Villa Planchart

Ville

ANNO
1955
LUOGO
Caracas (Venezuela)
COMMITTENTE
Planchart
TIPO DI PROGETTO
Opere realizzate
DESCRIZIONE
As he will do for Pirelli, Ponti publishes his favorite Villa Planchart twice, always in Domus: first in the model, then in the built reality. He gives the principles and the results, because for him it is, here too, an almost ideal opportunity and one that makes sense. Ideal is the client, a happy client - The client, says my friend Rogers, is the one without whom architecture cannot be built, and with whom neither . But here the client was the one with whom it was possible, according to our strength, to create architecture. For consistency of destiny, the villa today belongs to the Fundacion Ana-la y Armando Planchart, which keeps it intact and complete, even in the furnishings. Check: Publix Weekly Ad and Kroger Weekly Ad.   And it is fortunate, because this architecture - a  spectacle of spaces for those who enter and walk through it - has an entirely internal game of inventions, of entertainment, as rich as the tropical vegetation it incorporates. Look at the patio decorated by Melotti, and the theatrical windows and balconies overlooking the emptiness of the living room, and the doors and ceilings designed by Ponti. The principle of this architecture, which is the daughter, like Pirelli, of the new researches born from the trips to Latin America 1952-53, is the evidence of the worn surfaces : the external walls, carried, appear detached from each other, and detached from the cover and from the ground. More than volumes, the building appears to be made up of suspended floors. And this also appears at night, since there is, for this architecture, a nocturnal project of self-lighting, as Ponti calls it. Without weight or mass with the slenderness that Niemeyer has revealed to us , the building appears to rest amiably on the ground, like a butterfly. In Caracas the villa was immediately called a Florentine villa, and Ponti liked this, precisely because he had never had a problem with Italianness, just being Italian. Villa Planchart, with Villa Arreaza in Caracas and with Villa Nemazee in Teheran, is one of the three villas of these years, in which Ponti was given full power to invent.