Ron Arad
Product Designer + Architect (1951-)

Combining playful forms and experiments with advanced technologies, RON ARAD (1951-) has emerged as one of the most influential designers of our time. Born in Tel Aviv, he moved to London in 1973 to study architecture and made his name in the early 1980s as a self-taught designer-maker of sculptural furniture. He now works across both design and architecture.
Consistently inventive and challenging, Ron Arad has studiously avoided categorisation by curators and critics throughout his career. He never wanted a profession as such – whether as architect, product or furniture designer – but his reputation in each of these fields is formidable; as the outsider continually questioning established practices and institutions.
Arad was born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951, to artist parents. After studying at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem he moved to London in 1973 to study under Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi at the Architectural Association, and graduated in 1979. A brief spell in an architect’s office convinced him to set up his own company, One Off, in 1981 with Caroline Thorman, who has been his business partner ever since; followed by the One Off showroom in Covent Garden in 1983. In 1989, they started Ron Arad Associates in Chalk Farm, north London in the building they occupy today.
The first piece of furniture he 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 Rover Chair and the products that followed – including the 1983 stereo cast in concrete and 1988 beaten steel Tinker chair – captured London’s early 1980s spirit of rugged individualism and post-punk nihilism set against a backdrop of urban blight. Arad represented a generation of self-taught designer-makers who began the decade making their own work out of economic necessity and ended it as the darlings of the newly-wealthy, commanding art-market prices for one-off pieces.

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.