Gio Ponti. La Villa Planchart a Caracas
Edited by Antonella Greco, Edizioni Kappa, Roma 2008 (pp. 198, € 40,00)

Once upon a time there was an architect who spoke about modern architecture in the tropics. When he designed a house, he sent letters and telegrams or made long telephone calls, "trying to grasp intangible matter and turn it into art". As Antonella Greco recounts the fairy tale of Villa Planchart, originally El Cerrito, you only have to close your eyes to see the Melotti ceramics, the colours of Morandi's work, Fornasetti's black-and-white lacquers, or the workings of a still early technology devised to move partitions and walls and open up views everywhere. Hannia Gomez then tells us about Mrs Anala Braun and her memories of her husband Armando Planchart Franklin. We hear of their friend Gio Ponti, the architect from Milan who would go away with his pockets filled with leaves gathered in the garden every time he came to see them. In 1953, Ponti gave them a mental image of what their house would be like: "As graceful as a large butterfly on the top of a hill." It was Villa Planchart, set on a Caracas hill.

It all started in Milan at no. 14 Via Dezza. It was 1953 and Mr and Mrs Planchart had secured an appointment with Gio Ponti through the Venezuelan Embassy. All three were seated around the drawing board with the light slipping through the shutters and bouncing off the floor lighting up models, technical drawings and sketches, and copies of Domus lying all over the place. Ponti asked, "So, tell me what you expect from a house." It was a wonderful, crucial and personal question that made the person living there the primary and essential design condition. Anala replied that they would like to see the splendid Avila Mountain from all parts of the house, and Mr Planchart asked that his collection of 2,000 orchids be contained within the walls. So, a house with no walls that was a home to orchids and provided views of a mountain from every part. Ponti immediately started to draw and then showed the couple an initial sketch, a low house with plenty of arches. "I don't like it," said Mrs Planchart at once, "I want a modern house!" Now that the last condition had emerged, he could start on the design.

The second sketch was drawn with greater care and attention, and this time Mr and Mrs Planchart were sent away with the knowledge that they were about to build the house of their lifetime. From that moment on, the design process became poetry and a close relationship formed between the architect and his clients, as the written correspondence between them bears out. Letters, telegrams and despatches would reach the Plancharts everywhere, even on the Stella Polaris ship as the couple travelled to the North Pole. Over 500 messages promised, announced and described every moment in the design process that flowed through the studio in Via Dezza and Ponti's creativity.

As in poetry, upon entering the house one would be overwhelmed by the fragrance of orchids, even before the architecture and the artworks it contains. To reach the planted orchids one would walk along a veritable promenade of flowering orchids arranged all around the inside of the house, in a constant relay between new and wilting blooms. Ponti devised "flower containers" and "portable gardens", metal trays that fitted together and into the floor design, making the floral feature a material and constructive part of the whole house – a true celebration of total art. When you abruptly open our eyes, the fragrance of flowers gives way to the reality described by Fulvio Irace. He described Caracas by night as "a burning piece of coal, like the setting of an atomic catastrophe that has engulfed the city, giving El Cerrito the appearance of an unexpected and precarious negation before the looming fire".

The favelas have devoured the megalopolis, encroaching on small and precarious oases of beauty. Villa Diamantina, another of Ponti's little gems, has been demolished to make way for blind speculation. So, to drive back today's horrors, it is still a delight to shut your eyes and try to think back to those days, when a house's architecture was like a story told in poetry, an intense relationship between an architect from Milan and an enlightened couple from Venezuela who loved flowers, and who lived happily in that house for many, many years.