Ron Arad

International Designer

Background

¢  Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951, educated- Jerusalem Academy of Art and later - Architectural Association in London

¢  Design and Production Studio 'One Off' in 1981

¢  Later, Ron Arad Associates Architecture and Design Practice.

¢  From 1994 to 1999 - The Ron Arad Studio, Design and Production Unit in Como, Italy.

¢  Currently the Professor of Design Products at the Royal College of Art in London

¢  Since 1997, Ron Arad has led the Design Products Masters’ Degree Course at the Royal College of Art in London.

¢  Initially appointed Professor of Furniture and of Industrial Design

¢  This programme aimed to make the two year course more interdisciplinary and pluralistic.

¢  His influence is undeniable: without turning out Arad clones, the RCA course has produced a generation of graduates whose willingness to question, to experiment with processes and to expand boundaries is due to Ron Arad.

¢  Although Arad has been better known as a designer than an architect, in the years since he graduated from the Architectural Association, architectural projects have been continuous.

¢  Ron has been commissioned for retail and restaurant interiors followed the opening of his Covent Garden and Chalk Farm studios, notably the Belgo restaurants in London

¢  He works on his designs and projects at home sometimes, because it’s difficult to work at this studio with people walking in and out.

¢  He wants to design for the things themselves. There’s no one who he’d love to design for.

Characteristics, Materials, Techniques

¢  London studio - individual pieces made of sheet steel, and he exploits their formal and functional possibilities to the fullest.

¢  The sculptural forms often have an unexpected impact which first emerges during use, and are just as much a result of graphic design as the experimental work that goes on in the workshop.

¢  His first success was with a range of furniture and interior structures in tube and cast iron fittings.

¢  Well known pieces include the "Rover Chair", the vacuum-packed "Transformer" chair and the remote controlled "Aerial" light.

¢  Later work explored the use of tempered steel, first in the "Well-Tempered Chair" and later in the popular "Bookworm".

¢  Ron Arad makes expressive furniture out of metal, glass and even concrete.

What Arad produced was a fusion of two ready-mades – a scrap yard seat from a Rover 200 Car mounted on a frame of Kee-Klamp scaffolding, originally designed in the 1930s

¢  The products that followed captured London’s early 1980s spirit of rugged individualism and post-punk nihilism

¢  Using welded steel as his material, Arad made armchairs and seating, utilising the springiness of steel for his collection of simple, eccentric chairs. Calling the chairs his ‘Strict Family’ series, he portrayed different family personalities in the individual designs, avoiding the uniform, anonymous look of metal furniture in the modern style.

¢  His Big Easy series of armchairs are hollow, welded steel forms which imitate the rounded overstuffed shapes of traditional upholstered furniture. His furniture is at once primitive and futuristic, and is designed to be comfortable while at the same time creating the appearance and aura of hard, unyielding surfaces, although some of these chairs he covered with material, giving them a softer look.

¢  In welding the chairs together, Arad took the patterns from a series of freehand sketches, and used the cutting torch in a freehand way, so the shapes he cut from the same pattern were all different. And when he welded them together the pieces went together differently, making each one an individual or ‘one off’ chair.

¢  With the creases and irregular folds amplified in the highly reflective surfaces, Arad succeeded in his aim of creating expectations and breaking them.

¢  This evolving series of volumetric chairs began with the 1986 Well-Tempered chair.

¢  At the invitation of the Swiss furniture manufacturer, Vitra, Arad conceived a chair whose outline suggested a stuffed armchair but whose softness came from the naturally sprung properties of tempered steel held in tension by bolts.

¢  Almost ten years later, Arad returned to the cartoonish armchair form when he painted layers of pigmented polyester into a mould from a steel Big Easy to create the 1999 New Orleans.

¢  The 2000 series of Bouncing Vases financed and sold by Galerie Mourmans in Belgium was made by fusing grains of polyamide powder through laser sintering.

¢  Clients select any single frame from a computer-generated animation of a springy vase for production by Materialise.

¢  The frame is deleted forever thereby ensuring that the piece is unique.

¢  Combines playful forms and experiments with advanced technologies

¢  These processes involve making physical models of computer drawings in order to aid the mass manufacture of industrial products.

¢  A stereotype of Ron-the-strong, manfully teaching himself to weld, beat steel and forge brutal new forms from the roughest materials, prevailed until the late 1990s.

¢  The “volume” chairs like the 1988 Big Easy, made from sheets of bent and welded steel, demonstrated above all his fascination with the techniques and the visual effects of welding and polishing metal.

¢    The technical expertise of Arad’s studio is in constant state of evolution as he and his team vigorously exploit one material and process after another: from ready-mades and welded heavy metal; to extruded plastic and rapid-prototyping.

¢    Having established a team of expert metal workers in the studio, Arad went into partnership with an Italian metal fabricator in Como in 1994 to continue production of the limited edition pieces.

Achievements & Exhibitions

¢  His work has been widely featured in many design/architectural books and magazines
world-wide.

¢  He has exhibited at many major museums and galleries throughout the
world and his work is in many public collections including, among others.

Examples of Work

¢  Arad’s architectural projects include the foyer of the Opera Theatre of Tel Aviv, Israel

¢  The 'Belgo restaurants' in London

¢  The development of a concept of sport cafes for Adidas Sport Café with advanced interactive technology audio/video for Adidas/Kronenbourg and the new flagship Adidas stadium, Paris.

¢  He worked for Vitra, Cassina, Driade, Fiam, Kartell, Artemide, Alessi, Flos.