The art of too much
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Gio Ponti, designer.
What I despise most about Ponti is that he makes designing look so effortless when it’s never been that for me. I’m not afraid of having design ideas as there’s always some prompt from which to begin and I still believe site conditions are a good place to start. Because, if you do that, the end result is more likely to look like it belongs there – if that’s what’s required. I don’t get the impression Ponti conducted rigorous site analyses or made endless study models before deciding what to do. There may be books of sketches and an entire archive of drawings but it’s unlikely to be as extensive as those of, say, Edwin Lutyens, who never stopped drawing and inventing things on paper. As a writer, Mishima was equally prolific and there’s still much that hasn’t yet been translated into English.
With Ponti, I feel that if you’d asked him to design five villas by tomorrow morning, he’d have just gotten on with it and your five villas would be there for you the next day. He must have had a design process but he never made it explicit. He may not even have been aware of it. For all he wrote, he wrote very little about how he designed. He’s like many other architects in not giving away any secrets but then, I don’t think design for him was ever a conscious act. If he ever compared numerous alternative ways a building or surface could be, they all existed in his head where he processed them apparently instantaneously and effortlessly in a way AI desperately tries to create the illusion of. Design for him was something so simple and easy it never needed automating. And why should it if it’s as natural and effortless as breathing?
