Gio Ponti worked sixty hours a day

A peek into the legendary Italian designer’s daily routine

Nov 18, 2024

Welcome to the 154th issue of Subtle Maneuvers, and the first issue since the recent presidential election. Fuck! It feels strange to just keep sending out this newsletter as usual … but I do think it’s worthwhile for us all to continue trying to become our most authentic weirdo artist selves—who better to oppose an administration of dimwitted authoritarians?—which is what I hope these dispatches can help us do, at least a little. If you need some added camaraderie and accountability in the coming weeks, there’s always my morning Worm Zoom sessions. OK, onward—

Gio Ponti (1891–1979)

Gio Ponti in the Milan apartment he designed, with his wife and one of his daughters in the background, 1958 (David Lees/Getty Images)

Today would have been the Italian architect, industrial designer, and publisher’s 133rd birthday, which gives me a good excuse to share the following account of Ponti’s daily routine, as recorded by his daughter Lisa Licitra Ponti in her book Gio Ponti: The Complete Work 1923–1978:

There were sixty hours in Gio Ponti’s day. During the first ten hours (between 5 and 6 in the morning) he would draw/write thirty letters (he was not allowed to use the phone). These were the letters that went to his friends—and his collaborators—his way of waking them up; they would find out that the project had changed overnight, that another one had emerged, along with at least eight or nine cute variants, requiring urgent attention. Only a few doors and steps (the way home from the studio) separated his nighttime and daytime designs. Over the following forty hours (from 7 in the morning to 8 in the evening) Gio Ponti was in his barn of a studio, a huge former garage where (in the early days) the draftsmen could drive their scooters right up to their tables. There were more tables than walls beneath the vaults, and the little room in the center, intended for secret talks, was open and empty. Here Gio Ponti used to work on his projects until the evening: from three o’clock on, his hands were black with graphite and ink. He did not even wash them for meals—hurried feasts of colors and shapes, rather than of flavors, followed by a little drop of concentrated sleep, 5 or 10 minutes long. Then came the night. The beautiful night in his sleeping but brightly lit house. And he used to draw in silence, with other lighted windows in other houses for company. Even when, later on in life, he no longer went down to the studio, and was left to himself in the now empty house, he went on designing, day and night, just for himself.

In this manner, Ponti produced an astonishing legacy. According to his daughter, it encompassed “buildings in thirteen countries, lectures in twenty-four, twenty-five years of teaching, fifty years of editing, articles in every one of the five hundred and sixty issues of his magazines, two thousand five hundred letters dictated, two thousand letters drawn, designs for a hundred and twenty enterprises, one thousand architectural sketches . . . . It is a great deal, and all from one man.”

In sharing this, I’m certainly not suggesting that we all try to emulate Ponti’s over-the-top work habits (though I wish I had that kind of energy!). But I did want to note that Ponti spent the first two decades of his career working in a country under fascist rule, and still managed to maintain, throughout his life, a continual, almost palpable sense of delight; as one of his colleagues remembered, Ponti had “an ability to be entertained by almost anything.” That wily spirit does seem worth emulating, at least some of the time, as we lurch toward whatever comes next.

Ponti at 80, walking in front of the Denver Art Museum, which he designed with James Sudler & Associates (Duane Howell/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

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