The future is a beautiful time. Gaetano Pesce Passes Away at 84

Italian architect Gaetano Pesce and the enfant terrible of the design world (popularly known for the famous UP5 Chair and author of other thought-provoking furniture) passed away on Wednesday in Manhattan, at 84. According to his daughter Milena Pesce, he died because of a stroke at the hospital.

Gaetano Pesce will be remembered for a groundbreaking career that spanned six decades, beginning as an industrial designer in Italy in the 1960s, and turning into one of the leading figures behind the Radical Design movement.

His contributions included the Up5 chair he made for B&B Italia, the Moloch floor lamp, and other artistic pieces that commented on politics and society. His numerous works models, and drawings are part of over 30 permanent collections of the most important museums in the world, such as the MoMa of New York and San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Vitra Museum in Germany, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Pompidou Center and Musee des Arts Décoratifs of Louvre in Paris.

Gaetano Pesce. Photograph by Mark O'Flaherty. Courtesy of Gaetano Pesce Studio

Gaetano Pesce was born in La Spezia in 1939, Italy, but spent much of his life in New York City. He studied architecture at the University of Venice, under Carlo Scarpa and Ernesto Rogers, between 1958 and 1963. He participated in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus. He researched the function and form of architecture and utilitarian objects.

Today, I would like to remember his participation in “Inventionen. Piranesi und Architektur Phantasien in der Gegenwart” (“Inventions. Piranesi and architectural fantasies of the present") an exhibition in Hannover, Germany, in which the proposals by Raimund Abraham, Gaetano Pesce, Adolfo Natalini (Superstudio), Günter Günschel, Hans Dieter Shaal, Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Gerd Neuman, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Gaetano Pesce constantly experimented with new materials from the beginning, trying to redefine the architectural language through innovation in construction with these materials.

"Among his contributions to the exhibition were, among others, dreamlike drawings and some bas-reliefs, with an evident Gaudian or Dalinian influence depending on the case, but always identified under the idea of presenting themselves as manifest projects, critical of functionalism and rationalism. Among these proposals was that of a skyscraper for New York that would be located on the site of the Seagram Building, a megastructure with a volume of 41,500 cubic meters made of polyurethane foam, in which the creation of the architectural space would be the result not of the addition of pieces and construction elements, but rather the extraction of material, the generation of voids in the created mass. The result was intended to propose a changing architecture, where spaces would be generated by the creation of those voids and not by the sum of volumes.

Project for a skyscraper in Manhattan. Rubber model, 350 x 160 cm, Gaetano Pesce.

In four or five days the volume will reach the necessary strength, and it will be possible to place from one side to the other, other volumes linked to each other by stairs, elevators and other facilities; Such volumes are emptied of their matter and form new structures with a hardened mold that allows them to fit into others,…

It is a skyscraper formed by the superposition of organic masses and determined by contrast with its surroundings. Why continue to accept, for example, the possibilities of presenting architecture as a set of already decided facts?

Gaetano Pesce's set of proposals was accompanied by critical and pessimistic reflections towards conventional construction systems, demonstrating more than ever that the possibilities of technology now allowed greater freedom for the architect to think and create new architectural spaces, posing to society the possibility of a structure without limits, of infinite, continuous spaces, which would generate new forms of architecture."

(Excerpt from chapter: 3 Inventions from the book:
"José Juan Barba. "Inventions: New York vs. Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Piranesi." Ed. UAH: 2015, pp. 65 - 97.)

Gaetano Pesce was the winner of the 2023 Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Sketch for the Seat of a Political Party”. Pencil, 70 x 80 cm, Gaetano Pesce.

Up 5 Lounge Chair with Up 6 Ottoman by Gaetano Pesce (1969). Polyurethane foam covered in stretch fabric. Dimensions: a (chair): 101.6 x 110.5 x 114.3 cm .b (ottoman): diam. 57.2 cm

Pesce seated with Pierre Cardin on designed the Up5 chair in 1960.

Up Chair series by Gaetano Pesce, 1969. Photograph courtesy of Créateurs Design Awards

Gaetano Pesce. The Period of Great Contaminations: Housing Unit for Two People, project, Axonometric section. 1971

Project for a skyscraper in Manhattan. Rubber model, 350 x 160 cm, Gaetano Pesce.

Gaetano Pesce Church of Solitude Project, New York, (Transverse section), 1974–1977.

Gaetano Pesce's Organic Building (1989 - 1993) in Osaka, Japan. The walls of the construction feature extruded pockets with plants, thus creating an impromptu vertical garden. Photograph by Hiromitsu Morimoto.

The Organic Building in Osaka, Japan, by Gaetano Pesce, 1989-1993. Photograph courtesy of Créateurs Design Awards.

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Gaetano Pesce

Gaetano Pesce. Born in La Spezia, Italy, in 1939 (New York, 3 April 2024), he was an Italian architect and a design pioneer of the 20th century. Pesce studied Architecture at the University of Venice between 1958 and 1963 and was a member of Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus.

He taught architecture at the Institut d’Architecture et d’Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France, for 28 years, at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, at the Domus Academy in Milan, at the Polytechnic of Hong Kong, at the Architectural School of Sao Paulo and at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he has made his home since 1980, after living in Venice, London, Helsinki and Paris.

Pesce’s work is featured in over 30 permanent collections of the most important museums in the world, such as MoMa of New York and San Francisco, Metropolitan Museum in New York, Vitra Museum in Germany, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Pompidou Center and Musee des Arts Décoratifs of Louvre in Paris; he exhibits art in galleries worldwide.

His award-winning designs include the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation and Design in 1993, the Architektur and Wohnen Designer of the Year in 2006 and the Lawrence J. Israel Prize from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2009.

During his career, which spans four decades with commissions in architecture, urban planning, interior, exhibition and industrial design, Gaetano Pesce, the architect and designer, has conceived public and private projects in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia.

In all his work, he expresses his guiding principle: that modernism is less a style than a method for interpreting the present and hinting at the future in which individuality is preserved and celebrated.

Published on: April 7, 2024

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