I am in Chennai, on a WhatsApp call to Ron Arad, 5,099 miles away in his North London studio on Chalk Farm Road, imagining the designer-architect in his trademark wool-felt Cappallone hat, baggy trousers and long scarf. Arad will be in India for the first time this month, for India Design 2018, following on the heels of his daughter, singer Lail Arad, who toured six cities across the South late last year. When I ask him what he’ll speak about in New Delhi, he counters, “I never prepare my talks ahead; I improvise depending on the audience. The title is ‘Whats and Ifs’, as I am always asking ‘what if we try that? What if we don’t do that?’.”
A whirlwind of energy on Monday morning, he adds with typical restlessness, “I was crushing cars in Holland this weekend for the project In Reverse , and now I’m (at the studio) jumping from one project to another.” He began smashing cars to make art way back in 2013, finding a shipyard in the Netherlands with a special press that compressed Fiat 500s into 12 cm thick metal. He has always been a rule bender, doing the unexpected. “It’s more that I am curious and excited about everything. It’s about not accepting convention. Even though I am the eldest in my studio, I am still considered the rebel that ignores the rules,” he says.
Bands and beams
Going on 67, Arad is the artful pioneer of firsts; he built Design Museum Holon in Jerusalem, the first of its kind in the country, which he describes as “the most-loved contemporary building of Israel”. He wrapped sinuous red bands around the white cube of the museum, rising to the challenge of Frank Gehry’s iconic Guggenheim in Bilbao. He is now on the path to complete the tallest building in Tel Aviv, called the ToHA, with twin towers.
On his plate also is the commission for the new National Holocaust Memorial in London, which he won as part of the consortium with architect Sir David Adjaye. Metaphorically, the museum is about “architecture with emotion” with its 22 blades slicing into the earth signifying the 22 countries where Jewish communities suffered the Holocaust. They intend an immersive experience with a subterranean learning centre.
Free thinker
Israel-born Arad arrived in London in 1973 finding it exotic, and the art and film scene more cultured than America. He studied at the Architectural Association, attracted to its pluralistic and conceptual-thinking environment. He recalls, “Arriving as an outsider, I had different lenses to see the world.” One-Off, his studio, took off in 1981 when he walked into a scrapyard and picked up a discarded leather car seat and welded a tubular frame for the base, making his first piece of furniture. The Rover Chair rocketed him to iconic status. Yet, he makes no pretensions, saying, “I never claimed to be recycling or going green, but I am happy the Rover Chair was on the cover of the Friends of the Earth magazine.” Since then, the inveterate designer — who founded Ron Arad Associates in 1989 — has designed for coveted brands like Italian furniture majors Moroso and Kartell, and Swiss furniture firm Vitra, among many others, proving that non-conformist approaches can be realised in mass production. His retrospectives have been shown at the MoMA in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Barbican Centre in London.
Trysts with technology
Arad’s career is interspersed with innovation and cutting-edge thought. In 2004, his concept for a chandelier with Svarovski crystals displaying messages along its spiral shape inspired artist Moritz Waldemeyer’s Lolita at the Milan Design Week. Around six years ago, when Roundhouse Theatre in London approached Arad to do an installation, he wondered why not “do something big and round, with a 360-degree projection, and allow people to play with it?” The result was Curtain Call — using 5,600 silicone cords, a steel structure and 12 projectors streaming video made by artists. “You can part the curtain and walk into it. In London, when we set it up, people came and sat on the floor for hours.” This later went to Jerusalem as 720 Degrees and to Singapore in 2016.
Arad was inspired to create the iconic Last Train after seeing a man drawing on the glass windows of a train with his ring. The exhibition, which showed at the 55th Venice Art Biennale, invited artists to draw on an iPad, which was then converted into etchings on glass with a mechanised diamond ring, all enabled through WiFi and an app. Arad recalls, “The nicest story was Al Weiwei’s, who was in Beijing under house arrest at that time. He made a drawing from there and my diamond ring drew it.”
Bending the rules
Arad is most admired for his sinuous and fluid forms, like the Big Easy Chair, the moulded Tom Vac chair and the Ripple, that appear as if they have melted to his will. But he argues otherwise. “The result is always a rapport. The real shape comes from the will of the material, not just the will of the designer. In my Well Tempered Chair, the form was a result of what spring steel could do,” he explains.
Emotions invigorate his thinking process, too, and these playful provocations are seen in the bond between name and objects: Bookworm is a series of bookshelves that crawl sinuously on the wall, and the PizzaKobra is a lamp that snakes up and packs flat in a pizza-type box. The designer, who made a name with his furniture and recycled for art’s sake, is now firmly back to architecture. Looking forward to the Holocaust Memorial, he concludes, “It will be ready by 2021. All the usual suspects applied for the competition — Anish Kapoor and Norman Foster — but this time the judges got it right!”
India Design 2018 is on from February 22-25, at NSIC Grounds in Okhla, New Delhi. Details: indiadesignid.com
