The Office That Dreamed Too Loudly: Gaetano Pesce and the Chiat/Day Project

Gaetano Pesce poured a resin floor thick enough that when the time came to tear it out, the crew brought jackhammers. That was 1994, on a high floor of a Financial District tower, inside the New York office of TBWA/Chiat/Day. The floor lasted about four years.

Most of the furniture outlived it, though not by much and not by design. In the last year it has surfaced three times, twice in New York and once in Paris, reassembled out of whatever a few people had the sense to keep.

We keep a private list of buildings that came down too early. Most of ours are in Austin. This one is on it.

Jay Chiat's dare

The brief came from Jay Chiat, the ad man convinced the office of the future would be paperless and deskless. He wanted a workspace where nobody owned anything, where staff carried their early laptops around and worked wherever they landed. Hot-desking, before there was a word for it, in a year when wireless still sounded like a promise someone was making up.

Pesce took the brief and went somewhere else with it entirely. Instead of a clean sandbox for creative nomads he built something closer to a body. The floors ran in rivers of colored resin. The desks were translucent slabs with metal grids suspended inside them, no two alike. Storage refused to match. Furniture meant to be shared was given a temperament anyway, as though each piece had shown up with a history.

The lockers are the part we think about most. Every employee got one wooden door, the only square foot of the place that belonged to them, and Pesce rendered each one in psychedelic color with a face-shaped cutout punched through it. In an office engineered to dissolve hierarchy, he insisted on leaving everyone a face.

What the office was arguing

The question Pesce was working on has not gone anywhere. Companies still spend serious money on workplace experience consultants. WeWork rose, collapsed, and came back. Every few months another firm announces a new policy about where its people sit. Underneath all of it sits the thing he was actually asking, which is what a workspace owes the people inside it.

He answered: everything. A room should be as uneven as the people in it. It should have opinions about color and form, about what a desk is allowed to be, about what a floor should feel like underfoot. Nobody in 1994 was measuring that office in productivity gains. It was built to make people feel awake.

Which is why the pieces are worth looking at now, in a design landscape that mostly rewards the frictionless. Pesce's work is a standing argument that objects are permitted to be difficult.

The salvage

What survived did so by accident. The best account belongs to Eric Portnoy, who told The Architect's Newspaper that he searched eBay for a single word, chair, and turned up a Broadway chair listed by an employee of the building who was overseeing the demolition. There was more where that came from. Portnoy rented a van, drove down from Boston, and made two trips. What he saved sat in a New Hampshire barn for the better part of three decades.

That is the part of this story we keep returning to, because it is finally a story about deciding something is worth keeping. Every object anyone chooses to hold onto is a small argument about what matters. Whoever pulled those desks out of a demolition understood they were not saving desks. Pesce built them to say something, roughly: be careful, don't let the world flatten you into something convenient.

Three returns

The collection came back out in the summer of 2025. Work/Life Imbalance, mounted by Sweeterfat with Kalei at 159 Bowery, put a selection of the surviving pieces on view through early August.

Later that year it went home. Return to Office brought the furniture to WSA at 180 Maiden Lane, into the tower that housed the agency in the first place and onto the floor the office had occupied, first as a short preview in October and then as a full show in December. Thirty years late, the desks stood on the floor they had been jackhammered off of.

The following spring the project reached Paris. Pulp Galerie's Gaetano Pesce: The Chiat\Day New York Project ran from 26 March to 30 May 2026, assembling surviving desks, locker doors, the cafeteria's Waffle Table and the Broadway 928 bar stools, alongside a video loaned by Françoise Dalmon and the Centre Pompidou, shot inside the offices eight days before they were destroyed. Three shows in under a year, drawn from the same scattered inheritance: private collections, archives, and the Pesce studio itself.

The Paris show arrived with a book behind it, published by Editions Norma, tracing the project from the archives of Studio Gaetano Pesce with photography by Donatella Brun. It is the kind of volume that ends up permanently out on the table rather than shelved.

The Pesce frequency

Pesce died in April 2024, at eighty-four. His work has only gotten louder since. He belonged to the small group of designers who treated a commission as an argument to be won: the UP chairs about the position of women, the Nobody's Perfect chairs about the beauty of a flaw, the Chiat/Day office about what work does to a person.

There are not many like him now. The business has a way of sanding the edges off, and his work holds up precisely because it refused to be sanded.

What stays with us is how completely the argument won and how little of it made the trip. Hot-desking, the paperless floor, the flat org chart, all of it ordinary now, installed in every co-working space on earth. What got left behind was the part that made it worth doing: the eccentricity, the refusal to let two objects be identical, the door with toy cars driving across it. We took Pesce's logistics and left his joy in a barn.

Gaetano Pesce: The Chiat\Day New York Project ran 26 March – 30 May 2026 at Pulp Galerie, Paris.

Explore our collection of objects that refuse to be ordinary at sonofrand.com.