Gaetano Pesce | |
---|---|
Born |
8 November 1939 (age 77) La Spezia |
Nationality | Italian |
Occupation | Architect |
Practice | architect, designer, educator |
Gaetano Pesce (born 8 November 1939) is an Italian architect and a leading figure in contemporary industrial design. Mr. Pesce was born in La Spezia in 1939, and he grew up in Padua and Florence. During his 50-year career, Mr. Pesce has worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design.
Mr. Pesce studied architecture at the University of Venice, with such notable teachers as Carlo Scarpa and Ernesto Rogers. Between 1958 and 1963, Mr. Pesce participated in Gruppo N, an early collective concerned with programmed art patterned after the Bauhaus. Since the 1960s, Gaetano Pesce has been known to relate art to the design of interiors, products, and architecture. The New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp described Mr. Pesce as "the architectural equivalent of a brainstorm." Pesce's well known work includes Organic Building in Osaka, Japan, a Landmark vertical garden building designed to concealing a complex, computer-controlled hydration system to sustain plant growth, and the interior architecture of the Chiat/Day offices, an early workplace village modeled after urban life. Among Mr. Pesce's architecture achievements are Les Halles ACIH (1979) and Parc de la Villette (1985), Paris, France, a complex of forms shaped like a running child.
Mr. Pesce's prototypical three-dimensional models and architectural drawings are held in the permanent museum collections of MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City; the Philadelphia Museum of Art,PA; San Francisco Museum of Art, California; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Vitra Design Museum, Germany; Danish Museum of Art & Design, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France, and the Triennale Museum, Milan, Italy.