The full Ponti
10/28/2018
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is staging an exhibition on the oeuvre of architect and designer Gio Ponti.
D.154.2
| Presented: | Salone del Mobile 2015, Milan |
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| Stylepark-ID: | 05.1099.00242 |
| Categories: | Home furniture › Seating furniture › armchairs |
Product description
The collection of furnishings, reissued in partnership with Ponti’s heirs, has been enriched in 2015 with new pieces. The D.552.2 small table, in wood with a glass top, designed for the American company M. Singer&Sons in the ‘50s, and the D.154.2 armchair, produced by Ponti for Villa Planchart in Caracas in 1954.
In 1950 Joseph H. Singer of M. Singer&Sons, one of New York’s leading furniture companies, looking for new models to produce, came to Italy and discovered Italian furniture. In the designs by Gio Ponti, Carlo Mollino, Ico Parisi and Carlo De Carli, “one step ahead compared to the functionalism of their contemporaries”, Singer found what he was looking for, and dedicated an exhibition Modern by Singer to them, to launch them on the American market. According to Ico Parisi, the fortunes of Italian furniture in America were indebted to this exhibition. The success was such that, in 1954, Singer announced the distribution of the furniture in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami and Cleveland as well. The D.552.2 small table, made of solid rosewood with satinized bronze legs and an ultra light transparent triangular top, belongs to this collection destined for the American market.
The armchair, on the other hand, was designed for one of the projects closest to Gio Ponti’s heart, the villa of the Planchart collectors in Caracas (1953-57). The architecture reflected the ideas he had gathered during his trips to Latin America in 1952-53. “This building is dedicated to Anala and Armando Planchart”, Ponti wrote in Domus, “it stands in Caracas, at the top of cerro (a hill) dominating the heights from which you can see the city strung out below, (Caracas stretches down a valley that runs between the highest slopes of the Avila chain, on one side, and these gentler hills, on the other). Today the armchair, which is like a cosy shell, has a rigid polyurethane frame, a soft polyurethane counter-frame and a cushion, and is upholstered in the Molteni&C textile range, with the option of differentiating the three component parts.
