Collection Guide: Alberto Ponis

– Editors

Alberto Ponis was born in the small port suburb of Nervi in Genoa, in 1933. He was the son of Mario A. Ponis, who owned a textile production company called MITA, which introduced him early on to many Italian artists and designers of the 20th century. The company had worked with Gio Ponti, Paolo Buffa, and Arturo Martini, among others. Ponis studied architecture in Florence in 1953 and graduated in 1960. Shortly after completing his studies, Ponis moved to London, where he would stay until 1964, working with brutalist forms: first with Ernö Goldfinger and then with Denys Lasdun. He said of working for Lasdun, it ‘was my new university, where I learnt the importance of intense engagement’. In 1963 he had his first project in Sardinia, moving to Palau the next year and starting his own practice. His work on the island was shaped by the dramatic granite rock formations and the local rural vernacular of stazzi. His drawing and painting practice were key in Sardinia, with Ponis always recording the terrain of his sites. He stated,

‘I sometimes paint and draw subjects which are not architecture so I have the pleasure of drawing something which has the combination of geometric and informal lines. What Italo Calvino calls the crystal and the flame—the straight line and the free one—the combination of these two elements in the Sardinian landscape is very frequent. The rocks and vegetation are very informal, extravagant, imaginative and then there are the straight lines of the horizon over the sea, and of the building lines.’

From 1963 to 2024, he designed over two hundred houses on the island. He had studios in Palau, Rome, and Genoa with his brother Aldo E. Ponis, an urban planner and landscape architect, and his wife AnnaRita Zalaffi, a civil engineer. His archive is split between Drawing Matter and the Archivio del Moderno at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). A few works are also held in the gta archive at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), in Zurich, which were displayed in an exhibition entitled ‘Alberto Ponis: Drawing Landscape’ in 2018.  

The extensive materials held in the Drawing Matter Collections were assembled over seven years, and many visits to Palau, in close consultation with Alberto Ponis and AnnaRita Zallaffi, largely before the dispersal of the wider archive to its present institutional repositories. The process of selection was guided by many site visits to individual projects in Sardinia, in company with them both, and by an ambition to secure:

• Works that explored the impact of his transition, from the young architect in the early 1960s, to the cosmopolitan world of Lasdun and Goldfinger, and finally to the architectural ‘blank canvas’ of pastoral Sardinia.
• A comprehensive survey of the role of many different drawing techniques in the development of the design process over the sixty-five years of his career.
• Drawings of particular projects that, taken together, represent a full variety of his different housing types.
• All the available material for at least one seminal building project (Casa Scalesciani), to include the notes taken on the first site visit, development sketches, construction drawings, and photography.

READ ALL WRITINGS ON ALBERTO PONIS HERE. 

VIEW THE COMPLETE DRAWING MATTER COLLECTIONS OF ALBERTO PONIS HERE. 

SKETCHBOOK, 1962-1967 

The sketchbook held by Drawing Matter was used in the early 1960s, in particular between 1962 and 1963, the years Ponis spent in London working in Denys Lasdun’s office. The sketchbook is predominantly a space where Ponis recorded existing buildings, and on page 13, dated the 8th of December ‘62 we see lists of buildings he is interested in visiting or studying. They are divided by geography across Europe and by architect: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn. Site visits can be seen over his Christmas break from Lasdun’s office; pages from December 1962 and January 1963 show sketches that suggest a tour of Le Corbusier buildings, ranging from the Villa Savoye to La Tourette.

Some drawings contained within the sketchbook are copied from contemporary publications, such as the one on page 28, the new RICS office building designed by Denys Lasdun, which was featured in the Financial Times. Ponis utilised the sketchbook’s thin paper to trace printed images. 

In the latter part of the sketchbook we also see Ponis start to design his first house in Sardinia. The boxy rectilinear structure nestled within the rocky coastal landscape, drawn from page 62 onwards, it was for his restaurateur friend Enzo Apicella; a project that was later featured by Gio Ponti in Domus. Gillian Darley unpacks the sketchbook further in her text for Drawing Matter. 

SKETCH OF NEW YORK 

A pencil drawing torn from a ring-bound sketchbook, depicts a view of Manhattan from Brooklyn, it was most likely drawn from a photograph.

YACHT CLUB, 1965 

The Yacht Club was one of Alberto Ponis’ early projects when he arrived in Sardinia. The project was to transform a disused Napoleonic military lookout post into a bar with moorings for boats and a small jetty; the project then encompassed the formation of a path from the bar to the small public beach of Porto Rafael located about two hundred metres down the coast.  

