Gaetano Pesce, an architect-artist-designer based in New York City, has undertaken diverse commissions in architecture, urban planning, interior and exhibition design, industrial design and publishing. In more than forty years of practice, Pesce has conceived public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia, from residences to gardens and corporate offices. Pesce's extensive body of work - recognized for its emotive and tactile qualities, unrestrained use of color, and insistence upon innovative building materials developed through new technologies - has been described by prominent architecture critic Herbert Muschamp as "the architectural equivalent of a brainstorm".
Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939, Gaetano Pesce was trained at the University of Venice Faculty of Architecture. He has lived in Padova, Venice, London, Helsinki, Paris and, since 1980, New York. Pesce has served as a visiting lecturer and professor at many prestigious institutions in America and abroad, including the Cooper Union in New York. During 28 years, he has been a faculty member at the Institut d'Architecture et d'Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France. Gaetano Pesce has also worked in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Japan, the United States, and Brazil, which has influenced the internationalism of his approach.
His multidisciplinary work, that encompasses art making and performance, has been the subject of numerous publications and exhibitions and is currently displayed in the permanent collections of museums in France, Finland, Italy, Portugal, England and the United States. In 1996, he was honored with both a comprehensive career retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and publication of the Cataloque Gaetano Pesce: Le temps des questions. In 1993, Gaetano Pesce was the recipient of the influential Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design.
A distinctly figurative aspect and a hand-crafted quality characterize Pesce's most well-known commissions. Among these are proposed projects for Les Halles (1979) and the converted Lingotto Fiat Factory in Turin (1983); the Children's House for the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1985); the Hubin's Apartment in Paris (1986); the Organic Building in Osaka (1989-1993); the Gallery Mourmans in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium (1994); and the Shuman residence in New York (1994). |
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Pesce's Manhattan office for the advertising agency TWBA/Chiat Day, 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 esthetic we have come to associate with the modern world". In this project, as in all Pesce initiatives, the architect expressed his guiding principle: that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and prescribing a future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated.
More generally, Pesce's work is characterized by the "diversified series", the double functionality of objects and architecture, the creative use of colors, the political dimension of his projects, the theory and practice of the "poorly made", the provocation, the use and improvement of synthetic materials, the theory of "femininity" in the architectural projects and, lastly, the culture of objects.
On the subject of his work, Pesce recently said: "For the past 30 years, I have been trying to give architecture back its capacity to be "useful", by quoting recognizable, figurative images commonly associated with street life and popular culture, and by generating new typologies. I strive to seek new materials that fit into the logic of construction, while performing services appropriate to real needs. Architecture of the recent past has mostly produced cold, anonymous, monolithic, antiseptic, standardized results that are uninspiring. I have tried to communicate feelings of surprise, discovery, optimism, stimulation, sensuality, generosity, joy and femininity."
Because of its innovative character and non-conventionalist spirit Gaetano Pesce's work has often given rise to uproar and controversy. |
