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Portrait: Ron Arad, Industry Designer and Architect

By Ania Dardas

Furniture designer, architect, teacher, Ron Arad’s expertise is broad and his reputation formidable. He is the creator of the classic Bookworm – a fresh approach to book storage and shelving and the Well Tempered chair, an armchair commissioned by the Swiss Vitra Design Museum that suggests an old-fashioned overstuffed armchair but is fashioned in swathes of steel held in tension by bolts. Ron Arad’s life is a tribute to fascination with innovative approaches to design: marrying unconventional forms or materials with unexpected functions.

Born in 1951 in Tel Aviv, Arad studied art in Jerusalem before moving to London in 1973 to study at the Architectural Association in London. In 1981 he founded his first company One Off together with Caroline Thorman. The two have worked together ever since. In 1989 he founded Ron Arad Associates and later Ron Arad Studio in Italy to produce his hand-made pieces.

Ron Arad’s designs chart a path that takes him from recycled materials at the very start of his career where he fused a scrap yard seat from a Rover 200 car with Kee-Klamp scaffolding, through concrete to computerized manufacturing processes. He taught himself to weld and beat steel and then experimented with highly polished metal finishes. Ron Arad’s team rapidly became expert in various processes: from ready-made and welded heavy metal to extruded plastic and rapid prototyping.

Well Tempered Chair / Arad, 1986

Among the projects that rely significantly on computers, his series of Bouncing Vases in 2000 financed by Galerie Mourmans in Belgium was based on computer–generated animations of the vase – once a vase was selected by a customer and produced by fusing grains of polyamide using laser sintering, the design was deleted. Each piece was a one off. He was also responsible for a range of jewelry and objects whose forms were based on samples of handwriting transposed into three dimensions.

In recent years Ron Arad’s work has focused more on architectural commissions such as the Tel Aviv Opera House, Y’s store in Tokyo for Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto as well as the Belgo restaurants in London. A new design museum is scheduled for completion in mid-2007 in Holon, Israel, as are also the headquarters of domestic products manufacturer Magis in Treviso, Italy.

It is difficult to know in which direction he will turn next. As Ron Arad once said in an interview: “I’m afraid of boredom, fundamentalists, philistines”. So anything is possible.