Where, then, is Ponti’s Ronchamp or Fallingwater, the iconic works of Corbuser and Wright respectively? Well, it might well be the Pirelli Tower in Milan. That is moderately renowned because, designed in the late 1950s when he was leading a team including the great engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, it broke decisively away from the glass-shoebox aesthetic of what was called the International Style. We all saw this elegant, diamond-shaped tower on the news recently when someone crashed a small plane into it but until then, frankly, it was scarcely a world landmark to compare to the Sydney Opera House. You might look also at his houses from the post-war period - he built around the world - such as the 1955 Villa Planchart in Caracas, and conclude he was an enlightened modernist. Unfortunately for this sanitized account of Ponti, buildings such as his 1970 cathedral in the industrial city of Taranto, southern Italy, are interestingly rich, combining a baroque sensibility with experiments in pierced, dissolving facades. Nobody ever talks about that Ponti building or others like it. For their time, they were way out of line. The architectural history books ignore them but this exhibition rescues them from oblivion.

At times, Ponti could be a bit of a fevered decorator. That diamond shape was for a while as much his trademark as the red square was Wright’s. Ponti used the diamond motif everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s both as an ordering device and as a surface treatment, particularly using facetted tiles. We associate him with the 1950s, which was certainly his most fertile period, not only for such geometric shape-making but also for some of the spindly designs, especially in furniture, that he produced at his period. Note however that he was anticipating fashion rather than following it, since he was set on this course as early as the 1930s. Historians, as we have seen, pick what they want of an artist. That 1950s tag clung to him despite the fact that he went through numerous stylistic swerves in his life - about once a decade dropping everything and starting afresh, a veritable Olivier or Bowie of design.