NeoCon 2015: Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola has added colourful geometric patterns to sheets of architectural glass for Chicago company Skyline Design (+ slideshow).
Urquiola, who previously told Dezeen that she hated glass, introduced the self-titled collection for Skyline at this year's NeoCon trade fair.
The designer worked from grids that were layered, shifted and eroded to create three designs: Cipher, Overlay, and Check.
"This project for me begins from a simplified geometric pattern," Urquiola said. "We've been thinking and working more architecturally this year."
A variety of colours and degrees of opacity were added to give the flat surfaces a sense of depth and changeability.
The most simple pattern, Overlay, is composed of a series overlapping diagonals to create a three-dimensional effect.
The bolder Check design uses a graph pattern with shaded squares and diagonal lines. The colour palette and gradients offer a large variety of design options, from nearly monochrome white to bright polychrome.
Perhaps the most typical of Urquiola's soft-edged style, Cipher uses an abstract system of symbols that are repeated with no apparent duplication from a base grid, which appears to be eroding. From a distance the symbols appear as dots.
Urquiola unveiled a range of glass furniture with an iridescent sheen for Glas Italia during Milan design week in April, when she told Dezeen that the material usually makes her want to vomit.
However, the appeal of working with small Chicago-based company Skyline Design was enough for her to take on her second glass-related project this year.
"They are experts with glass," she told Dezeen. "They have a very sophisticated approach and understand how to create specific effects with the material. They're very rigorous. That's the appeal."
Glass is becoming an increasingly popular material for product designers. Tokujin Yoshioka, Nendo and the Bouroullec brothers are among those experimenting with the material to create furniture collections.
NeoCon 2015 is taking place at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago from 15 to 17 June. London studio PearsonLloyd is also showing a range of wooden office furniture at the trade fair, which largely caters for the contract furniture market.