Gio Ponti

A decade after Ponti's death his daughter, Lisa Licitra Ponti, summarised his career as: "Sixty years of work, 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 was, as she concluded, "a great deal, and all from one man." Lisa also described the daily routine which enabled her father to achieve so much. It began between 5am and 6am when he wrote thirty letters mostly to friends and collaborators telling them that he had decided to change this or that detail of a project. Ponti then left his family home for his nearby studio, a converted garage so big that, in the early days, his draftsmen rode their scooters right up to their desks, where he worked from 7am to 8pm. He sketched and wrote so frenziedly that his daughter recalled his hands being stained "black with graphite and ink" by the middle of the afternoon. Ponti then carried on working after returning home for dinner: often drawing silently after the lights had gone out, his sketches illuminated by the lights in other houses. Lisa calculated that he typically squeezed sixty hours into an ordinary day.

Design Museum