Gio Ponti Round Coffee Table in Walnut Wood Italian Manufacture 1950s

Round shaped coffee table with three legs, in walnut wood and brass details. Attribuited to Gio Ponti, Italian manufacture from the late 1940s to the early 1950s Gio Ponti was an icon of the modernist movement: the Italian designer, architect, artist and publisher contributed significantly to the worlds of architecture and design with his extensive work in fine furniture and ceramics, education, office and residential buildings, and everything in between. Giovanni, known as Gio Ponti was born in 1891 in Milan. It was there that he spent his childhood, and in 1921 he began to study architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. From 1923 to 1930 he served as the artistic director of the Richard-Ginori porcelain factory. In 1927, Ponti started his first architectural office, together with Emilio Lancia, and in 1928 he started the magazine Domus, which is still regarded as one of the most influential European magazines for architecture and design. He was also very influential during the period as a curator of the Milan Triennale. After his collaboration with Emilio Lancia had come to an end, upon completion of the Torre Rasini, he began to work as an architect together with the engineers Antonio Fornaroli and Eugenio Soncini...

Office desk with two frontal drawers with structure in wood, top in colored glass and brass details (keyholes, keys and feet), originally designed by Gio Ponti for the offices of the...

Large table or desk with structure in oak wood, tabletop in red laminate and brass details. Designe by Gio Ponti, Italian manufacture from the 1950s. Gio Ponti was an icon of the m...

Low table with a round-shaped table top in white marble and four metal legs from the Parallel Bar series, designed by Florence Knoll and manufactured by Knoll International during the 1950s. Born to a baker, and orphaned at age twelve, Florence Schust grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. Schust demonstrated an early interest in architecture and was enrolled at the Kingswood School for Girls, adjacent to the Cranbrook Academy of Art. While at Kingswood, Florence befriended Eilel Saarinen, whom she would later study under at Cranbrook. Warmly embraced by the Saarinen family, Florence vacationed with them in Finland, enjoyed the company of their accomplished friends, and formed a very close relationship with Eliel’s son, Eero. The connections she made and the skills she developed while at Cranbrook were the foundations of Florence Schust’s incredible design education and pioneering career. With recommendations from Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto, Florence went on to study under some of the greatest 20th century architects, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In 1941 Florence moved to New York where she met Hans Knoll who was establishing his furniture company. With Florence’s design skills and Hans’ business acumen and salesmanship, the pair, who married in 1946, grew the nascent company into an international arbiter of style and design. Florence also seeded contributions with her friends Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Mies van der Rohe. In creating the revolutionary Knoll Planning Unit, Florence Knoll defined the standard for the modern corporate interiors of post-war America. Drawing on her background in architecture, she introduced modern notions of efficiency, space planning, and comprehensive design to office planning. Florence ardently maintained that she did not merely decorate space. She created it. The Planning Unit rigorously researched and surveyed each client — assessing their needs, defining patterns of use and understanding company hierarchies — before presenting a comprehensive design, informed by the principles of modernism and beautifully executed in signature Knoll style. Florence and the Planning Unit were responsible for the interiors of some of America’s largest corporations, including IBM, GM and CBS. As part of her work with the Planning Unit, Florence frequently contributed furniture designs to the Knoll catalog...

Set of two stools with legs in black lacquered wood and seats upholstered in light blue fabric. Attribuited to Gio Ponti, Italian Manufacture 1950s Gio Ponti was an icon of the m...

Round table model TL30 with black lacquered metal base and a wooden top. Designed by Franco Albini for Poggi, Pavia in 1950s.   After spending his childhood and part of his youth in Robbiate in Brianza, where he was born in 1905, Franco Albini moved with his family to Milan. Here he enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic and graduated in 1929. He starts his professional activity in the studio of Gio Ponti and Emilio Lancia, with whom he collaborates for three years. He probably had his first international contacts here In those three years, the works carried out are admittedly of a twentieth-century imprint. It was the meeting with Edoardo Persico that marked a clear turning point towards rationalism and the rapprochement with the group of editors of “Casabella”. The new phase that that meeting provoked starts with the opening of the first professional studio in via Panizza with Renato Camus and Giancarlo Palanti. The group of architects began to deal with public housing by participating in the competition for the Baracca neighborhood in San Siro in 1932 and then creating the Ifacp neighborhoods: Fabio Filzi (1936/38), Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ettore Ponti (1939). Also in those years Albini worked on his first villa Pestarini. But it is above all in the context of the exhibitions that the Milanese master experiments his compromise between that “rigor and poetic fantasy” coining the elements that will be a recurring theme in all the declinations of his work – architecture, interiors, design pieces . The opening in 1933 of the new headquarters of the Triennale in Milan, in the Palazzo dell’Arte, becomes an important opportunity to express the strong innovative character of rationalist thought, a gym in which to freely experiment with new materials and new solutions, but above all a “method”. Together with Giancarlo Palanti, Albini on the occasion of the V Triennale di Milano sets up the steel structure house, for which he also designs the ‘furniture. At the subsequent Triennale of 1936, marked by the untimely death of Persico, together with a group of young designers gathered by Pagano in the previous edition of 1933, Franco Albini takes care of the preparation of the exhibition of the house, in which the furniture of three types of accommodation. The staging of Stanza per un uomo, at that same Triennale, allows us to understand the acute and ironic approach that is part of Albini, as a man and as a designer: the theme addressed is that of the existenzminimum and the reference of the project is to the fascist myth of the athletic and sporty man, but it is also a way to reflect on low-cost housing, the reduction of surfaces to a minimum and respect for the way of living. In that same year Albini and Romano designed the Ancient Italian Goldsmith’s Exhibition: vertical uprights, simple linear rods, design the space. A theme, that of the “flagpole”, which seems to be the center of the evolution of his production and creative process. The concept is reworked over time, with the technique of decomposition and recomposition typical of Albinian planning: in the setting up of the Scipio Exhibition and of contemporary drawings (1941) the tapered flagpoles, on which the paintings and display cases are hung, are supported by a grid of steel cables; in the Vanzetti stand (1942) they take on the V shape; in the Olivetti store in Paris (1956) the uprights in polished mahogany support the shelves for displaying typewriters and calculators. The reflection on this theme arises from the desire to interpret the architectural space, to read it through the use of a grid, to introduce the third dimension, the vertical one, while maintaining a sense of lightness and transparency. The flagpole is found, however, also in areas other than the exhibition ones. In the apartments he designed, it is used as a pivot on which the paintings can be suspended and rotated to allow different points of view, but at the same time as an element capable of dividing spaces. The Veliero bookcase...

Two-level engraved wood and glass coffee table, it was designed in Italy during the 1950s in the style of Gio Ponti. It is made of a circular grooved wooden top that supports the fr...

Iconic coffee table designed by Gio Ponti for Singer & Sons in Italian walnut with exotic Labradorite top.

Coffee table in walnut wood by Osvaldo Borsani, c.1950s. Walnut wood, cut and coloured glass Dimensions: W100 x D65 x H45 cm.  

Gio Ponti coffee table.

Low coffee table attributed to Gio Ponti, designed in the 1950s. The low table has a perfectly intact dark glass top. The frame is made of very strong wood. The structure of the tabl...

D.555.1 Round Table by Gio Ponti - Exper-crafted in Italy exclusively by Molteni&C The sculptural D.555.1 round table is designed from archival drawings by renowned Italian archit...