Drawing Board
La Lanterna di Ponti Sweden “La Lanterna di Ponti” is a new site-specific intervention at Stockholm’s Italian Cultural Institute, promoted by the C.M. Lerici Foundation. Designed to become permanent, the new, luminous narrative meets and completes the architecture, designed by Gio Ponti in the Embassy district of Stockholm at the end of the 1950s, giving new life to a design that spans over half a century of history. The Institute represents the complete expression of Ponti’s design philosophy, which favours floors over volumes, wisely exploiting light. A ‘consequent’ architecture, in which the façade, as well as in other buildings built in the same period, is considered as a two-dimensional surface to be modeled. For example, for the contemporary and equally famous Villa Planchart, built in Caracas in 1957, Ponti intervened by illuminating the entire structure, which almost seems to hover and fluctuate, and
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cadencing the interior spaces in a rhythm of succession and fusion. The Caracas building and the Stockholm building have many points in common. Thinking about the exteriors of the Institute, in fact, Ponti had designed lighting in many ways similar to that designed and built for Villa Planchart. This element, however, was never included in the final design of the Stockholm Institute, most likely due to the technical limitations of the time. “La Lanterna di Ponti” therefore takes up that reflection already imagined by Ponti, concentrating on that rational, important and definitive light that puts the volumes of an architecture in tension, that “simulates shapes, cancels certain perceptions of dimensions and distances because it has no depth, splits certain units into two, creating illusive aspects, cancels and transforms weights, substance, volumes,
