Progetto per il Concorso del Palazzo dell'Acqua e della Luce all'E42, Roma 1939 Veduta prospettica, china su lucido con indicazioni a china, mm.855X1045.
event
Saturday 25 January 2020 ore 11:30 - 13:00

The Histories of Architecture.Gio Ponti and the arts
 with Francesca Zanella

MAXXI auditorium – € 5
carnet for four meetings € 10
10 individual seats free and reserved for myMAXXI cardholders by writing to mymaxxi@fondazionemaxxi.it, by the day before the event

Four meetings to know Ponti’s multi-faceted activities, which include architecture, design, teaching, publishing, decoration, and scenography.

The programme intends to flank the exhibition in introducing and bringing the audience closer to Ponti’s multi-faceted activities: architecture and design, teaching and publishing, decoration and scenography; a legacy that has no equal in terms of versatility, flair, and commitment. A five-lesson long path designed to outline the professional profile of a person who actively participated in the re-birth of post-war Italian design.


Gio Ponti and the arts
with Francesca Zanella

“Which is the most important of the arts? This issue has no importance.”

The relationship between architecture and arts is a central theme of Gio Ponti’s though, as evidenced by this question asked among the fifty questions at the end of his book Amate l’architettura (Love Architecture, 1957).

We trace a constant pursuit of the eternal theme of the relationship between the arts and attention to the transformation of plastic and visual languages, from the first interventions starting in the 1930s to the 1970s, in the field of design, writing, publishing, and art direction at the Triennale.

Francesca Zanella, university contemporary art history researcher, she teaches history and theory of exhibitions and installations at the Department of Humanities, Social Studies, and Cultural Enterprises at the University of Parma. She has been the president of the University of Parma Communication Archive (CSAC) since 2015.