The MAXXI launches show that puts Gio Pontis architecture in the spotlight – Wallpaper*

The MAXXI launches show that puts Gio Pontis architecture in the spotlight

Gio Ponti: Loving Architecture, the new exhibition on the iconic Italian architects work, has just opened at the Zaha Hadid-designedMAXXI Museum in Rome and takes the visitor on a jounrey across Pontiscareer with a firm focus on his buildings

Last year Paris: this year Rome. Forty years after the death of Gio Ponti, the great Italian architect, designer and publisher receives his second major retrospective in under 12 months this time at MAXXI, the Italian capitals Zaha Hadid-designed National Museum of 21st-Century Arts.

While the Paris show, at the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs, made a heroic attempt to encompass the full range of Pontis life and work, the new exhibition at MAXXI (which opened this week and runs till 13 April 2020) focuses squarely on his architecture, with occasional asides examining his industrial and household designs and the influence of his role as the founding editor of Domus and Stile magazines.

Curated by Mariastella Casciato and Fulvio Irace, Gio Ponti: Loving Architecture takes over the museums soaring fifth-floor gallery, and overcomes the challenge of its sloping floor with ease a testament both to MAXXIs installation team and the instantly engaging quality of the many models, drawings and plans on show.

The exhibition is divided into eight sections, examining Pontis approach to houses, nature, classicism, facades, lightness, skyscrapers, urban planning and architecture as crystal, derived from his gnomic claim that when architecture is pure, it is pure as a crystal magic, closed, exclusive, autonomous, uncontaminated, uncorrupted, absolute, definitive like a crystal.

Rome may seem an odd place to stage an exhibition about Ponti, who spent most of his life living and working in Milan, but as Casciato points out, he was an architect of national and international renown when that was still a rarity, and he knew everyone and travelled everywhere, when that was far more difficult than it is today.

With an essay-filled catalogue and a series of newly commissioned photo essays featuring some of Pontis finest buildings, including Taranto Cathedral and the Villa Planchart in Caracas, this is a full-service show as well as being an excellent excuse to visit Rome, if any excuse were needed.

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The MAXXI launches show that puts Gio Pontis architecture in the spotlight - Wallpaper*