The essay reconstructs the genesis of the pareti attrezzate, theorized and built by Gio Ponti between the 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of the articles dedicated to this subject, which appeared in the magazines “Stile” and “Domus”, from the comparison with the existing bibliography and with some original and unpublished documents produced by Ponti, and through the analysis of the original furniture, the pannello-cruscotto appear to be the coherent result of a personal poetics of modernity, which weaves unexpected relationships with Le Corbusier’s theories, and at the same time has its roots in the research on modern style and taste that Ponti promotes since the 1920s. The synthesis between the past and the contemporary present, the rejection of a dogmatic modernity superficially linked to the forms and the visual language, the renewal of tradition, emerge from an unpublished writing dedicated to the villa L’Ange Volant with accents similar to those of the writings about the post-war furnishings.
