Up for sale is this masterpiece of Italian 20th century design, created by the world famous designer Gio Ponti. Different from earlier pieces from Pozzi / Ginori that are signed "Gio Ponti" and stamped 777, this one is unmarked and labelled "Designs Maisons du Monde"", most likely a production for the German or French market. Its dimensions are app. 6 x 6 x 8 inches. Property from a private art and design collection.

Background information: Giovanni Ponti, known as Gio, (* 18 November 1891 in Milan; † 16 September 1979 in Milan) was an Italian architect, designer and professor of architecture. Gio Ponti was born in Milan, the son of Giovanna Rigone and Enrico Ponti. After attending a humanistic grammar school, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic in Milan from 1913. Interrupted by the First World War, in which Ponti took part as a soldier, he was only able to complete his studies with a diploma in 1921. In the same year, he married Giulia Vimercati. This marriage produced four children: Lisa, Giovanna, Giulio and Letizia. Ponti's first architectural orientation after his studies was the circle of Milanese neoclassicists (Novecento Milanese). From 1923 to 1930, he was artistic director of the Richard-Ginori porcelain factory and from that year onwards was one of the co-founders of the Triennale in Monza.

In 1927, he opened his first architectural practice in Milan, which he ran together with the architect Emilio Lancia until 1933. Together with him, he realised his first project in 1926, the residential building "Casa Ponti" in Via Randaccio 9 in Milan. In 1928, Ponti founded the art, architecture and design magazine Domus together with Gianni Mazzocchi, which he ran - with an interruption between 1941 and 1947 - until his death. Ponti is one of the few architects in Italy who achieved international fame both in the design of small everyday objects and in the design of large building construction projects. Between 1933 and 1945, he designed a large number of buildings, such as the mathematics faculty of the University of Rome in 1934. In 1936, he was commissioned by the Italian Cultural Institute to redesign the interior of the Palais Lützow-Fürstenberg in Vienna in the neo-secessionist style. In the same year, Ponti was appointed full professor at the architecture faculty of the Polytechnic in Milan, where he taught until 1961.

Ponti was initially part of the circle of Milanese neoclassicists who came together to form the Novecento Milanese in the 1920s. His first creative phase was characterised by the influences of Otto Wagner, which he sought to combine with the emerging Razionalismo. With the designs for the three residential buildings Domus Julia, Fausta and Carola (1932-1936) in Milan, Ponti's turn towards a moderate form of Razionalismo was already apparent. In contrast, the office building Primo Palazzo Montecatini, which Ponti realised in 1936 with far stronger references to Novecento in Milan, was completed at almost the same time. With this office building, Ponti wanted to create a Palazzo del Lavoro (Palace of Labour) with uniform window openings running along the plane of the façade and suspended stone slabs. The result is a three-part structure with up to 15 storeys, which achieves its monumental effect through the generously opening gesture of the two ten-storey side wings. Serially arranged offices on both sides of an inner access corridor and symmetrically positioned staircases and lifts for vertical access support the impression of a mechanisation of the working environment. Ponti meticulously calculated the size of the façade panels and the glazing module.

Ponti clearly dissolved this rigour and uniform materiality in the construction of the second office building for Montecatini, the Secondo Palazzo Montecatini, from 1952. The different influences of Novecento and Razionalismo are clearly noticeable in this new building in the immediate neighbourhood. The concave curved main façade has a completely different façade design, which works with projections and recesses: A delicate grid of narrow aluminium profiles is placed in front of the recessed glazing. The façade becomes three-dimensional, acquiring a spatial depth. It is precisely this design principle that was often used by the protagonists of Razionalismo. In the Secondo Palazzo, Ponti develops a play of projections and recesses and different materials from the uniform, polished façade of the Primo Palazzo by contrasting large stone slabs with small-scale mosaic tiles.

In the post-war period, Gio Ponti gave Italian design a new impetus. In the 1940s and at the beginning of the following decade, Ponti turned to creations that demonstrated the skills of exceptional craftsmen. Together with the artist Paolo De Poli, he created furniture and enamelled panels. In 1948, he created a classic of Italian design with the La Cornuta coffee machine, produced by coffee machine manufacturer La Pavoni. The Occasional Chairs for a transatlantic ocean liner were based on his design. In 1957, he designed his best-known piece of furniture, the emphatically filigree Superleggera chair.

In 1958, together with Pier Luigi Nervi, Arturo Danusso and others, he realised his most important architectural project, the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan. This building is one of the first skyscrapers in the world to break away from the basic shape of a parallelepiped, a pure upright cuboid. With this clearly contoured, firmly defined, finite form, Ponti attempted to break away from the previously familiar grid cubature that could be continued at will. The two narrow sides of the 127 metre high Pirelli skyscraper converge at a sharp point, like the bow of a ship. The two massive end sections contain the secondary staircases, lifts and vertical supply lines. The innovative load-bearing structure of the high-rise, which was tested in several model tests, allowed a largly column-free office zone.

From 1966 to 1971, Ponti built the Denver Art Museum, whose strikingly narrow and irregularly opened façades consist of more than one million glass tiles. Ponti's only project in the USA is considered to be one of the first museums in the world to be consistently opened up vertically.[3] From 2003 to 2006, the Denver Art Museum was extended by the Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind. Financed by a donation of 12 million US dollars from Anna and John J. Sie, the construction of an additional Welcome Centre directly adjacent to Ponti's museum building is planned. This new part of the building is due to be completed in 2021, the 50th anniversary of the Denver Art Museum. Ponti died on 16 September 1979 in the house he had built in 1957 (Casa Ponti) at Via Dezza 49 in Milan, where he had lived ever since.