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Rocks and a Hard Place: The Work of Alberto

Ponis
20 MARCH 2015 BY DAVID ROBERTS
BOOKS

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After a career of over 50 years and 300 buildings,

Interview with Andrea Branzi
Alberto Ponis is the subject of a part biography,
17 MAY 2022 BY CATHARINE ROSSI
part monograph study
The wood wide web: trees in
Alberto Ponis has been building holiday houses in Sardinia literature
since the mid-’60s and only now, after a career of more than 50 20 OCTOBER 2021 BY ANNA SOUTER
years and 300 or so buildings, has a substantial volume
dedicated to his architecture finally come along. Given the Violence of planting in Israel-
work’s evident quality, the lack of attention is peculiar; its Palestine
physical isolation might explain it, but then, as this book 19 OCTOBER 2021 BY LIAT BERDUGO
demonstrates, Ponis’s architecture and personality don’t seek
attention.

Born near Genoa and having studied architecture in Florence,

Ponis first worked in London for Ernö Goldfinger and later for
Denys Lasdun. In 1963, the same year in which Lasdun began
designing the National Theatre, Ponis executed a commission
for a holiday house in Sardinia, a place he had never visited, in
what would become the resort town of Porto Rafael. This
fortuitous start ensured his career coincided with Sardinia’s
emerging tourist trade, as Anglo-Italian holidaymakers flocked
to its new resorts, transforming the harsh (and hence relatively
untouched) coastline from a moderately adventurous
destination into today’s playground of the ultra-rich and
powerful.

Fireplace and chimney of Studio di Yasmin, whose rugged forms were inspired by t
Sardinian structures

Thankfully, given his vast output, The Inhabited Pathway isn’t

so much a monograph cataloguing Ponis’s oeuvre as a thesis
expounding his architectural process. It is assembled in five
parts: ‘Biography’, outlining his education and time in London;
‘Early Projects’, touching on the challenges and evolution of
the initial houses; ‘Sardinia’, a series of essays and photographs
by Ponis surveying the history, climate, geology, flora and
traditional rural architecture of the island; ‘Eight Houses’,
works that make up the bulk of the book; and ‘Thoughts and
Form’, a series of reflections on his approach to design.
Bookending this are essays by editor Sebastiano Brandolini
and Jonathan Sergison (of Sergison Bates). Perhaps it’s the
uncomplicated presentation of the images, or the utter lack of
a didactic tone to the texts, but the book manages to avoid the
usual clichés of ‘place-based’ architecture while making a
compelling case for its pertinence (if only on ground as wild as
the Sardinian coast).
Though only eight houses are selected as case studies, they
span Ponis’s entire career and display a strikingly consistent
architectural language. This may owe as much to the tight sites
and budgets of the early work, as to Ponis’s engagement with
the materiality and site-consciousness of New Brutalism. His
work has the rare quality of seeming as if each building is an
iteration of the same house, adjusted to suit each new site,
bringing to mind the work of Rudolf Olgiati and Glenn
Murcutt.

The houses are presented in much the same way. Hand-drawn

plans and sections supplement photographs that follow a
processional route along the pathway (often little more than a
faint, narrow way, or a toehold scraped into granite bedrock),
then around and through the houses themselves. The
photographs give an impression the houses have ossified:
almost all signs of habitation have been filtered out. This can
be put down to Ponis’s masterful control of forms, to material
weathering, and to the flora pushing in on all sides (none of the
houses, sensibly, has a garden) which suggest the buildings
belong to the landscape far more than to the owners, who may
visit for only a few months each year.

Merging with the rocky landscape, the Casa Hartley looks out to the Mediterranea

Ponis’s work is animated by a tension between the imported

architectural styles and urban patterns of the coastal resorts
and the established building types of inland Sardinia (which
remain virtually unspoiled to this day), especially the
traditional structures for shelter and farming − the stazzo −
that he studied and reuses in his architecture as a kind of
elemental unit of composition. Resort developments are ultra
low-density: small houses on large sites. Yet Ponis seeks the
most difficult land to build on − between granite boulders,
against wind-bent shrubbery, perched on cliff edges, straddling
ridge-lines − and marks out the house using wooden stakes
and string. Consequently there is hardly a right-angle in any of
the plans.

It remains for others to piece together Alberto Ponis’s place

in the history of modern Sardinian architecture (or how his
retreats came to be sited near Berlusconi’s bunga bunga
parties), but his significance to world architecture is suggested
in the concluding essay by Jonathan Sergison which favourably
compares Ponis’s awesome Casa Scalesciani to Jørn Utzon’s
Can Lis in Majorca as one of the seminal houses of postwar
southern Europe; a case that could be made for two or three of
Ponis’s other buildings.

It’s somewhat difficult to characterise The Inhabited Pathway

− part biography, personal thesis, monograph − but careful
editing binds it tightly; its success residing less in the
presentation of any individual house than in the sensitive
distillation and representation of a lifetime’s work. This
handsome book makes a powerful introduction to an architect
whose work deserves to be widely appreciated.

The Inhabited Pathway

Editor: Sebastiano Brandolini

Publisher: Park Books

MARCH 2015


Since 1896, The Architectural Review has

scoured the globe for architecture that
challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new
are chosen as prisms through which arguments
and broader narratives are constructed. In
their fearless storytelling, independent critical
voices explore the forces that shape the homes,
cities and places we inhabit.

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