Ponis stated that the path was ‘found’ whilst the renovations of the military bunker were underway. He began by walking the path repeatedly over twenty days with a young, native stonemason of only 18 or 19 years old, taking notes and drawing the rock formations, vegetation, and openings. In two works held at Drawing Matter, this collaborative process of working the land is visible; notes and colours are layered across the terrain. The basis of these drawings was a simple military survey of the island which Ponis had magnified to work with. Find Ponis describe the project and drawings in his own words here. 

We hold a selection of material from the Yacht Club project: a set of twelve mostly presentational drawings, of the bar, alongside three drawings of the path (two working plans and a plan in charcoal which was made for publication), and six black and white photographs of the path taken by Ponis himself upon its completion.

HOUSE FOR THE DUCHESS OF KENT, 1968 

After Ponis’ project to redevelop the Yacht Club and its path, he caught the attention of many Londoners who wanted holiday homes in Sardinia; Ponis quickly became a fashionable choice. One of these clients was the Duchess of Kent (Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, before she married the Duke of Kent), yet the project was never built, as she passed away later that year. We hold seven drawings of the project, primarily working plans, some heavily worked up in coloured felt-tip pens.

CASA SERVICE, 1968 

Casa Service is a private home built on the Italian mainland, in the area of Potenza in Maratea, in Basilicata. Ponis here sketches it from the sea, to show how the buildings settle into the landscape, obscured by boulders and vegetation.  

CASA BAK, 1968 

The archive holds a working site plan of Casa Bak. The site of the private house at Punta Sardegna offered both challenges and excitement for Ponis; the terrain facing towards the sea is populated with granite boulders and is steeply sloped. Ponis stated of his private houses, ‘over time, I increasingly enjoyed designing in difficult, impassable sites’, and at Casa Bak we see his desire to work with an ‘impassable’ landscape.  

The drawing held in the archive reveals the difficulties of working with such a site. The plan of the house has been cut out and applied to the ground, the orange felt-tip pen cementing it into the already-drawn base. A note in the top left reads, ‘la posizione reciproca delle 2 case è sbagliata’ (the relative position of the 2 houses is wrong).

CASA HARTLEY, 1970 

Casa Hartley is nestled between two rocky pinnacles on the Costa Paradiso in the district of Trinità d’Agultu e Vignola. It takes the form of a triangular sliver built within a wider landscape of concentric circles that mark the house’s exterior terraces.  

The archive holds two plans for Casa Hartley, one working drawing and one for publication. The working plan is occupied not with the house itself, but with the path which connects it to its site; its focus is the access and terraces that situate the villa within the surrounding boulders. Red dots with annotations help understand where rocks are cut for the terracing and stairs, but equally where they are kept for effect – in front of the house, one stone is drawn over and over in black ink; Ponis writes ‘piccola roccia isolata’ (small, isolated rock), its importance to the scheme is inscribed on the plan.

STUDIO DI YASMIN, 1971 

The early projects of Ponis on Sardinia had cultivated a friendly network of Italians and English people who had moved to the island, including artist Yasmin Brandolini. In 1971, Ponis designed a studio for her, between her house and the sea, outside Palau at the edges of Punta Sardegna, close to the famous Roccia dell’Orso (Bear Rock). 

As seen in the working plan held in the archive, there is no access around the building; to visit the small beach below, one must pass through the studio. Ponis stated that this underlined ‘the fact the building is not the focal point’, only a gate that allowed movement across the landscape. Its diminished importance is again emphasised by the circular structure’s concessions to the surrounding rocks that encroach on its form. The plan held at Drawing Matter was drawn over again in black ink by Ponis on the 6th of February 1988, years after the studio’s completion.

CASA DOTOLI, 1972 

We hold two plans for Casa Dotoli, one working drawing and one presentational, in black ink. Unlike Ponis’ other houses of this time, Casa Dotoli takes a much more linear form, yet despite its long rectangular plan, it navigates a steeply sloping site. The project directs itself towards the sea, and in Ponis’ working plan we see two blue lines that present the desired access to the water. The drawing also contains notes around what is yet to be surveyed: the rocks around the house, the path to the sea, and the changing gradient of the terrain.  

CASA SCALESCIANI, 1974-1978 

The designs for Casa Scalesciani that we hold speak directly to the multiple design stages of the project. It was a holiday home for an Argentinian couple, in which the husband, Juan S., was heavily involved in the development of the design. There are a few sheets from early in the project, from meetings with the clients, that outline the parameters of the programme: a small plunge pool, the arrangement of the kitchen, but also the note ‘rocce in casa ok’ (rocks in house ok).

