Patricia Urquiola

Between Craft and Industry

“The design is not enough. What matters more is the transparency of the process.” – Patricia Urquiola

It is difficult to place Patricia Urquiola neatly within a single school of design. Her work can be playful, rigorous, colourful, restrained, highly technical or distinctly handmade, sometimes all within the same project. What connects it is an enduring curiosity about materials and the way people live with the things around them.

Born in Oviedo in northern Spain, Urquiola studied architecture in Madrid before completing her studies at the Politecnico di Milano, where she graduated under Achille Castiglioni. Milan would become both her home and the centre of a career shaped by some of the defining figures and companies of contemporary Italian design.

She worked alongside Vico Magistretti at De Padova and later led the design group at Lissoni Associati before founding Studio Urquiola in 2001. Since 2015, she has also been Creative Director of Cassina.

Yet biography only goes so far in explaining her work.

Urquiola is at her most interesting where seemingly opposing ideas meet: craft and industrial production, softness and structure, memory and technology. Materials are tested rather than simply specified. Textiles are knitted into new forms; waste materials are reconsidered; familiar objects are pulled apart and put back together in ways that alter how they are experienced.

Her approach begins with people. Urquiola has often spoken about the importance of observing how we live and of designing objects in relation to those who will eventually use them. The result is work that rarely feels precious, even when it is highly resolved. There is usually warmth to it, and often a little wit.

That thinking is particularly evident in Pantaya, the lighting system developed by Studio Urquiola, Pablo Designs and Haworth.

The idea begins with an unexpectedly simple reference: the lightweight construction of a tent. A slender aluminium framework provides the architecture, while a seamless digitally knitted textile sleeve stretches across it, concealing much of the structure and the integrated LED source within.

The textile itself is made from recycled polyester. More importantly, it changes the character of the light.

Rather than treating the shade as a surface placed around a conventional fitting, Pantaya allows light, textile and structure to read as one object. The knitted skin catches and diffuses the illumination, revealing its texture as the light moves through it. What might otherwise be a technical architectural fitting becomes something softer and more atmospheric.

The effect is almost canopy-like: generous in scale but visually light.

Available in pendant, wall and ceiling forms, Pantaya can define a space without dominating it. Its presence comes as much from the quality of the illuminated textile as from its silhouette.

It also says something important about Urquiola's work. Innovation, for her, is rarely an end in itself. New processes and materials become interesting when they alter our relationship with an object: how it feels, how it behaves and how comfortably it belongs in everyday life.

With Pantaya, an industrial lighting system becomes something unexpectedly tactile.

Light becomes material.