I think it’s fair to say that designer Patricia Urquiola has attained icon status. One search around the internet, where her Wikipedia page is quite healthy for someone who’s still living, will illustrate her general domination of the furniture field. Do some poking around on 3rings and you’ll find Urquiola everywhere. From the playful Tropicalia to the serene Axor, and the royal Crinoline to the futuristic Digitable.

Rift Collection. Designed by Patricia Urquiola for Moroso.

As part of 3rings’ Icon Outlook, a new weekly column that reviews in equal measure the designs of both heavyweights and emerging names, we shall introduce you to one of her newest creations, the Rift Collection. Showing at the Milan Furniture Fair 2009, Rift includes chairs, armchairs, and sofas—all of which play with the concept of fissures. Designed for Italian company Moroso, Rift takes its inspiration from a “rift valley,” which I can only assume is a bad translation for a canyon or tectonic fault.

Though Rift hasn’t made it onto Moroso’s website quite yet, it has appeared in Milan, where the collection’s signature lines have been noticed and admired. Reminiscent of steps, the various clefts in Rift make the furniture appear to build onto itself. The sofa intensifies this illusion with its unusual shape, a island-esque “L” like Florida or Italy or any one of the many Icelandic fjords. The armchair, on the other hand, makes of Rift’s spaces a compact rock, somewhat like a stone that shows various layers of sediment. It is the Rift Chair, however, that takes full advantage of the beauty of rupture. The contrast between the Rift Chair’s four slender legs and its four strata make the chair a geological sculpture. As quiet as a dormant volcano and as vital as an earthquake, the Rift Chair embodies a double movement, paying simultaneous homage to stability and instability.

All of Urquiola’s designs have something of a tension. This stress between old and new, organic and plastic, practicality and artfulness define Patricia Urquiola as someone who is undefinable. We can never expect anything from Urquiola except expectancy. If this seems enigmatic, that’s exactly the point.