Stack chairs (Caracas 1)
Stack chairs (Caracas 2)
Stack chairs (Teheran)
The series of works Stack chairs Caracas 1, Caracas 2 and Teheran are made with "Leggera" chairs (designed by Gio Ponti in 1951) and reupholstered with fabric impressions of 2011 newspapers from Venezuela and Iran. During the 50's Ponti was invited to Caracas and Tehran to build up three private villas (Planchart, Arreaza and Namezee) in the context of the process of modernization that involves these countries. Each Stack chairs is related to one building and by the application of some ideas of Ponti an Fornasetti, such as the tower display and the newspaper prints, the work confronts the utopia of 50's design with contemporary history. Each set of chairs can be exhibited as a tower or naturally used as a seat.
In 1949 Gio Ponti designed a chair based
on the traditional model made of wood of the area of Chiavari. He presented his
project on Domus magazine as “a chair-chair, modestly without adjectives, a
normal chair.” The chairs are so solid that the producers like to astonish the
customers by throwing them on the air and presuming of their resistance to
impacts. As a matter of fact, Ponti was the first one to be astonished of the
unexpected interest that this modest project, called number 646 -“Leggera”,
received. Later on Ponti continued to work on it and replaced it with a
weightless model, the number 699, “Superleggera”, that it is still on
production. The “Leggera” with its traditional simplicity expressed a critique of
modern culture in a period in which the Italian design got an additional
support from the economic welfare of the period after Second World War. The
“Leggera” became an iconic object and it was exhibited at the Museum of Modern
art of NY.
Ponti was invited to Caracas to build
two villas and some minor projects. The development that shakes the country
interested him. Venezuela was under an intense plan of modernization, after
years of isolation, called “El Nuevo Ideal Nacional” carried ahead under the
dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. This plan was supported by the richness
of increasing oil economy and from an intellectual class with international
aspirations. On Domus, Ponti published many articles on the modern
transformation of Caracas arriving to assert that this city had all the
characteristics in order to become the modern architecture world capital.
In the 1957
Ponti worked in Teheran for the villa of the government minister Shafi Nemazee.
In less than two decades Iran became a military and economic power of the
Middle East under the regimen of the Shah of Persia. It is also the period of
the historical oil agreement between the Italy of Enrico Mattei and Iran and
also of the creation of OPEC between Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and
Venezuela in 1960. The dominant trade positions of the “Seven Sisters” and the
geopolitics ones are also threatened by the negotiations that Mattei undertakes
with Morocco, Libya and USSR.
In the last decade in Iran and Venezuela, in different
times and ways, new governments arrived to power and explored a diverse
economic and social organization from those foreseen on the plans of
development of 50’s period. The modernization process became an
inconvenient inheritance, reflecting the aspirations of
the old regimes, a criticized and fought model. Two nations that in the modern
utopia were supposed to be models of development became exact the opposite one. In both societies
the modern inheritance have been a founding one. A hardly erasable reality, as
it laid the bases of the social conflicts that still remain in action.
Notes: On “Leggera”, Gio Ponti, Senza
Aggettivi, Domus 268,1952 / Articles about Caracas Domus (1954-1961). N. 295,
299, 303, 304, 307, 309, 317, 348, 349 e 375 / Gio Ponti, A Teheran una villa,
Domus n. 422, 1965 / Gio Ponti, Amate
l’Architettura, Rizzoli.