I am now a recovering design guru, but once was often asked to talk about how to encourage creativity. I used to enjoy annoying the audience by saying ‘make it illegal’. The rationale being that creative people enjoy theft. Transgression is stimulating. But cities can stimulate creativity, too. Now and again, you get optimum forces in alignment. Plato’s Academy in Athens would be an example. So too Palo Alto when Stanford graduates (Hewlett, Packard, Jobs) soldered electronic things in suburban garages. London’s Chelsea and Soho in the 1960s, obviously.
But most to my taste, Milan in the 1950s. Has there ever been, from furniture to cars, a better incubator of industrial beauty? Formally, the period was known as the ricostruzione. Less formally, L’Era del Boom. My eye now turns to a photograph of Sophia Loren in giddy heels and very short shorts doing a publicity shot for an Alfa Romeo 1900. Alfa’s badge is the heraldry of Milan.
And my imagination takes me to Bar Basso on Via Plimio, where in 1947 the negroni sbagliato was invented: prosecco replacing gin in the famous cocktail. A navy blue Lancia Flaminia Presidenziale sedanca de ville by Pininfarina is waiting outside with a grey uniformed driver wearing sunglasses, even though it is overcast. He is going to take me to see Gio Ponti, the capo dei capi of designers.
Ponti was the editor of Domus, the Domesday Book of the Era del Boom. His office is in the Torre Pirelli, Milan’s sabre-thin skyscraper, which he designed. The Lancia whooshes me there and I admire the building’s fridge-cool modernismo contrasting with the fussy swagger of the Mussolini-era train station nearby. Ponti’s office is a design education in itself: the floor in durable Pirelli rubber with patent round studs, intended for airports and subways but soon popular in fashionable houses. Ponti’s modernist chandeliers light the room; we sit on his signature 1957 Tipo 699 Superleggera chairs.
Here is a nice example of creative theft, at least so far as the name is concerned. The carrozzeria of Touring had patented its ‘super-light’ construction in 1936. ‘Everything is going from the heavy to the light’ became Ponti’s belief. He reduced his chair legs to a section of a mere 18mm for a total weight of 1800g.
Like every visitor, I would have been served espresso in the tiny blue cups Ponti had designed for Alitalia. Holding
