Antonio Pio Saracino was born in Puglia, in the south of Italy, in 1976. He earned a Master’s Degree from La Sapienza University of Architecture in Rome in 2003, and he began his career teaching architectural design at the university, while working for a number of Roman architectural firms, including Studio Fuksas. In 2011 his work was selected as part of the Italian Pavilion of the World for the 54th Venice Biennale; and in 2013 The Museum of Arts and Design in New York showed his work in Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital. In the same year he established his own multi-dsciplinary practice (APS Designs and Atelier APS) in New York, where he has lived and worked ever since.
His projects are wide-ranging, and include large-scale, multi-use commercial and residential structures (with leading-edge interiors), as well as commissions for public art, landmarks, and furniture design. They have been featured in ARTnews, New Italian Blood, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Interior Design, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, in which Saracino was named "among the most prolific Italian industrial designers abroad.”
Saracino has created work for, among others, Matt Mitcham, the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, Bloomingdales, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where two of his sculptures, entitled Life, are installed outside the entrance. One of his most prominent commissions resides in Bryant Park—The Guardians, a celebration of civic heroes, consists of two 13-foot-high statues, one made of marble and other of stainless steel. One, inspired by Michelangelo's David, was commissioned by Eni and the Italian Government, and is a gift symbolizing amity between Italy and the United States. In 2019, he won a competition for creating a landmark for the city of Newark, New Jersey called A New Arc for Newark.
Antonio’s Pio Saracino’s furniture is of a piece with his sculptural and architectural projects. Of ingenious and meticulous design and execution, each work is perfectly tailored to its particular space, its function and form united in an elegant aesthetic uniquely (and recognizably) his own. His sources of inspiration—the origins and development of organic life and other wonders of the natural world—serve as a thread running through all his work; and these sources are, perhaps, most apparent in Saracino’s furniture, alive in his playful and expert interplay of subject, material, and composition.
Saracino's work draws inspiration from two decades of experience in architectural design and public art rooted in Italian hand-craftsmanship and his European heritage. With Atelier APS Saracino presents a collection of sculptural artworks, furniture, lighting, and collectible design pieces that evoke the return of beauty into modern experiences—the convergence of art, architecture, and design. By employing digital technologies, he re-imagines objects with the logic of natural structures, investigating the evolving role of nature in design. In his work can be seen Saracino’s desire to create distinctively new pieces which are, nevertheless, firmly rooted in history. His creations combine a sense of continuity and heritage with an exciting, new aesthetic of the future.
Saracino has received two American Architecture Awards from the Chicago Museum of Architecture and has been recognized as one of the Top Ten Italian Architects by New Italian Blood. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; and MAAS, Sydney. He is represented by Maison Gerard in New York.