The Art of Too Much

I recently bought a copy of Japanese author Osamu’s Dazai’s 1956 novel The Setting Sun. The dust cover had two quotes. One was from Wong Kar-Wai. “I like Dazai a lot.” It used five words to say what it had to say. The other was from Yukio Mishima. He wrote: “What I despise about Dazai is that he exposes precisely those things in myself that I most want to hide.” This sentence is simple and honest but it’s also theatrical, beautiful, artful, brutal, and as such, typical of Mishima. There’s an art to saying something with an economy of means but there’s also an art in using all the means at one’s disposal to create something equally simple. It doesn’t happen very often with architecture. Very few architects can pull off maximalism with honesty and a lightness of touch. Yes, I’ve been thinking about Gio Ponti again.

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?

1923 – 1958
Over this period Ponti was designing ceramics, furnishings, vases, dinnerware, chairs, glassware and lamps for various companies. This is a bottle from 1949. It’s what I mean about the art of excess. Every part of this bottle is an opportunity for more design. The bottle looks satisfyingly comfortable to grip and pour whatever from. I feel the liquid has to be clear and yellow or maybe green but Strega is too “southern” and Yellow (or green) Chartreuse too French. This bottle is the DNA of what Alessi was to become.

If Gio Ponti had had a method for designing then we’d know about it by now, but some patterns can nevertheless be seen. This interior design for a casino has playing card motifs on the chairs and interior furnishings. A design for (the early office calculator and computer company offices of) Burroughs features calculator keypads on the waiting area chairs. Less literally, luxury ocean liner interiors for Italy’s rich and powerful feature fresco-like wall coverings of Italy’s historic rich and powerful.

1950 Interior Design for San Remo Casino, San Remo, Italy

1949-1953 Ocean Liners: Conte Grande, Conte Biancamano, Giulio Cesare, Oceania, Africa, Andrea Doria

We don’t know who these people were but we know what they represent.

This was the golden age of Italian ocean liner travel and although the interiors Ponti designed for them are for the gilded, there’s more than just opulence on display. These next two photographs are both inspired, one showing the design of the espresso bar and the other how it is experienced. These are real people.

Out of thanks, I must say that many of these images are scanned from this book by TASCHEN. It’s easily the heaviest book I own – a time capsule.

These ocean liner interiors weren’t meant for permanent occupancy and Ponti was well aware of designing to “amuse by means of excess.” He didn’t hold back.

1950 Interior Design for the Vembi-Burroughs Offices, Turn and Genoa

On the other hand, these photographs look staged but oh what stylish staging! (What’s happening? What’s about to happen?) The noirish lighting in the image on the left reminds me of  Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 film on fascism and beauty, The Conformist, which is worth watching just for the lighting design, and beginning with the opening scene while the credits are still rolling. I have a memory of its cinematographer Vittorio Storaro explaining the link between lighting design and fascism as “The light can never fully illuminate the shadows”. This itself is a beautiful thing to say about depicting the then nature of fascism.

Scenes from the movie, and with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda.

1952 Interior Design for the Lucano Apartment, Milan

This is a dressing room.

1936-41 Frescoes, Interiors, and Architectural Renovation for the University of Padua

I’ve mentioned this one before. It’s fairly restrained for a space where every single thing shows evidence of design and thought. The room itself is the waiting room for the important room the other side of those doors. The purple upholstery and those green walls are all the better for the glimpse of orange wall in what appears to be the waiter’s pantry. For me, it’s the terrazzo floor that steals the show. I’m trying to think how it could have been made. Would you press wood strips into concrete until it hardens, then remove the strips, fill the grooves with gravel and more concrete, and lastly, grind it smooth and then polish it? The point is, somebody did it and, if that wasn’t enough, on the diagonal as well.

1957-1964 Villa Namazee, Terhan, Iran

The plain ceiling in the above project was atypical of Ponti. It’s more common for his residential projects to give ceilings as much attention as floors and walls. Perhaps this was his way of updating the great Italian tradition of decorated ceilings. Maybe he just saw any flat surface as a canvas but the ceilings never overpower the floors. (There’s some excellent photographs here on Hidden Architecture.)

1955 Villa Planchart, Caracas, Venezuela

This dining area continues to fascinate me and is perhaps my best example of the art of too much. This time, Ponti supersizes terrazzo. No two surfaces are the same. It looks like the ceiling pattern extends into the kitchen.

That panelled feature wall has mini-features of a shelf with pot-plant, two (three?) curious insets and two non-identical bracket lamps. All this is trying to steal our attention away from the bubble/flower glass texture on the far wall and that yellow and white striped ceiling. It’s easy to overlook the indoor garden. It’s photograph styling I know, but the plates on the table are different colors. I wonder what kind of food one would eat off them in such a space? What clothes would one wear?

These interiors are of their times and places but the articulation of abundance never seems to go out of fashion. Are there any other masters of the art of too much? The only one I can think of is Carlo Scarpa, particularly his Olivetti showroom in Venice where every surface, every element and every corner of every element is an opportunity to show that no opportunity for design was overlooked. If you look down the second you enter, this is what you see. It’s wonderful.

Are there any living masters of the art of too much? Counterintuitively, I think the architecture of John Pawson might be one, although his maximalism is a heavy-handed contrivance of process combined with a decadence of materials and, as such, worlds apart from the simple enjoyment of design and designing. I hesitate. There’s a murkiness of intent I’m suspicious of.

• • • 

• Career Case Study #8: Gio Ponti
• It’s Just Design