Gio Ponti and Konstantin Grcic play ping-pong.
By CHRIS DERCON

Design objects are objects of desire in more than just one way. The 1965 novel Les Choses (Things) by Georges Perec unforgettably tells the story of such a desire. In Perec’s novel, a young Parisian couple develops an almost maniacal yearning for the best and the most beautiful, which they – alas, alas – cannot ultimately acquire.

However, in Perec’s story we also detect another kind of desire, for an outspoken contemporary way of living, a realization of the dream to be up and coming in the mid-’60s. And certain “things” are more fit to express that realization than others. Indeed, we mostly do associate new – meaning better and more beautiful – design products with the desire to be upfront contemporary.

But now a kind of fun riddle pops in: Why do some “choses” – indeed, “things” such as design objects – which were produced a couple of decades ago, often strike us as so utterly contemporary? And more often than not, they look even better and more beautiful than “things” produced today or yesterday. Is it the severe Benjaminian category of the “just past” that hits us in this context? “Who wants yesterday’s papers anyway,” sang the Rolling Stones. The answer is nobody, indeed!

But papers from the day before yesterday do often get good use. Does our strong fascination for design objects from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s have something to do with the way those “things” are capable of transforming their fabricated rationality over a length of time, into some sort of spiritual irrationality? Are design objects then like time capsules or objects adhering to a cult, the cult of time? Thus objects that, once they shed – partially or entirely– their functionality, become like fetishes? Yes, and no.

I believe it is also because the category of the contemporary has suddenly become so thick and so dense, that we are strongly attracted to past expressions of … living contemporaneously. This obvious paradox becomes more understandable if we accept that the quintessence of the contemporary now, is the congestion of time. We have simply to live with the fact that contemporaneity is by itself expanding continuously.

The desire to live dangerously contemporaneous is best fulfilled through design. Design is a permanent revolution of the self, not in the least because of its many links to individual consumerism. But let’s not forget that we also like to possess and surround ourselves with such “things,” because they appear like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, the jigsaw puzzle of time. And as with any puzzle, we move pieces back and forth, until they – almost seemingly or finally – fit.

Speaking about configurations of design objects in our homes or work places, we may also benefit from the ability to move pieces around on the chessboard. What then matters most is the result – the prospect – of a move. Thus why not consider design objects as “corners” expressing “prophetic time,” to catch another great term by Walter Benjamin? While it is true, with “good” design objects, just like with tropical plants, we can literally see the future growing. Whether we like it or not, that future presents itself in the form of a question: “When is design?”

For a felicitous living I considered this while sitting on the terrace of Gio Ponti’s seaside house overlooking the Mediterranean, the “Villa Allunghata” or Long House, at Capo Perla in the municipality of Capoliveri on Elba. It is everything that Le Corbusier would have liked to build and what Eileen Gray actually succeeded in doing once, and architect and designer Gio Ponti accomplished several times. The Long House, one of a series of “Little Houses by the Sea” was commissioned by a British developer in the early ’60s.

In the pages of Stile and Domus the professor and publisher Gio Ponti, through the years continued to propose projects of small seaside houses for the benefit of his readers, propagating a felicitous living which was Ponti’s main ideal. A dozen compact and elegant seaside houses were imagined, but only two were realized. The Long House has a markedly long plan; it has an extended front with a view of the sea from every room. Inside, the plan is laid to provide a balanced communal life, generous sleeping quarters make it possible for each individual to withdraw while still enjoying the view.

Gio Ponti is, like Achille Castiglioni and Jasper Morrison, one of Konstantin Grcic’s main influences and great inspirers. At the seaside house, I had wished Grcic’s portable “Mayday” lamp would be around, and not only to attract the most amazing moths. I equally missed the adjustable tables “Tam Tam + Tom Tom,” great objects to place near inflexible beach chairs. And a really comfortable chair like the “Leopolda” would have been welcome. My children like to play Spartacus with such stuff. And I admit, I am used to washing my socks in Grcic’s basin with “Two Hands.” All these “things” would have made my felicitous summer retreat even more felicitous.

