Gaetano Pesce – Greene Street chair
Ghostly and almost alive, Gaetano Pesce’s Greene Street chair appears like a strange domestic creature emerging from the radical design scene of the 1980s. With its openings resembling eyes and a mouth, its long metal legs, and its irregular black silhouette, it evokes a small monster or a “ghost chair,” a form in permanent imbalance, seemingly ready to move through space. Pesce himself compared the chair to a kind of alien standing on suction-cup feet. In his work, an object never serves a purely functional purpose: it seems to possess its own character, almost its own personality.
The project emerged in the mid-1980s, after Gaetano Pesce settled into his studio on Greene Street, in the heart of New York’s SoHo district.
The Greene Street first appeared as a prototype in 1984, through a series of experiments involving resin, fiberglass-reinforced polyester, and steel. At the time, Gaetano Pesce worked directly with materials, without seeking perfectly regular or standardized forms. Distortions, surface variations, and traces of fabrication remain visible and fully contribute to his artistic approach. The chair also belongs to a broader series of furniture pieces built around multiplied structures: during this period, Pesce created several works resting on a large number of legs, including certain tables with nine or twelve legs, as well as the Broadway 929 armchair series in the early 1990s.
The Greene Street was part of the first Vitra Edition collection presented in 1987, a program bringing together prototypes, experimental pieces, and limited series. This first produced edition is now the rarest. Made in only fifty examples, it was available in both chair and armchair versions, with a matte black finish. Certain variants with armrests, more complex to produce, were offered by Vitra at a higher price. With their extremely slender metal legs and unstable silhouette, these early editions give the impression of an object almost in motion.
Vitra later produced a second edition of the Greene Street, this time in glossy black. It is therefore relatively easy to distinguish the original historical version from the reissue.
Each Greene Street also bears a small red mark, placed in a different location depending on the piece. This detail, almost imperceptible at first glance, is nevertheless essential in Gaetano Pesce’s work. He rejected the idea of furniture that is uniform and identically reproducible; instead, he sought to introduce slight variations so that each piece, like human beings themselves, would retain a form of uniqueness. This red touch thus becomes a singular marker, a detail that gives each chair its own identity.
The Greene Street perfectly embodies the vision of design that Gaetano Pesce defended throughout his career. Far removed from industrial perfection, he imagined freer, deliberately irregular objects that seem almost alive. With its appearance of a ghostly little monster perched on long metal legs, the Greene Street ultimately reveals the importance of experimentation in Gaetano Pesce’s work. More than a simple seat, it expresses another way of thinking about design: freer, more expressive, more human.
