Gaetano Pesce (1939–2024)

Iconoclastic Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, known for his curvaceous, vibrantly hued furniture and design objects and for his humanist structures, died on April 3 in New York following a stroke. He was eighty-four. Pesce over a six-decade career introduced organic shapes where hard edges and straight lines might be expected—say, in a home or office building—and then bent the rules even further by lending them unnaturally bright colors. “Gaetano Pesce’s buildings and objects exude an unashamed sense of artifice and an unchecked air of exuberance,” wrote Patricia C. Phillips in a 1989 issue ofArtforum. “His work is as visceral as it is cerebral. Pesce’s designs question comfortable assumptions about what a bank building or a chair should look like, and offer delightfully twisted alternatives to conventional solutions.”

Gaetano Pesce was born on November 8, 1939, in the coastal northwestern Italian town of La Spezia, the youngest of three children. His father, a naval officer, was killed in World War II and Pesce and his siblings were raised in Padua and Florence by his mother, a concert pianist. While studying architecture under Carlo Scarpa and Ernesto Rogers at the University of Venice, he fell in with Gruppo N, a Bauhaus–influenced collective concerned with programmed art. Interested in industrial design, he visited chemical companies to learn about the modern materials—such as foam, resin, and plastic—they used, and which he would soon employ in his own creations.

On opening his own studio in Padua in the 1960s, Pesce began producing objects and furniture, and in 1968 came up with what would turn out to be one of his most enduring designs, the idea for which occurred to him in the shower. “I had the sponge in my hand,” he toldArchitectural Digestin 2017. “When I pressed the sponge, it shrank, and when I released it, it returned to its original volume.” Pesce’s Up chair, also known as La Mamma for its sensual rounded contours, shipped as a four-inch-thick polyurethane disc that, when removed from its vinyl packaging, filled with air and rose regally and slowly from the floor to assume its voluptuous and welcoming final form. Accompanied by a ball-shaped ottoman, the chair to Pesce was “an image of a prisoner. Women suffer because of the prejudice of men,” he told the magazine. “The chair was supposed to talk about this problem.”

Other design objects that made their way into the public psyche include his Feltri armchair, a slouching, enveloping column made entirely of felted wool, stiffened in the appropriate places; the Tramonto sofa, which resembles a set of soft gray skyscrapers foregrounding a descending bright orange sun; and the Moloch floor lamp, a massive version of a swing-arm desk lamp. Pesce was dismissive of those who denounced his work as ugly or unserious. “I don’t make things so they appear nice or elegant,” he toldPin-Upin 2021. “I make objects to communicate different stories to people.” Many appeared to like those stories, design curators chief among them: Following his inclusion in the pathbreaking design exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Pesce saw his work exhibited widely; theNew York Timespointed out that it was featured in seventeen exhibitions at MoMA alone.

Pesce pursued his architecture practice concurrent with his design career. “You cannot bring a style of architecture to a place without considering the environment,” he toldPin-Up.“You must consider geography, tradition, and climate . . . You must spend time and get to know it.” His most famous building is undoubtedly the nine-story 1993 Organic Building in Osaka, whose red facade features extruded pockets for plants, which are watered via a computer-controlled irrigation system. His nearly wall-less 1994 design for the offices of New York’s Chiat/Day ad firm predicted the open-plan offices popular today; sadly, embellishments such as a colossal set of painted lips framing the concierge desk and glowing multicolored floors did not make the transition to twenty-first-century corporate culture.

In addition to his work as an artist, a designer, and an architect, Pesce for twenty-eight years taught architecture at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg before going on to teach at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; Domus Academy, Milan; Hong Kong Polytechnic University; the Architecture and Urbanism College, University of São Paulo; and Cooper Union, New York. His work is held in the collections of major museums around the globe, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; the Centre Pompidou and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, both in Paris; and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany.