Designer Desire: Alberto Ponis

Last week, we featured Michele Busiri Vici, the man responsible for designing many of the beautiful villas in the area of Sardinia we visited recently. Another architect with breath-taking buildings in the same area is Alberto Ponis.

In the early 1960s, Alberto Ponis (b. 1933) worked in London with Erno Goldfinger and Sir Denys Lasdun (working with the latter on the National Theatre on the city’s South Bank). In 1964, he set up his own studio in Sardinia.

There’s a monograph entitled, The Inhabited Pathway: The Built Work of Alberto Ponis in Sardinia, which features eight of his projects built between 1965 and 1998. In it, Ponis explains:

I began to arrange houses in such a way that I could place particular emphasis even on just a single massive block of granite, or on a Mediterranean macchia hedge, or on an old cork oak tree… The footprint of the house, when the spaces are very narrow, coincides with the creation of its plan, which simply cannot be born on the drawing board… When a rock remains as if imprisoned inside the house, then the integration is complete and the client is happy. The architect is too, as he hasn’t had to invent anything except what already existed.

Another book, Alberto Ponis: Architettura in Sardegna by Sebastiano Brandolini, covers 40 of the architect’s buildings created between the 60s and the present day.

The Right Rock, Alberto Ponis from corradocattinari on Vimeo

Image credits:

Designer Desire: Michele Busiri Vici

_{Villa Olivastri, Porto Rafael}

We spent a week and a bit in Sardinia last month; as well as the landscape and the beaches, the thing that we enjoyed looking at the most was the architecture. After a bit of online research, we discovered that Michele Busiri Vici was the man who was responsible for many of the buildings in the area.

Rome-born Michele Busiri Vici (1894-1981) descended from generations of architects and town planners. He designed the award-winning Italian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He’s credited as being the creator of the ‘Mediterranean Style’ of architecture; consisting of organic, white-washed forms, terra-cotta floor and roof tiles and incorporating the landscape into the interior.

He was one of the architects commissioned by the Aga Khan to create Porto Cervo and the Costa Smeralda – a playground for the Aga Khan and his wealthy, international jet-set friends.

A few years later in the 1960s in Porto Rafael, (the village on the north eastern coast of Sardinia where we stayed) he was commissioned by Raphael Neville, Count of Berlanga de Duero to design the Piazzetta and the Chapel of Saint Rita. He also designed various private villas in the pretty coastal resort.

_{La Piazzetta, Porto Rafael}