British architect-designer Ron Arad on staying curious and being bored all at once, and finding something good in fake replicas
Ron Arad Architects and Adjaye Associates won the competition last year to design UK’s new Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which will sit along the banks of Thames in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament. The memorial, embedded in the land, is meant to connote the many layers of history and memory. It will take visitors on a journey through its tall bronze fins, requiring them to enter solitary pathways that culminate in a place of contemplation. The pathways are meant to be sensorial, emphasising the isolation survivors would have felt.
Arad says, “We wanted to do something you can go into. It is in walking through that is the memorial. It is a reminder that nothing is as it seems,” says Arad. The UK-based designer-architect was in Delhi last week for the India Design ID 2018.
Arad was a presumptuous graduate from the Architectural Association School, London, who left his native country, Israel, in 1973. Not keen on working for somebody, Arad stepped out for lunch in north London one afternoon and stopped by at a local scrapyard. There he found a Rover leather car seat, which became a part of his first iconic piece of design. “This piece sucked me into the world of design. I had made a frame for it and it became the Rover Chair. Jean Paul Gaultier bought six of them for himself. He had a nose and could tell what’s coming,” says Arad, 66.
Arad wears his signature black felt hat called the Cappellone, which theoretically is neither a bowler hat nor a baseball cap nor a borsalino, yet a bit of them all, as he talks about being sculptor, architect, designer and artist. Elected as a Royal Academician in 2013 by the Royal Academy of Arts, Arad is known for experimenting with the boundaries and possibilities of materials, and re-conceptualising form and structure of objects and buildings.
His best-selling Bookworm shelf and Tom Vac chair are designs in point. The shelf, which is part of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum collection, allows users to individually adjust the shape of the final piece by manipulating the position of the wall brackets. Meanwhile, the Tom Vac chair — identifiable by its ribbed shell — has a hole in the base, making it stackable. Intended as a sculpture for the Milan Design Week in 1997, Tom Vac was later absorbed into the well-known furniture company Vitra’s collection.
“Some times, you get better than you deserve,” says Arad, adding that the chair has been replicated in factories in China and the fakes sold the world over. Though he confesses that he didn’t know how he felt when he actually visited one such factory in China, he says, “If they stop copying you, you’re in trouble. It’s a sign that you’re good. Sometimes, I’m more upset when a person in the neighbourhood makes a bad copy of my work. But when a factory of 300 people, who go to work on a bicycle, make a living on your design, maybe there’s something good about it.”
While his design and architecture have their say in the marketplace, it’s his sculptures in public spaces that win hearts. At London’s St Pancras railway station, a symbol of excellence of Victorian Gothic architecture, is Arad’s twisted, rotating sculpture in aluminium. Suspended above the Eurostar platforms, the sculpture belies its weight and length giving the impression of a wafer-thin ribbon of gleaming metal when one sees it from a distance. It’s hypnotic rotation calms the anxious traveller.
This blurring of boundaries between art, architecture and design is what Arad is known for. He mindfully called his 2008 retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in France “No Discipline”. “Some people want to know what discipline I belong to because they like to have the protection of their profession, I don’t. For me, my starting point is curiosity and boredom. In the Bauhaus period, designers believed that a good door handle can improve the world. I don’t think design has a solution for the world’s problems, including the environment or exploitation of child labour, even in products that are well-designed. When I did the Rover Chair, it was celebrated by the Friends of the Earth community, but that wasn’t my point at all. If someone can improve health care in the world, that’s far more important than design,” says Arad.
And to prove just that, Arad is currently working on a hospital project, a cancer facility in northern Israel, which will serve Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Druze communities in Israel as well as Palestine.
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