Seat Of Power

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

Years ago, celebrated architect Frank Gehry lent the fast-rising designer Ron Arad some advice. “He told me that he had to stop making furniture if he wanted to be taken seriously as an architect,” said Arad, the Israel-born, London-based designer and architect. Arad was grateful for Gehry’s time, but ignored the star’s advice. If Arad’s glittering new exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened on Sunday, is any indication, it was the right move. “I’m not going to refrain from doing something because people might pigeonhole me,” Arad said, sitting on a massive red couch he designed that stands just outside the exhibit.

Arad has become one of, if not the, world’s leading design artists since starting his career in 1981.

That was when he began assembling gritty furniture out of recycled materials — record players, car seats, Kee Klamps — that he scavenged from junkyards and flea markets. One of his earliest works, “Rover Chair,” (1981) made from Rover V8 2L chairs that he fastened metal rails onto, became a major commercial success. After the fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier walked passed Arad’s London studio and bought two, everyone seemed to want one.

“They sold like hotcakes,” said Caroline Thorman, Arad’s longtime assistant who was also at the museum with Arad last week. She said that for the next few years, the two would rummage through junkyards looking for the old Rover seats. Eventually, though, “we just exhausted the supply,” Thorman said.

But more ideas replaced them: the “Concrete Stereo,” from 1983, which had Arad pouring concrete over vinyl record players; the “Rocking Chair,” from 1984, a Bauhaus-style seat made from a black metal frame and coiled silver springs; the “Well Tempered Chair,” designed for the mass-market manufacturers Vitra in 1986, which bends thin metal sheets into a plush-looking armchair. “If you undid the wing nuts, the whole thing would spring out,” Thorman said, standing in front of the chair, which, like the others mentioned here, are all on display.

Arad left Israel in 1973, when he was 22, but not quite because it didn’t suit him. He had been a student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design for two years and was restless. Taking a shot in the dark he applied, at his mother’s prompting, to the Architectural Association in London. When he showed up for an interview, he didn’t even bring a portfolio of his work, telling the panel, “I don’t have one, but I have a pencil here. What do you want me to do?”

The night after the interview, he saw a panel member at a post-election party in London who told him, “We decided to give you a place, but it was a big argument and you nearly didn’t get in.” Arad formally accepted the admission later that year and went on to study with classmates who would also become well-known names — Zaha Hadid and Nigel Coates, for instance.

For the past two decades, Arad’s stature and style have continued to evolve. Though he made his name with the humbly chic “ready-made” pieces like “Rover Chair” and “Concrete Stereo,” most of his works since have veered toward bright and shiny spectacles. There is “Bodyguard” (2007), more sculpture than chair and made from blown aluminum so reflective it makes mirrors look dull. There’s “Sit!,” from 1990, which in profile resembles an embryo, except that the center is entirely punched out. Then there’s the “Ripple Chairs” (2006), which he collaborated on with the fashion designer Issey Miyake. To match Arad’s butterfly-shaped seats, Miyake made a shawl where the armholes mimic the holes in the chair.
“If you want to take away one word,” said Paola Antonelli, the curator of the show and senior curator of MoMA’s department of architecture and design, “it’s pluralism.” Arad will not be confined by any definition; he will work in any medium, for any audience and with any artist. That ethic, Antonelli noted, is evident even in the show’s title: “Ron Arad: No Discipline.”

A good example of his ability to defy boundaries is his lesser-known work in architecture. Many of those projects are located in Israel: a luxury apartment building in Tel Aviv and a model for a sculpture park in Zion Square in Jerusalem. Neither of those has been completed, but one that has is the foyer of the Tel Aviv Opera House, built in 1994. For that project, Arad designed a swooping cream-colored staircase and a café, studded with his black-lacquered “Empty Chairs.”

Still, his biggest architectural project to date will be the Holon Design Museum, which is almost complete. A model of the building — five enormous gradated steel bands are wrapped around low-slung white walls — is on view at the MoMA show. Within Israel it is a much bigger deal than the exhibit might lead you to believe. “There’s a lot of interest in the museum; there are going to be people who love it and people who don’t,” said Aric Chen, an architecture and design critic who will help curate the museum’s inaugural exhibition.

Despite producing several internationally known architects — Moshe Safdie and Zvi Hecker, among them — Israel itself has not produced any distinct architectural style. For much of the country’s past, it was too poor to focus on stylish new buildings. And when it tried, as in the early buildings of Tel Aviv, it simply copied styles from abroad: Bauhaus, for instance, or Internationalist architecture.

One major exception was the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, completed in 1995 by Ram Karmi and his sister Ada Karmi-Melamede. The public as well as critics, in Israel and abroad, roundly praised it for referencing the city’s past — Roman gates and archways, Hebraic tombs, the 20th-century Internationalist style — while also remaining unique. As Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times: “With the completion of the Supreme Court, Israel, a nation that has shown little architectural leadership, has produced a building that can stand as an example to the world of the potential of public works to reflect a culture’s highest aspirations.”

While Arad’s Holon Design Museum does not exactly have those aims, it is part of a growing internationalism in Israeli projects. “Israeli architecture is pretty globalized at this point,” said Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, an architecture historian at The Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. (The Spaniard Santiago Calatrava has built two bridges in Israel in the last five years. And Gehry is trying to build a branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, called the Museum of Tolerance.) Yet she noted that the Holon structure does appear to respect the local environment. Arad’s goal, she said, was to re-brand a city that has long been considered drab and unremarkable. “Holon doesn’t want to be what it was,” Nitzan-Shiftan said, “it wants to be something new and exciting.”

Arad’s museum, scheduled to open in January 2010, is certainly that. The Cor-Ten steel ribs not only startle, they also keenly reference the desert city in which the museum is built. Most notably, each band is a slightly different shade of sandy reddish-beige. “It’s very Ron, yes,” said the critic Chen, “but it’s also very Israel in that it addresses the context of the place.”

Arad said that he still feels like he never left Israel. Not only does he continue to design works for the country, he is married to an Israeli and has two children with her. After 12 years, he left his post as dean of design products at the Royal College of Art this spring, but he does not plan on leaving England. When asked if there was anything particularly Israeli in his work, he paused, then gave a vague answer: “Of course, you’re a product of what’s around you.” But that, of course, goes for his British home too.

“Ron Arad: No Discipline” shows at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. (212) 708-9400. Exhibit runs through Oct. 19.

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