Gaetano Pesce

The revered – and iconoclastic – Gaetano Pesce has been a prolific architect-cum-designer-cum-artist for the past four decades. His work is renowned for its organic, visceral, tactile qualities and innovative use of materials, notably resin. Pesce was born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, and studied architecture at the University of Venice. He has lived in Venice, London, Helsinki, Paris and, since 1980, New York. In the 60s, he was one of the pioneers of the pop movement; his 1969 Up furniture series in polyurethane foam, for C&B Italia, came vacuum-packed, but, once released from its containers, bounced up into shape. One of his better-known projects is the Organic Building in Osaka (1989-1993), while his redesign of the offices of advertising agency TWBA/Chiat/Day in Manhattan, completed in 1995, was hailed by the New York Times as ‘a remarkable work of art… that bears no resemblance to the sleek, hard-edged aesthetic we have come to associate with the modern world’. In 1996, the Centre Georges Pompidou held a retrospective of Pesce’s work. Pesce has said about his ultra-experimental ideas, ‘Architecture of the recent past has mostly produced cold, anonymous, monolithic, antiseptic, standardised results that are uninspiring. I have tried to communicate feelings of surprise, discovery, optimism, stimulation, sensuality, generosity, joy and femininity.’ Speaking at Be Open’s Unique and Universal conference, Pesce talked about how the future would bring ‘a more unified world’ but that, within this, it was important to cultivate ‘diversity’.