Patricia Urquiola: Flex Time
The winner of Collab’s 2017 Design Excellence Award is a force.
Patricia Urquiola photographed by Marco Craig
Patricia Urquiola is one of the most respected and influential female designers in the world. This November, when she receives Collab’s Design Excellence Award, she will join the likes of Florence Knoll, Denise Scott Brown, and Paula Scher, all of whom have thrived in various design fields that are dominated by men.
Urquiola loves vivid, colorful, textured fabric and complex patterns. She uses hand-crafted elements like woven leather and stained glass in her work. These design touches elicit a sense of warmth and comfort, suggesting the subtly thrilling idea that an object was made just for you. She even designed a chair called “Gender.” So, is she a feminine designer? Or a feminist designer? Is her work somehow feminine, either by dint of her point of view as a woman, or perhaps because her love of the handmade evokes the traditionally female sphere of the handmade and homespun?
People often say that sensuality and sensitivity are feminine qualities, but they are not gender specific. They are individual qualities.
In an Interview with Elle Decor back in 2010, when asked if she agreed with the suggestion that her designs were “very feminine,” she replied: “People often say that sensuality and sensitivity are feminine qualities, but they are not gender specific. They are individual qualities. Tord Boontje is more sensual than I am. Where women are different from men is that women are more flexible, adaptable, and able to multitask. We have to be to survive, and those two qualities—flexibility and adaptability—I like a lot in design.” For Urquiola, the superficial and physical qualities we tend to associate with masculinity and femininity—hard versus soft, bold versus cozy—are red herrings. If anything marks her work as that of a “woman designer,” it is flexibility and inventiveness. In a June, 2017 interview with Forbes, Urquiola opined on the 552 Floe Insel Sofa she designed in celebration of Cassina’s 90th anniversary. The sofa is part of a modular system that borrows its organic geometry from a beehive. Each piece has elements of a hexagon, and together they can be arranged in myriad ways that go beyond the traditional options afforded by rectangles and squares.
Recalling the bracingly chilly moment of her inspiration, she tells Forbes: “Well, yes. The iceberg, for me, was emotional. When we were driving on a boat on the coast, I automatically understood the complicity of the beauty found in the hardness. I also wanted to do a more organic item in between the collections we already have—like the Beam Sofa and the armchair by Bouroullec.” It’s vintage Urquiola to fall in love with a spiky, difficult element of nature, tame it, then come up with an eminently practical way to fit a new design into an existing system. Adaptation chic. The design of her 2006 Antibodi Chaise, which appears at first glance to be decorated with a bed of flowers arranged hexagonally (of course) is actually inspired by the microscopic forms of cells, whose unseen geometry shapes our whole world. Upholstered in different colored fabric, the “cells” have sides that can be flipped in different directions, to make the chaise monochromatic, or multicolored in a unique fashion, according to the owner’s preference.
In his 1923 essay “Vers une Architecture” (“Towards an Architecture”), the Swiss architect and designer Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, described the home as a “une machine-à-habiter,” a “machine for living in.” Driven by the desire to provide post-World War I France with affordable, dignified housing, his machine age vision was utopian. If Le Corbusier and his brethren in Modernism placed their hopes for the future in technology, Patricia Urquiola has given her own designs an evolutionary twist. Rather than emulating a mechanical device that always produces the same result, she has looked to nature’s adaptability for inspiration. Like the uniqueness of individual organisms, she knows that each piece of furniture she designs will become part of an ecosystem—and office or home—and be adapted to fit the needs of its new environment. Her affection for the unplanned and her flexible design ethos, much more than any traditional association with femininity, explains her love of craft and the handmade. Though her designs are produced on a large scale, in its own way, wherever it ends up, each piece is one of a kind.
