“It is not a hindrance or a flaw to be ashamed of, but rather, it is the point. Designers like Urquiola, the Bouroullec brothers, Hella Jongerius, or Naoto Fukasawa create the objects, from furnishings to inexpensive accessories, that populate our lives.” With this in mind, one wishes that the PMA had named the artisans who constructed these objects. “The commercial aspect of design is to be celebrated, in museums, in academia, and in culture,” she told me. Struck by this unusually frank observation, I contacted Antonelli to ask her about it. She gets business because she makes business.” As Paola Antonelli, design curator at MoMA, said in a recent piece for Fast Company: “Urquiola is a winning horse. The membrane of accepted taste is not her enemy - it’s her canvas. Her aesthetic moves, while often clever and satisfying, are never outrageous. She generates interest, and sales, on a budget. What Urquiola does is neither anonymous nor spectacular. Installation view of Patricia Urquiola: Between Craft and Industry at Philadelphia Museum of ArtĪs I’ve written elsewhere, museums tend to avoid middle-market design and concentrate on either “everyday classics” that anyone can own, like Post-It Notes, or extraordinary specimens like the “Lockheed Lounge” by Marc Newson (Collab winner in 2013).
In 2015, Urquiola was appointed art director at Cassina, giving her a quasi-curatorial role at the highest echelon of Italian manufacturing. She went on to work with other leading Italian manufacturers - among them B&B Italia, Kartell, and Flos - as well as the German porcelain maker Rosenthal, the Danish textile company Kvadrat, and the Michigan office furnisher Haworth. Acquired by MoMA in 2006 (gift of the manufacturer), it was a first step in Urquiola’s rapid rise. Moroso commissioned the earliest Urquiola work on view at the PMA, her “Fjord” armchair (2002), a witty play on Danish modern that alludes to the country’s coastline. But it was really Patrizia Moroso, the CEO of Moroso Furniture, that made her career. She studied with Achille Castiglione, then worked in the office of Vico Magistretti, and gained a certain prestige through these connections to giants of design.
Urquiola was born in Spain, but she has spent her entire career in Italy. For the most part, she succeeds with this sleight of hand. Her designs imagine a world in which there is no conflict between a company’s bottom line and the interests of its workforce. But Urquiola wants to jump right over this divide. From the days of William Morris, the artisanal has always been seen as a counterweight to the industrial. Patricia Urquiola’s new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is called Between Craft and Industry, as if that were a comfortable place to be. “Husk” chair (2011), “Landscape” tea set (2008), and “Antibodi” chaise (2006) (all photos courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2018)
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