Interiors of the Italian culture Institute, Palazzo Füstenberg

Wien, Austria

Realized works

In arranging the interiors of the Furstenberg Palace in Vienna for the Italian Cultural Institute, Ponti chose his own way of commenting, in a light and detached manner, on the old architecture of the building. But his ties with Vienna amounted to more than that. There was a kind of affinity, an affinity that lay more in a way of thinking than inform. His love for domestic architecture and for the applied arts was a trait he held in common with the Viennese. Working in Vienna in those years and coming into contact with Hoffmann, Frank, Wlach, Strnad, and Haerdtl, he was most strongly impressed by the Kunstgewerbeschule, the famous school of applied arts, as he had earlier been by the Wiener Werkstadtte: he dreamed of having such a school in Italy as well. «I got to know the Vienna of the Secession, of Klimt, Loos, Max Reinhardt.... I owe to these examples of modern perfection of expression my first feeling of a European motherland. A motherland that he found again after the Second World War in what he perceived as the splendid fragility of Viennese culture, ennobled by the presence of a lofty nostalgia and that touch of melancholy that makes things human. This is what Europe was for him, sacred to civilization and equally fragile.