Gio Ponti, thoughts about a lamp

摘要

"Here are the various lamps." The words are handwritten in italics, on a sheet with holes in a folder. He had the idea buzzing about in his head and gave shape to it on paper, drawn with subtle yet confident pencil lines. Gio Ponti would pass from the sketch of a spoon to the design of a skyscraper or the pattern of a fabric. With his typical creative energy, in 1955 he produced a set of drawings embodying his thoughts about a lamp, a light source that could change its appearance. The Milanese designer had in mind different versions of a floor lamp: a tubular stem, long or short, supported the shades in the form of cylinders or truncated cones, while the base rose on supports of different shapes: tripods, pyramids or squares. The series was probably conceived for a company abroad, perhaps in America, and reveals Ponti's working method, his aptitude for promoting his work. Instead of offering the client company a finished product, he seduced it with a range of ideas, drawing a palette of shapes, colours and solutions from his repertoire of designs, which in the 1950s was becoming more receptive to fusions between the arts.