The first designs are of a single file of small square rooms (DMC 3899.4), and the second iteration pulls the originally close block into a longer serpentine sequence of rectilinear spaces(DMC 2918.5). Yet the Scalescianis were after a design that followed Casa Martinez from 1966, a house that was more fluid and dramatic. The third design therefore departed from Ponis’ initial ideas and took the form of a spiralling plan that finds the spaces between the boulders (DMC 2918.28). These three stages of the design process are captured most clearly through a set of long folded sheets that detail topography plans, floor plans, elevations, and a perspective rendering. The archive also holds a grey binder of documentation, containing additional sketches, correspondence with the builder and client, as well as working drawings.  

We hold multiple working plans for the house, often heavily annotated, or creased from their use on site. Equally drawings of the project for publication are held in the archive; 20 tracing paper sheets comprising of plans, sections, elevations, and perspectives, as well as three highly contrasted black and white images of the building in its rocky context.

VILLA STUDIES, 1971-1978 

Working from the plan of a single cell (derived from the vernacular stazzi of Sardinia), Ponis’ designs evolve through the morphology of the landscape. He states that his house plans are defined by materiality, the rock and excavations, or by more abstract qualities such as the openings, light, and views. This scroll of fourteen plans, held in the archive, is a format Ponis played with multiple times (he redrew them as a group later in 2013, a work held at the USI archive). In seeing them together, we understand the power of these material and abstract qualities to guide each project and produce such diversity of form.

In the archive, the scroll sits with 15 other plan drawings of his houses, some known and others not, that show them within the topography of their sites. They are rendered graphically in black with heavy shadows, a style that Ponis implemented for the publication of his drawings.

STAZZO PULCHEDDU, 1975 

We hold four drawings of Stazzo Pulcheddu, a small development of houses inland from the coast in Palau. The houses are stepped down the sloping terrain, each formulated as a long rectangular block with both internal and external spaces. The project was developed ten years after the first tourists started to visit Sardinia, and in 1990 it was awarded the INARCH prize.

5 HOUSES, PUNTA SARDEGNA, 1985-1986 

The archive holds five plans for a project in Punta Sardegna for five houses. From left to right they are Casa Carrara, Casa Giaculli, Casa Valentini, and Casa Fortunato (which is comprised of two buildings). Ponis had been approached by the families, who were acting together to buy a single large undeveloped site; his challenge was to exploit the complex topography to offer individual privacy, amenity, and character to each dwelling.

The archive holds one site plan that shows the silhouettes of the houses over the topographical map of the terrain; it is stamped by the local authorities. The following four plans are labelled A through D, and each explores different aspects of the proposal. Plan A highlights the first three houses, with Casa Fortunato not fully worked out; for those it does depict, we see a system of coloured felt-tip pens delineating landscape (green), terrace or patio (yellow/orange), proposed work (black), and large rocks (red). Plan B primarily uses yellow to show the terraces and patios of the houses, as well as the paths that connect them. Plan C again highlights those forms in yellow, but with additional spaces coloured close to the road that runs the length of the site, perhaps marking car parking. Plan D marks the houses in red with orange for their external spaces; it also has a network of lines and measurements applied over the top.  

CASA HEINTZSCHEL, 1986 

The villa was designed as a holiday home for the Heintzschel family in Punta Sardegna. For Ponis, it stood as a resurgence of the villa over the recent tourist developments for condominiums. Like many of Ponis’ villas, it speaks to its site, creating a harmonious relationship between the existing stone and the intervention of the house. In two working plans we hold, one can see again Ponis jostle with the internal organisation of the villa, and equally with the placement of rocks and terraces; he maps the entire site, not only the built work. The archive also holds a drawing made for publication, with its tracing-paper precursor, and two photographs of the completed project taken by Ponis himself. In his photographs, we see that the house never comes above the horizon line, emphasising the built work’s ground-hugging sensitive design.

CASA GOSTNER, 1998 

The archive holds a single printed heating and electrical plan with hand-drawn annotations for Casa Gostner. The house was originally designed for a client who decided not to build the project and sell the site, after five years, Gerhart Gostner bought the land and built the house to the original design. The house takes a hexagonal shape to accommodate the large rock that dominates the site and creates a courtyard around an existing strawberry tree. In the plan we see the hand of Ponis balancing again the topography of the site, its encroaching rocks and the central fruit tree with his interventions, small staircases and a swimming pool.

Additions and amendments are welcomed at editors@drawingmatter.org