He also designed interiors, including, famously, offices for the Chiat/Day advertising agency in Manhattan (in 1994), a surreal landscape that, as Herbert Muschamp wrote in The New York Times Magazine that year, “appears suspended in a dream state: tables sprout faces, chairs chime, the floor erupts in a free association of icons — arrows, animals, eyes, logos, light bulbs — and painted captions.”
Mr. Muschamp called it “a remarkable work of art” reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí.
“Where a conventional design seeks to satisfy the desire for beauty,” he concluded, “Pesce uncovers something closer to the beauty of desire.”
Chiat/Day’s and several other of Mr. Pesce’s interiors have been dismantled over time, their parts turning up at auction. That disturbed design historians, who said the pieces were most meaningful in context.
Mr. Pesce also designed buildings, including an office block in Osaka, Japan, covered in plants; a vacation house in Bahia, Brazil; and two separate playful “holiday houses” in Puglia, Italy, for a married couple. (He made them from polyurethane, one pink, one blue.) Why two? “To stay together with someone is boring,” he explained during the Columbia lecture.
Mr. Pesce’s first marriage, to Milena Vettore, when he was in his late 20s, ended with her death about a year later. In the early 1980s, he married Francesca Lucco, who died in 1997.
In addition to his daughter Milena, from his second marriage, he is survived by a son, Jacopo, also from that marriage; a daughter from another relationship, Fontessa Duncan Pesce; a brother, Claudio; and a companion, Ruth Shuman. He lived on the Upper East Side for decades.
The seemingly endless variety of Mr. Pesce’s works wasn’t accidental. “I believe that the treasure of the world is diversity,” he told the Times style magazine T in 2022. “If we are the same, we cannot talk, because there is nothing to say. But if you and I are different, there’s a lot to exchange.”
