Inside the Making of Skyline Chess | Eat Work Art
We’re pleased to share that Eat Work Art has featured Skyline Chess in Inside the Making of Skyline Chess.
From architectural references and 3D-printed prototypes to pieces that can take months to manufacture, Skyline Chess founders Ian and Chris turn familiar city landmarks into objects designed to be recognised.
There are two moments Skyline Chess looks for when someone encounters one of its sets. The first is immediate: it is a chessboard. Playable and usable. The second arrives more slowly, as individual pieces resolve into buildings, landmarks and, eventually, an entire city.
That delayed recognition is central to the work. Architecture carries its own associations, whether as a place lived in, grown up around or visited. Yet, on a chessboard, it has to submit to an entirely different set of rules, becoming small enough to fit within a square, stable enough to pick up and move, and legible enough that a player still understands instinctively whether they are holding a rook or a bishop.
“We want the set to work immediately as a chess set, but then have that extra moment of discovery when you realise you’re also looking at a cityscape,” explain founders Ian and Chris, who started this venture some 15 years ago from their shared flat while working as architects.
For them, reaching that apparent simplicity begins with a fairly unforgiving exercise in selection. A new set typically starts with a moodboard of buildings and architectural details, chosen not only for their significance within a city but for whether their proportions might survive being reduced to the scale of a chess piece. Some buildings, however recognisable, simply do not translate.
From there come sketches, as each landmark is tested against the familiar grammar of the game. The footprint, height and proportion of every piece are constrained by the chessboard grid, which means architecture often has to be subtly altered in order to work in another form.
“People need to instinctively understand which chess piece is which, while each piece also has to fit within the individual square, remain well balanced and feel substantial enough when picked up,” says Ian.
The aim is not architectural miniaturisation in the strictest sense, as they have experimented with forms being simplified, proportions adjusted and scales exaggerated, provided the intervention remains almost invisible.
“The aim is for the building to remain instantly recognisable, without people necessarily noticing what has been altered to make it function.”
At Skyline Chess’s studio in Hackney Downs Studios, those decisions move continuously between screen and physical object. Once the overall forms are established, the team develops the architectural details digitally, working within the tolerances of whichever material will ultimately be used before producing 3D-printed prototypes in the studio. Often, it is only at this point that the design reveals what hasn’t quite worked. A detail that appears pronounced on screen can disappear when reduced to a few centimetres, and pieces that seem balanced in a render can feel awkward once placed together on the board.
The studio is set up around that exchange between representation and object. It holds the tools for concept work, 3D design, visualisation, prototyping and photography, alongside favourite finished sets and a sample library of previous boards and pieces, allowing earlier materials, proportions and solutions to remain immediately accessible.
“Having all of this around us means a project can remain visible and evolve over time, rather than existing only on screen or having to be packed away between stages.”
The value of that continuity becomes clearest when a building refuses to cooperate. For a bespoke NetJets project, Skyline Chess included the Sagrada Família, whose density of spires made it unusually difficult to produce at chess-piece scale. Rather than replacing it with an easier landmark, the design was developed so that the piece could be manufactured in several separate parts and assembled afterwards, while still reading as a single coherent form.
That kind of problem-solving continues well beyond the studio. Ian and Chris work closely with fabricators from the earliest stages, bringing manufacturing knowledge into the design process rather than treating it as something to resolve later. More intricate pieces can move repeatedly between designer and maker as forms are simplified, divided or reworked to accommodate the realities of casting and assembly.
Years of working with different materials have given Skyline Chess a detailed understanding of those limits, but the intention is not simply to stay safely within them.
“We are always looking to push the boundaries of what can be manufactured.”
The same process becomes more personal when a commission begins with something other than a skyline. A set created with Giannis Antetokounmpo placed members of his family at its centre, making likeness and posture essential to the design. For Eberechi Eze’s Neochess collaboration, created to raise money for the Eze Foundation, the starting point was faith: crosses were incorporated at intersections across the grid, while quotations from Ecclesiastes appeared within one corner square.
From a distance, the board remains restrained. Its more personal details only emerge through closer inspection.
That relationship between immediate clarity and slower discovery extends to the set as a whole. The 32 pieces sit alongside a screen-printed board, a printed insert and precision-cut foam designed to house the pieces between games, with the complete object considered as carefully as any individual landmark.
For Skyline Chess, a project begins to feel complete when that entire packaged set returns to the studio ready to be photographed.
Photography, in turn, creates one final shift in perspective. Metal, resin and acrylic behave differently under light, with reflections and shadows bringing forward facets and textures that may have been less apparent during digital design. After months spent thinking about tolerances, balance and manufacture, the set can suddenly be read again as an image.
“It is often at this stage that you really see how all of those individual design decisions come together in the finished object.”
What the image does not show is how much labour has already disappeared into it.
A single steel chess piece can pass through 17 separate stages before completion, with many carried out entirely by hand. The process can take several months from beginning to end. Across a full set, sourcing, manufacturing, finishing and coordinating its different components extend that process further still.
The success of the finished object lies partly in how little of that complexity it reveals. A building is recognised; a piece sits comfortably in the hand; an entire city appears across 64 squares.
What looks inevitable by the end has, in fact, been negotiated at almost every scale.
