After pouring my heart and soul into the pieces, Mike says to go low poly. I liked the shapes well enough, and the non-standard cylindrical form factor I went with does not translate well to low poly so I have decided to suspend the class, and just finish the scene while experimenting some more with materials/shaders before getting back and doing it properly.
It is wildly apparent that I have serious addiction issues with frosted glass and volumetric substances in cycles render.
Was thinking about adding some frosty mist along the board but that kicked the render time up from 1 to approx 5 hours (per image @ 1080p resolution) on my i7 4790K, so being the impatient kid that I am, I just ditched it… I got other stuff to do. 
Lighting stuff that is highly reflective and transparent at the same time is not a trivial task. Basically you need convey the form with reflections and backlighting, not by directly lighting the surface. You need large bright surfaces, at reflection angles to the sides of your subject and you neeeeeed very dark spaces to keep the scene from becoming cloudy. I included my setup at the end.
For the black piecesI was going for some rough dark grey lathe’d metal. The grind marks aren’t really visible tho.
White pieces are basic frosted glass.
The tiles are some magic material, that kinda looks like ice or aloe vera drinks, but are actually a cell noise based material, that absorbs scatters and emits light all at the same time (there’s not floor lighting underneath, the cells literally emit light)
The black material is sort of what you’d get if you poured molten black tinted glass into clear glass.
And a screenshot for how I laid out my stuff
