Blueprint Awards 2017: The winners
Blueprint Award for Design 2017
Winner: Patricia Urquiola
Nominated by our Judges, voted for by Blueprint readers
Anyone who has ever met or seen Patricia Urquiola talk will know that she is a bundle of pure effusive energy. And this is something she brings to her dynamic output of interiors and product design.
Every year in Milan she is to be seen rushing between manufacturers stands as she launches one piece after another. Her collaboration is in high demand and she has a client list that beggars belief, from Alessi to Vuitton, from Bilbao (the city of) to Qatar (museum authority), from Mandarin Oriental to W Hotel.
Her products have garnered many awards and have entered museum collections around the world. Likewise, her architecture and interiors are to be found all over the globe covering the broadest range from residential to showrooms, from hotels to retail. Patricia Urquiola is an energetic polymath — a renaissance woman.
Urquiola is a kind of Spanish Italian. She was born in Oviedo, and studied architecture in Madrid and then Milan, where she now lives and works — and has done so since opening her first studio there in 2001. She has collaborated with many great names; she began by having AchilleCastiglioni mentor her for her thesis and then went on to work with VicoMagistretti on her first projects. In the Nineties she worked at LissoniAssociati with PieroLissoni, and has gone on to develop a process that draws heavily on craft skills as well as the renowned skills of Italian high-end manufacturing.
As well as continuing her own work, in 2015 she became art director for Cassina launching her first collection with them at Milan last year, with pieces by designers including Philippe Starck, Ora–ïto and the late Zaha Hadid.
Nominations
Ingo Maurer
Patricia Urquiola
Category sponsored by Turkish Ceramics
