Future Funky

For many years, Gaetano Pesce was a beloved but sectarian figure within the design world—a visionary supported by a small circle of loyal patrons and institutions. But in recent years he has become something of a celebrity. The furniture and homewares for which he is best known are often described as “goofy” and “wacky,” an aesthetic that is now synonymous with a resistance to the tyrannical minimalism that characterized so-called good taste for the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. Today, at design fairs, galleries, and even fashion shows, Pesce’s work has become hard to avoid. He has been the subject of profiles and interviews in outlets like T magazine and PIN-UP, where he has charmed a new audience of young people with his florid proclamations about the present state of affairs and what design ought to do.

Pesce’s architecture is undoubtedly formally progressive: he uses experimental materials and challenging shapes. We could even call him an aesthetic futurist. But he falls short of being a fully realized futurist, as he hasn’t managed to actually complete many architectural projects and, despite his persistent attestations otherwise, does not seem very serious about attending to legitimately political activity—through design or otherwise. A new show at Galerie56 puts this tension in Pesce’s work on clear display.

Gaetano Pesce Unframed follows a spate of recent exhibitions of Pesce’s furniture and objects at prominent galleries such as Salon 94 and The Future Perfect. The show consists of sixty never-before-seen (and all up for sale) drawings, primarily building plans, sketches of chairs, and images that look equally like a human face and a building. Relative to Pesce’s realized designs, some of which are scattered around the gallery, the drawings are more subdued and have an intimate feel. They are the soft underbelly of his bold, confrontational works, revealing a gentler, more humble version of his vibrant world.

Taken altogether, the collection of drawings almost reads like Pesce’s plans for a city—perhaps one that belongs to a different, kinder future where there is more space for recreation, joy, and amusement. The drawings are attached to the wall with gaffer tape under a thin sheet of plastic, giving the impression of special access to the designer’s workshop. Pesce, ever seeking ways to eschew convention, selected this mode of presentation as a way to draw the viewer in; according to a spokesperson from the gallery, the artist felt that typical framing makes prints seem unattainable and inaccessible. The pieces on view range from fully realized drawings to old sketches on restaurant napkins and represent a span of forty-five years. Pesce himself hadn’t laid eyes on some of them in three decades. (The last exhibit of his architectural drawings was in 1975, at MoMA.)

Many of the drawings depict buildings with big environmental ambitions and odd, unexpected materials. The projects included in the show weren’t built, but the vision they represent did come to life in Osaka’s Organic Building, completed in 1993, where Pesce appended planters that house eighty types of indigenous plants and trees selected by horticulturists and irrigated by a computer- controlled system of pipes. The use of a variety of local plants is one of Pesce’s classic “political” statements, but it’s unclear whether this—or any of his other buildings— are actually ecologically friendly. Nevertheless, he’s incorporated the gesture into several projects, such as a proposal for the Paramount Hotel, also included in the show, and, not included in the show, a proposal for Pluralist Tower a residential building in São Paulo made up of mixed architectural styles in order to, in Pesce’s words, “show diversity.” In designs for his own vacation home—the Rubber House in Bahia, Brazil—Pesce’s attention to the local takes a different form. The house, divided up between six archipelagic structures, splays across a beachfront property. Scales made of locally manufactured rubber, a product of Pesce’s relentless experimentation with material, cover the main building. The tiles are infused with juniper, an addition made after Pesce observed the manufacturing process and noted that the workers washed their hands with juniper to get rid of the rubber smell.

While the artist himself interprets these gestures as inherently political, it’s difficult to take that seriously when they’re expressed in the design for an office building or a vacation home. Pesce’s political proclamations are at least partially a reaction to the uniformity of the International Style, which he saw as authoritarian for prohibiting individual architects from expressing themselves through architecture. These criticisms are valid on an aesthetic level, but they ring a bit hollow, considering that throughout his career Pesce has shown little interest in the social benefit of his projects— or even in ensuring their completion. Can the expression of “freedom” and “diversity” through ornamentation for the beach homes of the wealthy really be interpreted as political? To the Internationalists’ credit, they at least were concerned with leveraging industrial techniques to build mass housing and improve quality of life. Pesce instead prizes the architect’s right to self-expression, spinning that out into a kind of politics. For all the flaws of the International Style and its adherents, there’s something to be said for the virtues of practicality and of suspending one’s personal desires for the sake of the collective.

According to a New York magazine profile, Pesce once scrawled inside a cabinet he created for Louis Vuitton that “diversity is humanity’s treasure. Vulgarity and ignorance are invading this country. The future is receding and a nostalgia for a totalitarian regime is resurfacing, threatening freedom. This mess will not last and civilization will continue to grow.” Pesce, along with the rest of the Italian Radical designers, had a dream of transforming society via design. Their legacy has now been reduced to selling funky couches to the wealthy and relying on brand partnerships—see Pesce’s recent collaboration with Bottega Veneta—to carry out their visions.

The dream might not be completely dead. There are many young people newly interested in Pesce’s work who could make use of Pesce’s exciting formal language and adapt it to projects with legitimate social benefit. His designs are inventive and joyful, even if the values they purport to espouse tend to fall a bit flat. A more liberated, colorful future where collective values are reflected in the built environment is a beautiful idea—the show at Galerie56 makes this plain to see—but it’d be easier to find this future rousing if it weren’t locked away in private houses. Still, Pesce’s progressive architectural future, remote and limited as it is, could still be on its way, waiting for a proper executor. Until then, we can wait while sitting on one of his silly chairs.