Patricia Urquiola Exterior
Late 20th Century Italian Modern Center Tables
Leather, Plastic
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Floor Lamps
Steel
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Floor Lamps
Steel
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Chandeliers and Pendants
Steel
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Chandeliers and Pendants
Steel
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Table Lamps
Steel
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Table Lamps
Steel
Early 2000s Italian Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Stainless Steel
People Also Browsed
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Modern Chandeliers and Pendants
Steel
2010s American Mid-Century Modern Chandeliers and Pendants
Brass, Bronze, Enamel, Chrome, Aluminum, Nickel
21st Century and Contemporary Finnish Mid-Century Modern Chandeliers and...
Metal, Brass
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Mid-Century Modern Dining Room Tables
Travertine
21st Century and Contemporary German Commodes and Chests of Drawers
Plywood
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Mid-Century Modern Wall Lights and...
Brass, Metal, Aluminum
2010s Austrian Jugendstil Chandeliers and Pendants
Silk
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Mid-Century Modern Chandeliers and...
Aluminum
21st Century and Contemporary Chinese Industrial Chandeliers and Pendants
Lava, Aluminum
21st Century and Contemporary Chinese Industrial Chandeliers and Pendants
Lava, Aluminum
2010s American Flush Mount
Brass
21st Century and Contemporary Swedish Mid-Century Modern Table Lamps
Textile
2010s American Modern Chandeliers and Pendants
Aluminum
21st Century and Contemporary Portuguese Modern Sofas
Velvet, Walnut
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Mid-Century Modern Wall Lights and...
Brass
21st Century and Contemporary Brazilian Modern Floor Lamps
Cement, Steel
Recent Sales
2010s Italian Modern Armchairs
Aluminum
Patricia Urquiola Exterior For Sale on 1stDibs
How Much is a Patricia Urquiola Exterior?
Patricia Urquiola for sale on 1stDibs
Spanish-born, Milan-based architect Patricia Urquiola doesn’t lack for commissions these days, and, unlike the work of many other high-concept architects, her projects tend to get constructed, envelope-pushing though they sometimes are. And when she’s not imagining covetable creations for contemporary furniture houses — including B&B Italia, Driade and Cassina, where she was named art director in 2015 — Urquiola makes headlines by designing some of the world’s most aesthetically ambitious hotels, such as 2016’s Il Sereno on Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy.
Born in Oviedo, in northern Spain, Urquiola grew up in a family that valued creativity. Everyone in the house, she says, talked and cared about design. She fondly remembers her mother going to London in the 1960s and ’70s and coming back home with a Mary Quant this, a David Hicks that. When it came time to go to university, Urquiola decided that her place was architecture school, first at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and then at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where she completed her design thesis — a felt carpet with a panel that connected to a home’s electricity source and telephone line so that you could plug, say, a table lamp and your phone into it — under the direction of legendary Italian industrial designer Achille Castiglioni.
Today, Urquiola has become a go-to when it comes to avant-garde product, hospitality and retail design, working with such blue-chip international furniture, fashion and hotel companies as Alessi, Baccarat, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kvadrat, Mandarin Oriental, Panerai, Rosenthal, W Hotels and Louis Vuitton, among many others. Her residential projects, meanwhile, though few and far between, stretch from such far-flung locations as Punta del Este, Uruguay, and Melbourne, Australia, to closer-to-home Udine, in northeastern Italy, where she designed the two-story, largely open-plan glass-and-cedar home of Patrizia Moroso, creative director of the family-owned design company that bears her last name.
Over the course of a long-term and highly productive collaboration spanning some 20 years, Urquiola has created dozens and dozens of Moroso-branded products. A chair from her 2001 Fjord line of seating, tables and poufs for the company sits in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Moroso debuted (love me) Tender, her modular sofa system upholstered in jersey, during Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in April of 2014.
Find Patricia Urquiola furniture on 1stDibs.
A Close Look at modern Furniture
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”
Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.
Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.
It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.