In the 1990 biography of her father, Gio Ponti, The Complete Work, 1923–1978, Lisa Licitra Ponti summarized his life’s achievements: buildings that he designed in 13 countries, 25 years of teaching and 50 years of editing articles in all 560 issues of Domus, the architecture and design magazine he founded in 1928. During those five-plus decades, Gio Ponti (1891–1979) was the colossus of Italian design, equally at ease with tradition and modernity. He was both a craftsman and an industrial manufacturer. His output extended beyond architecture to embrace the design of interiors, furniture, ceramics, glass, textiles, lighting and industrial products.

Born in Milan in 1891, Ponti interrupted his architectural studies at the Milan Polytechnic to fulfill his military service during World War I, then returned to receive his degree in 1921. Although he always considered himself an architect—"I think about architecture at night and work on architecture during the day"—he joined ceramics manufacturer Richard Ginori as artistic director in 1923. Responsible for production as well as design, he transformed the company into a model of excellence and efficiency. During the next seven years, Ponti designed a vast number of plates, vases and urns decorated with elegant neoclassical motifs imbued with a modern spirit. In 1925 his ceramics won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs. In the Expo’s catalogue, Ponti wrote, "Industry is the style of the 20th century, its mode of creation"—which was tantamount to a claim that mass production and quality were not incompatible.

At Christie’s New York in 2006, a circa-1925 Ponti vase for Richard Ginori featuring the figure of an Amazon sold for $33,600. "It is beautifully executed, particularly the shading, which is modeled to create a three-dimensional effect," says Carina Villinger, a specialist in the auction house’s 20th-century decorative art and design department.

The mid-century years were the most productive for Ponti, who approached every new project with passion and a sense of purpose. He designed chandeliers, lamps and drinking glasses for the Venetian glassmaker Venini, an espresso machine for La Pavoni, interiors for Italian ocean liners and flatware for the French silversmith Christofle.

Ponti’s collaboration with artists such as Paolo De Poli and Piero Fornasetti resulted in some of his most imaginative works. De Poli was a master of enamel work on copper. At New York’s Primavera Gallery, a slant-top secretary desk by Ponti is elaborately decorated by De Poli with a variety of motifs that gallery owner Audrey Friedman suggests were "playing off the 1920s collages of Braque and Picasso." The New York gallery, which recently moved from Madison Avenue to Chelsea, currently has about 13 Ponti pieces at prices ranging from $6,000 to $185,000, the latter for a hexagonal table inlaid with a variety of semi-precious stones, including malachite and lapis lazuli.

In 1956 Ponti designed a group of animal, bird and serpent figures, possibly cut from paper and then bent into the desired form. De Poli turned Ponti’s ideas into objects. In 2006 the Chicago auction house Wright sold "Gatto" ("Cat"), enamel and silver leaf over copper, 1956, for $10,200 (est. $5,000–$7,000). "It’s a fanciful little sculpture," says auctioneer Richard Wright, "that brings together both the rationality and playfulness of Italian design."

Ponti began working with Fornasetti in the 1950s and said their collaboration was a "marriage of contradictions." While Ponti’s style was pure and restrained, Fornasetti’s playful and exuberant. He was a master of trompe l’oeil painting and strongly influenced by Surrealism. "I married decoration to form at a time when decoration was rejected and banished," Fornasetti declared in the late 1930s. Ponti said of Fornasetti, "He made objects speak."