However, I put up on Ponti’s long reddish terrace, a ping-pong table: an all-weather 722C Cornilleau, painted in that striking olive-green color listed as Pantone 357-U. The thin, tubular metal understructure, equipped with rubber wheels, and the large green wooden plane, circumscribed with lines in clear white, did not contradict the perfection of the simple surrounding architecture. To the contrary. Ponti once wrote about his own furniture, “Questo è il mio capolavoro. È un mobile simplice, ma di forma non inerte.” The same could be said of a ping-pong table! And if at first sight Grcic’s morphologies of tables, chairs, and other objects providing for a felicitous living, show a clear preference for slowness instead of speed, his forms are not inert either.

Ping-pong tables are also one of Grcic’s favorite objects, exactly because they are what they are, just tables. For Grcic tables are an expression of a wholeness and they – think of Grcic’s side tables lovingly entitled “Diana” – offer endless possibilities too. In addition, tables like the “Diana,” and of course ping-pong tables, make up for play: the possible becomes probable and the probable becomes possible. That is what Grcic invites us to do with most of his “happy objects” too – not unlike Gio Ponti’s frivole bedding ensembles, which look like invitations for a pleasant love affair, one with a happy ending. At Capo Perla, it suddenly appeared to me that Ponti and Grcic had together engaged in a game of ping-pong.

Just like Gio Ponti, Grcic is constantly seeking out felicity. They both want to bring order to our chaos without wanting to control it. They are not inventors; instead they rework, reconstruct, reduce, and improve that which already exists. From coffee machines to biergarten-furniture! And although they do not shy away from the decorative, they are convinced that elegance ought to be found somewhere else – namely in the essence of things. Thus they both adhere to “una semplicita perfetta”: a vase for the Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg by Grcic is as simple as a washbasin and worthy enough to hold a place among Ponti’s products for Ideal Standard.

After that, things may connect with other things. A “plus” and a “hyphen” appear in their work on a regular basis, like in Grcic’s “Clothes-Hanger-Brush.” But not only in the form of descriptions or oxymorons. Ponti and Grcic both like to connect – with or without architecture. They mount shelves, fabricate bookcases, and construct a great variety of other displays. They both like to give order to what is available, creating possibilities for new configurations and juxtapositions of things already present.

Another similarity is just as striking, namely their shared preference for compact, geometric volumes with strong angles. And then they return: “Da una forma geometrica, ad una forma naturale,” as Ponti wrote. As such, Grcic’s “Osorom” and “Chair_ONE” are not only things to sit on, but also crystals to stare at. And believe it or not, crystals continue to grow, though invisible to the human eye, at an extremely slow pace. Grcic’s newest ideas are indeed first and foremost about growth, but growth as an expression of the desire to connect.

It has now also become clear and acceptable that for Konstantin Grcic, the “Poltrona di poco sedile” of the name “Gabriela”– what a name! – which Gio Ponti designed in 1971, was the perfect base from which to imagine his own “Chaos” chair (2000). Even earlier than that, the “La superleggera,” realized by Ponti in 1957, proved to Grcic that “some pieces of furniture are more capable of speaking than others” and there is really such a thing as a “furniture-speak.”

Indeed, designing furniture is not a static theme that relies on standard solutions. Furthermore, the “things” of Ponti and Grcic prove that a politics of aesthetics is not contradictory to creating simple, realistic, even frolicsome, felicitous forms. At first glance, the aesthetical experiences Ponti and Grcic deliver, look similar to our daily experience and show a tendency to dissolve within other forms of life. It indeed takes a while to understand that their forms show a great resistance as well. But that is exactly because the “things” made by Ponti and Grcic prompt another crucial question: “When is design?”

But the imaginary game of ping-pong between Gio Ponti and Konstantin Grcic does not end here. Indeed, the sense of becoming inherent to a felicitous living relates to the amazing passage of many “things” that have come to be contemporary. We have to hold onto a vast depot of such “things” like a refuge. We want to be able to see the future growing. Only as such, design is not a crime!