Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key TakeawaysIn the mid-20th century, the prolific Italian architect designed elegant railcars, cruise ships, and cliffside hotels that formed a distinct travel aesthetic.
Welcome to Origin Story, a series that chronicles the lesser-known histories of designs that have shaped how we live.
Gio Ponti, a designer, a professor, the founder of the seminal design magazine Domus, and a mentor to other creatives, is best known for how he shaped a new form of Italian design in the mid-20th century. He played with color, form, and function in a way that spoke to his country’s aesthetic past, present, and future. But he also created cruise ship interiors, cliffside hotels, and glamorous train cars, along the way shaping a distinct vision of stylish leisure.
Architect Gio Ponti (with his wife and daughter in the background) in the Milan apartment he designed on Via Giuseppe Dezza.
Photo by David Lees via Getty Images
A Hotel "Village" in the Woods
In 1938, Ponti worked with Austrian architect and cultural theorist Bernard Rudofsky, also a Domus staffer, to design a "hotel in the woods" built on the rocky slopes of Monte Solaro on the Italian island Capri. They planned for a series of individual rooms,or "cells,"connected by winding paths that served as corridors. The design utilized natural materials and fluid lines to blend in with the property’s existing mature trees, with each room getting expansive windows positioned to bring the outdoors inside.
Gio Ponti and Bernard Rudofsky’s never-realized design for a hotel in San Michele, Capri (1938).
Courtesy Gio Ponti Archives/Archivo storico Gio Ponti
Ponti described it as creating a place for people "to lead the Capri lifestyle," one in which visitors, for the duration of their stays, could become Caprese, staying both on the island and within it.While the project was never realized, Ponti and Rudofsky’s ideas inspired seaside villas across the country and helped conceive a new style of tourism in which the character of the landscape was as important as the architecture on it.
The exterior of the Giulio Cesare transatlantic liner for Società di Navigazione Italia (1951).
Courtesy Gio Ponti Archives/Archivo storico Gio Ponti
AdvertisementAdvertisement#«Rrekkr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframe AdvertisementAdvertisement#«R1bekkr8lb2m7nfddbH1» iframeSee the full story on Dwell.com: How Gio Ponti Shaped the Style of Modern LeisureRelated stories:
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