Giovanni "Gio" Ponti (18 November 1891 – 16 September 1979) was an Italian architect, industrial designer, furniture designer, artist, teacher, writer and publisher.During his career, which spanned six decades, Ponti built more than a hundred buildings in Italy and in the rest of the world. He designed a considerable number of decorative art and design objects as well as furniture. Thanks to the magazine Domus, which he founded in 1928 and directed almost all his life, and thanks to his active participation in exhibitions such as the Milan Triennial, he was also an enthusiastic advocate of an Italian-style art of living and a major player in the renewal of Italian design after the Second World War. From 1936 to 1961, he taught at the Milan Polytechnic School and trained several generations of designers. Ponti also contributed to the creation in 1954 of one of the most important design awards: the Compasso d'Oro prize. Ponti died on 16 September 1979.
His most famous works are the Pirelli Tower, built from 1956 to 1960 in Milan in collaboration with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, the Villa Planchart in Caracas and the Superleggera chair, produced by Cassina in 1957. (wikipedia)
Hello! It's time for my monthly Zoom-solve with my friend and fellow central New Yorker, crossword constructor Rachel Fabi. Normally we'd do it on the 23rd, but ... you know, circumstances, so here we are, solving a Friday puzzle on the 26th.
Our overall take was: very nice central stack, decent long Downs, rough everywhere else. Which seemed upside-down, as pulling off a clean 15 stack seems like it would be more challenging than simply filling a relatively small and highly sequestered corner, but, yeah, none of the corners was very good, and one (the NE) was just baffling. You can watch the video and see us solve it in real time, but if you're not so inclined, I can tell you there is a good chunk of time where I just keep changing
IMPASTO (!?!?!) to IMPASSE over and over and over again. The
IMPASTO / TAW (!?!?!?!?!) cross is extremely likely to cause some subset of solvers to just stare at the grid in befuddlement. I don't think
IMPASTO or
TAW is particularly good on its own, but I *know* they're awful when they team up to cross at that "T." It's been 60 years since anyone could tell you the different marble types—since anyone played marbles at all, honestly—so what in the hell is that clue even doing? IMPASSE / SAW / ERS ... why did the puzzle not go this direction? I'm all for the road less traveled, but sometimes you don't travel down a road because it's full of potholes or leads off a cliff. It's true that
TO SEE is already in the grid, and maybe you don't want SAW and SEE in the same grid, but. you can clue SAW as a noun, a bunch of ways, so that ... really shouldn't be a problem. Honestly, on every level,
IMPASTO / TAW is such a terrible choice. To make things worse, someone's gone and parked a
GREEN CAR up in that corner as well. I've only just begun to accept ECOCAR, so there is no way I'm accepting
GREEN CAR ... unless the car is actually painted GREEN or belongs to singer Al GREEN. The other corners are merely mediocre and mildly tiresome, but that NE corner has me just shaking my head.
But the middle part, as I say, is wonderful, with
PUT A FACE TO A NAME occupying its rightful place of glory at center stage (
38A: Meet somebody you've heard lots about). This puzzle played hard for me, with a bunch of names I just didn't know (
GIO, SVEN??) and cluing I couldn't make sense of very readily. There are many more little details in the video. Enjoy! Or don't! See you tomorrow!
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
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