Rubelli - A Family Of Style (Gio Ponti chapter only)

Fabric : Alchimia 30007-05

make something beautiful!

Fabric : Alchimia 30007-05

make something beautiful!

RUBELLI

41 LR 2012

fabric: Rattoppato 30006-05

Pauly, chair and armchair

RUBELLI

43 LR 2012

fabric: Punteggiato 30005-05

Mc 105, armchair

RUBELLI

45 LR 2012

He was a poet, painter, craftsman, industrial designer, journalist and founding editor of Domus magazine, as well as an architect. He was passionate about the power of good Italian design to contribute to la dolce vita, and he publicised his inspirations, ideas and style in his magazine, which he founded in 1928 and edited for many years. He participated in the Biennale delle Arti Decorative in Venice, which he used as a showcase for the best of Italian design and decorative arts.

Avid to try his creative hand at seemingly everything, Gio Ponti began to experiment with ceramic design in the 1920s, and soon thereafter began creating with a wide variety of other materials. Ponti created Murano glass for master glassmaker Paolo Venini, stage sets and costumes for Milano’s La Scala and fabric designs for Rubelli that were presented at the Venice Biennale in 1934. His interest in the decorative arts made him a master of decorative architecture also, designing ceramic skins for his buildings and decorating the walls of his hotels with huge and daring colourful patterns. Like many artists and designers working in the first half of the 20th century, his goal was to create total works of art which included architecture, decoration, textile and industrial design, inventing the idea of lifestyle avant la lettre.

Two of the three fabrics Ponti designed for Rubelli reinterpreted the centuries-old technique of velvet weaving. For Punteggiato he created a close sequence of staggered disks with various gradations of colour in a soprarizzo, and for Rattoppato, a series of graphic signs were incised on the surface of a figured velvet. Inspired by Japan, these lively, light-hearted graphic designs are complemented by a westernised figurative design on satin – the Asian ceramics distributed across the surface communicate all the rhythm, verve and exuberance for which Ponti was known. The Rubelli creative team designed a modernist component to complete the collection, an abstract to coordinate with the figuratives.

Forever extending his reach, Ponti applied his eclectic, multidisciplinary design approach to buildings like the famed Pirelli Tower of Milano, and to furniture pieces that became classics, such as the 1953 Distex armchair and the iconic lightweight 1957 Superleggera chair for Cassina, dubbed “the chair for all times” by the designer. Ponti’s creative curiosity and generosity of spirit led him to collaborate widely. The results were as playful as they were rigourous. He became a master in the manipulation of figurative motifs on a monumental scale: working with Fornasetti, the pair decorated a casino with enormous playing card motifs, while their collaboration on office design resulted in furniture adorned with images of pens, pencils, paper and computers.

At the time of his death in 1979 at the age of 88, Ponti had achieved, in his daughter Lisa Licitra Ponti’s words, “Sixty years of work, buildings in thirteen countries, lectures in twenty-four, twenty-five years of teaching, fifty years of editing, articles in every one of the five hundred and sixty issues of his magazines, two thousand five hundred letters dictated, two thousand letters drawn, designs for a hundred and twenty enterprises, one thousand architectural sketches.” Thanks to the Rubelli family’s re-edition, we can enjoy the whimsical patterns in the luxurious yet modernist fabrics he designed and share in the free-spirited joyousness with which Gio Ponti created. And that was what he would have intended. “Make something beautiful,” he said, and he did just that, many times over.

photo and drawings

Gio Ponti Archives

fabric photos

Camille Hammerer

fabric: Reticolo 30008-02

gio, con brio

RUBELLI

47 LR 2012