Describing his monument to Princess Diana, the Italian-born architect and designer Gaetano Pesce says that "It touches values that have changed traditional behaviors." It's a sentiment that well describes what Pesce has been doing his entire career: changing concepts of the way buildings and products should be seen-and produced. Pesce's work is characterized by its figurative strength, its expressive tactility, and its refusal to be constrained by technology or tradition. This strength is embodied in creations like his landmarked "Organic Building" in Osaka, Japan, with a self-watering vegetation system covering its red facades, and his inflatable UP chairs, which burst out against the backdrop of staid 1960s corporate Modernism. That impulse continued with his design of Chiat Day's "virtual offices" in 1994, which reconceived the aesthetic and functional qualities of the office in accordance with changing meanings of work.

Pesce was honored with a career retrospective in 1996 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and publication of the book Gaetano Pesce: Le Temps des Questions. Among his other projects are Sao Paulo's Pluralist Tower; the Space City initiative, undertaken to create model public transportation shelters; and the design for the Guggenheim Museum's exhibition "Warhol: A Factory." In his buildings, furnishings, and product designs, Pesce has consistently pioneered new materials, from resin "pictorial" floors to recycled plastics, and his investigation continues. "Part of my work involves explorations that don't fit the parameters of what we know now."