Ron Arad was born in 1951 in Tel Aviv into an artistic family - his mother is a painter, his father a photographer. He attended the Accademy of Art in Jerusalem until the early 1970s, when he decided to leave Israel and study architecture in the UK. Settling in London in 1974, he enrolled at the city's least conventional school, the Architectural Association, where he studied under Peter Cool and Bernard Tschumi with classmates like Nigel Coates, Peter Wilson and Zaka Hadid. He quickly developed artistic and cultural interests outside architecture, and his work became increasingly oriented towards design and non-rhetorical artistic uses of materials. In 1981, with Dennis Groves and Caroline Thorman, he set up One Off, the design agency that made its successful debut with a set of tubular steel furniture. Arad has made no secret of his predilection for technology and the modern aesthetic as ways of revisiting and revising typologies from the past. As a sculptor and craftsman who has taught himself to cut sheet steel, bend wooden legs and put bent plywood to new sculptural uses, he has produced furniture that is emotional and sensual as well as aggressively light and pratical. A similar philosophy is evident in his designs for the futuristic foyer of the Opera House in Tel Aviv, the Belgo restaurant in London, the instalaltions for “L’Esprit du Nomade”, Fondation Cartier in Paris, the impressive project of Adidas Stadium in Paris, the Domus Totem for the Triennale in Milan, the exclusive Yohji Yamamoto’s Store in Tokyo, the Design Museum in Holon, Israel.
