In 1994, advertising executive Jay Chiat invited Gaetano Pesce to design a workplace for Chiat/Day that would reflect his vision for a “paperless office.” What resulted was a radical, resin-drenched experiment that would reshape contemporary office design and eventually take the crown as one of Pesce’s most renowned projects.
Pesce designed the space under the auspices of virtuality, an intimation of how the world wide web would revolutionize the workplace. Instead of the comforts—or limitations, depending on how you see it—of one’s own desk and landline, employees were outfitted with Macintosh Powerbooks and set free to use the office as they saw fit. Here, gridded corporate convention was abandoned for a free-wheeling sculptural sensibility. Despite the space’s visual and cultural impact, it was demolished four years after its construction, and the dream for the virtual office was proclaimed dead. Little did they know.
This month, pieces salvaged from Pesce’s office make their return to their original FiDi location in Return to Office, a homecoming exhibition curated by New York City–based furniture store Sweeterfat.
Many of these pieces still survive today because of a failed eBay bid in 1998. “I got on this new website called eBay, and put in one word, ‘chair.’ I saw the Broadway chair and was blown away,” recalled one of the show’s consignors Eric Portnoy. An obsessive furniture collector, he emailed the seller, who turned out to be an employee of the building that was overseeing the demolition of the Chiat/Day offices. “He told me that there was a lot more Gaetano Pesce, and if I came to New York I could have it,” Portnoy added. Portnoy booked a van and drove in from Boston, where he still resides, taking two trips to save as much as he could from demolition. For the better part of three decades this collection has sat in storage in a barn in New Hampshire, until now.
Although the concrete floors and exposed beams of Chiat/Day’s former space on the 39th floor of 180 Maiden Lane offer a stark contrast to the original design, the exhibition’s thoughtful presentation of the collection still manages to evoke Pesce’s playland. A handsome citrine-colored conference table with legs that end in resin globs are surrounded by Pesce’s signature, spider-legged Broadway chairs. A mail cabinet, numbered per employee and painted in a muted pastel watercolor pattern, still features name labels of former employees. One can almost imagine employees picking up tech equipment out from the check-out window molded into the shape of an open, red-lipped mouth or taking a turn at the hopscotch embedded into the technicolor resin floor.
Despite the elements of joy, surprise, and freedom that Pesce inserted in his office design, the experiment wasn’t embraced by everyone. In former Chiat employee Haj Ando’s tribute to his former office, he recalled a fellow employee comparing the space to “being inside of a small child’s stomach…after they had eaten an entire bottle of Flintstone vitamins.”
Within this project Pesce wove his own philosophical beliefs on work and life throughout the design. For instance, to emphasize the importance of retaining worker’s individuality in the office, wooden locker doors, Chiat/Day employees’ only allotted private space, were unique, rendered in psychedelic colors and with cut-outs in the shape of a face.
In his reimagination of the future of work, Pesce avoided sleek optimization in favor of playful friction. This was embodied in the rickety imperfection of a resin office chair and the hidden faces Pesce left as easter eggs across his tables, sofas and chairs. “All of his objects will call for some sort of response from someone,” said Noah O’Leary of Sweeterfat, “Each one extends a hand, and asks the viewer, ‘Do you want to take it?’ Each person gets to answer that question for themselves, and I think that’s a very poetic way to make work.” As work becomes increasingly de-personalized, Pesce’s workplace vision remains as relevant as ever.
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