THE POPE OF GLOOP

For 60 years, Gaetano Pesce has been preaching the gospel of uncertainty in design. Finally, the world has caught up.

- Matthew Schneier

THE WORLD OF TIDILY ORDERED forms is a convenient fantasy. The real world gloops and glops. Here and there, it bulges. It sags. It was once considered modern to architect this chaos into order, to machine the wet muck of existence into clean lines and hard edges. That is not the modern of Gaetano Pesce, the Italian-born industrial designer–artist-architect– prophet, who has been plying his alternate vision in resin, foam, fabric, and polyurethane for more than half a century. These days, he does his conjuring out of a pungent, hard-candy-colored studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. On a day this past July, just before the monthlong annual summer holiday that is an Italian nonnegotiable even for an Italian who has spent four decades in New York (somehow never losing his gravelly Italianglish), Pesce was holding court there for a procession of gallery swans, museum factotums, and press attachés who had come to discuss the various Pesce retrospectives and shows around the globe.

Court is a comfortable posture for Pesce, who is imperial in his bearing and imperious in his pronouncements. An audience with the man is an opportunity for oratory, as he makes his argument against the rigid, linear world the rest of us live in unquestioningly. “Horrible,” says Pesce, gesturing vaguely at the concrete-and-glass buildings outside his window. “International Style”—the reigning aesthetic of design since the 1930s, meant to mimic the efficiency of machines, and what most of us most often associate with the word modern—“is a horrible way to make architecture. Architects don’t know that they do something that is an image of non-freedom.”