Time's Table

A Gio Ponti design created for a New York icon has a happy landing in Milan

- Laura May Todd

Gio Ponti’s ‘D.859.1’ table was originally designed to sit atop a Manhattan skyscraper. It was the centrepiece of the Milanese master’s most extensive project in New York: an auditorium perched on the eighth-floor terrace of Harrison & Abramovitz’s Time & Life Building. When it first opened its doors in 1959, Ponti’s auditorium was the ultimate gathering place for the sharply suited businessman. Indeed, it was intended to woo advertisers and facilitate high-powered business meetings for Henry Luce’s Time Inc, then at the apex of a mighty media industry. Hoping to beef up his profile in the Big Apple, Ponti had rained down on that little space all the lustre of Italian luxury he could muster.

A 1960 issue of Architectural Forum describes the chapel-like space as bordering on the Baroque, its floors ‘a grand lava flow of marbleised sheet rubber in yellow with streaks of green, and dark blue’. Its walls were ‘punched with luminous-colored glass block’, and its furniture ‘neo-art-nouveau, [with] as many joints as a praying mantis’. The table, at 3.6m, was long enough to comfortably fit ten people. Originally made of solid ash, with curving splayed legs like flying buttresses, it held an impressive tabletop tapered at either end that felt years ahead of its time.