From March 26 to April 25, 2026, Pulp Galerie presents Gaetano Pesce: The Chiat/Day New York Project, an exhibition dedicated to one of the designer’s most radical spatial and furniture commissions. Originally created for the New York headquarters of the Chiat/Day advertising agency, the project redefined the visual and social language of the workplace, replacing uniformity with variation and hierarchy with openness.
FURNITURE
Located on the thirty-eighth floor of a Financial District skyscraper, the original Chiat/Day offices became a testing ground for Gaetano Pesce’s critique of modernist standardization. Working in close collaboration with agency founder Jay Chiat, Pesce developed an environment structured around fluid circulation and visual unpredictability. Desks, storage units, and communal furniture abandoned repetition in favor of individuality, allowing each element to carry its own formal identity.
The exhibition brings together furniture and architectural fragments that retain visible traces of their original use. Locker doors, crafted under Pesce’s direction by Mexican artisans, reject alignment and serial production. Their undulating surfaces, irregular perforations, and layered colors transform utilitarian objects into expressive components of space. The gesture challenges the idea that functional architecture must rely on neutrality, instead proposing variation as a structural principle.
Among the works on view, the Waffle table exemplifies Pesce’s approach to material and structure. Its circular polychrome resin surface rests on an integrated metal frame, supported by four legs in contrasting colors. While playful in appearance, the table maintains architectural rigor through its internal structure, ensuring durability within high-use environments such as cafeterias and shared work areas. This balance between expressive form and structural clarity remains central to Pesce’s practice.
The exhibition also introduces a new publication tracing the origins, context, and legacy of the Chiat/Day project. Drawing from the archives of Studio Gaetano Pesce and accompanied by photographic documentation from Donatella Brun, the book positions the project within a broader architectural and cultural framework. Selected images appear alongside the furniture, allowing visitors to reconnect the objects with their original spatial environment.
Pesce’s work has long challenged the conventions of globalized aesthetics, from the Up5 chair to large-scale architectural environments. The Chiat/Day project remains a pivotal example of his belief that design can reshape social structures through spatial intervention. At Pulp Galerie, these pieces return as evidence of an approach that placed individuality, imperfection, and material experimentation at the center of architecture and design.
