by Andrea Schito and Giacomo Abate
In design, utility that becomes beauty is a process of synthesis between the designer’s idea and the production process. In the autarkic Italy of the 1930s, anonymous but highly skilled manufacturers were able to create elegant objects with humble materials that took nothing away from the intrinsic formal quality of the product.
The next Design and Italian Style auction on December 10th – 11th 2020, will feature a 1936 desk in beech wood, aluminium, faesite and linoleum, which demonstrates that when industrial design has a harmony in itself, which gives it balance and proportion, materials become functional tools for the final result.
Gio Ponti in this regard, in all his research – which made him a master of 20th century Italian architecture and design – was an example of simple sobriety that combined, with superb gracefulness, purity and essentiality, usefulness and pleasantness, so much so as to make him intimately Italian and absolutely universal. A sofa and two armchairs, designed in 1950 to furnish the first class of the Augustus transatlantic liner, are an example of conceptual rigour where style and practicality blend into a unique object in its splendid reproducibility.
Gio Ponti Coppia di poltrone, per l’arredo del transatlantico Augustus, 1950
Stima € 4.000 – 6.000