Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino

Description

This book considers the strange figurative works of Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino, two Italian friends and architects practicing, teaching, theorizing, and publishing architecture through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Ponti and Mollino offer architects today a wondrous, poetic, and distinctly Italian perspective on how to create works of architecture that allow people to feel at home with themselves and their surroundings. This book considers the work of Ponti and Mollino as a middle position poised between the Utopian aspiration of high-modern architecture that preceded it, and the obvious, scenographic and often elitist figuration of the post-modern architecture that followed it. As Ponti and Mollino were not only architects but also designers, artists, professors and authors, the audience for this book is wide ranging: architects, artists and visual artists, as well as scholars and students of these same creative pursuits. As Ponti and Mollino sought to discover the relationship between words, poetry and the figurative language of architects, this book will interest scholars of literature, aesthetics, metaphysics, and linguistics. The book will also interest todays architects and designers working within nature-inspired, biomimetic and sustainable practices towards creating design works that behave (more than look) like living things. In the past ten years, there has been a renewed interest in the work of Ponti and Mollino. Despite this interest, there exists little critical consideration of either the individual architects themselves or the illuminating conversation between them in any significant work presently available. This book offers something more: it considers the fruitful relationship of two architects working through a difficult historical moment toward the realization of a fundamental human aspiration to find our place in this world. This book has 40 Black and White Photos