About this talk

Running time: 41 minutes

Gaetano Pesce is one of the most outstanding and unique designers in the world today. He studied architecture in Venice, Italy, and at the age of 30 in 1969 he was already famous for the UP seating he did for C & B. Since then he has been pouring out ever more inventive designs - furniture, lamps, interiors, exhibitions and architecture.

Since the 1970s he has lived and worked in New York but has studios also in France and Italy. Always curious about new technology and new materials, he spends most of his time in his workshop exploring the qualities of materials such as rubber, resin, polyester and felt - materials that suggest ambiguity rather than hard edge.

In 1992 he designed an organic building for Osaka, a tower with a vertical garden. Two years later he was commissioned by Chiat Day to fit out their offices in an ordinary office tower in Manhattan. It was to be a "virtual" office for the agency, without hierarchy, job titles or fixed work stations. He produced a symphony of colour (colour is the expression of life, he says).

In 1975 he had a retrospective exhibition in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris; and Paris hosted him again in 1996, at the Centre Pompidou in a show which he called "Le Temps Des Questions". Here both the invitation and the catalogue cover were in the form of a question mark of coloured resin, no two the same.

In his talk he begs architects to do more research into new technologies and materials, else they will lose out to engineers and become obsolete.

Recorded in a London hotel dining room, hence background sounds.

Please note that a transcript of this talk is available - please contact us for further details.