The headboard-panel for Spartaco Brugnoli

Cantù (Como)

Brugnoli

Realized works

At the end of the forties Gio Ponti defined a principle that he was never to abandon in his interior design: that of the organized wall (as he called it), that is, the principle of assembling shelves, light fixtures, and objects within a single wall panel. Out of this came the idea of the headboard-panel for the bed: a wall panel containing all the required facilities (consoles, shelves for books and the telephone, light switches, built-in radio, built-in cigarette lighter, etc.) combined with a light, mobile bed on castors. He devised a writing desk on the same lines: a table clear of encumbrances, with a well-equipped panel on the wall behind it. The idea of assembling and combining items within a definite area may also underlie the concept of the furnished window, 1950 a set of consoles and shelves, bearing objects, is inserted into the empty rectangle of the window, to be looked at in silhouette against the sky. In 1950 the principle of assembling within a panel was refined by the idea of sharpening the edges of the panel and shelves, in order to strip them of their visual weight. A lightening that was taken further by illuminating the panels from behind. (Ponti would apply the same criteria to architecture as well, in the fifties and sixties. He insisted on lightness. In fact it was a lightening, and a purely visual one (the tapering support, the sharpened profile).