This article was taken from the October 2014 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Eleven years ago, Ron Arad created the iPad, or at least a version of it. He has video evidence: an animated pitch that was prepared for the electronics corporation LG. "They asked me to do a monitor but instead of doing that I did the iPad," Arad says. "We had two people dedicated to it for a year and then we made this film to show them how it might be used. I watch it now and it is me and my iPad."
Arad's film shows a device functionally equivalent to Apple's tablet. Cartoon figures use it to check email, watch videos and surf the internet. It features a touchscreen and an onscreen keypad. "I read in Steve Jobs's biography how excited he was to have the keyboard on the touchscreen," he says. "We just did it without thinking about it."
Indeed, Arad's invention had one functional advantage over Steve Jobs' device: it was waterproof, meaning that the cartoon characters were able to use it in the bath. "We went to do another presentation to LG. Half of them were asleep and it took them two weeks to say no to the idea. They just couldn't see it. They were like: 'What are you talking about? Why would anyone want this?' And listen, nothing was science fiction. It was all there."
Arad has another film he wants to show WIRED. "About a year later, I met the guy at some dinner party who was head of design at LG. I asked him why they didn't go with the idea, and if I could film what he said. He said that they had been stupid and that we had shown them the future and they hadn't seen it." In the film, the Korean executive laughs uncomfortably in the face of Arad's gentle interrogation (it is hard to imagine Arad being anything less than gentle -- he's softly spoken with an accent still more Tel Aviv than Kentish Town, and possessed of a wry sense of humour) while history thunders along a different track. "Perhaps it was for the best," Arad says. "I wouldn't be here if they had gone with the idea."
Of course, Arad is smart enough to know that there must have been others putting together similar pitches around the same time.
But he tells the story as evidence of his method and ambition. "I'm interested in designing something that didn't exist before I designed it," he says.
Arad, a dynamic 63-year-old with grey stubble, his eyes in the permanent shade of his large-brimmed hat, runs a 20-person studio in an odd run of large rooms in what was once a piano factory on Chalk Farm Road in north London. Ron Arad Associates has been here since 1989, long before Clerkenwell and Shoreditch emerged as creative and tech hubs. To reach the studio you need to cross a courtyard and climb a steel staircase. Inside, there's a lobby area with a wooden floor that rises, for no clear reason, to a cliff-like edge that drops to the main studio below. Throughout the space there are unexpected materials and undulations, twists and curves. Scattered around the studio are prototypes and reworkings of chairs that have become design icons. (A product designer's worth and legacy are measured in iconic chairs.
By this measure alone, Arad is top table.)
He works at a large, outward-facing desk at the back, equipped with a giant Wacom tablet and a light pen. The architecture team is down another set of stairs. Beyond that is a glass-fronted showcase for Arad's studio pieces: large, mostly metal, one-off sculptural objects you can sit or lie in. (They're surprisingly comfortable.)
The older pieces were fabricated here, the metal bashed and bent.
Newer ones are made by specialist fabricators in all sorts of materials, from polyester and fibreglass to Corian, carbon fibre, bronze, aluminium and stainless steel, and are sometimes polished, patinated, tinted or anodised. They sell for extraordinary prices: in 2007 a polished steel version of Arad's "D" Sofa, one of 20, sold at auction at Phillip's, New York, for $409,000 (£238,000); and €1m (£796,000) was reportedly paid in a private Sotheby's auction for an Arad piece at an exhibition at Chatsworth House the following year. Prices in an exhibition of works by Arad held at London's Timothy Taylor Gallery in 2009 ranged from €60,000 (£47,000) to €1m (£782,000).
He calls the studio a "progressive playground" where he is games master. All of its work -- radical product and furniture design, graphics, architecture, those one-off functional-sculptural studio pieces, collaborative art projects, plots, pitches and speculations -- moves across Arad's desk.
Everything begins with his sketches, his ideas. He's almost apologetic about the level of creative control he retains: "I have to say, it is like that. It's not that I curb people's creativity but they know that it is like that."
He doesn't have to operate that way. He has not been given a title like Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid or Jony Ive, but Arad has been one of Britain's best-known designers for more than 30 years and has a global stature to match. In recent years he has had retrospectives at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, MoMA in New York and the Barbican Centre in London. Arad could run a larger operation, signing off designs he had little to do with, but that's not how he operates. "We try not to have too many people here because then it becomes a business and starts to behave like a business," he says. "I know people who have those kinds of businesses and they go to the opening of one of their projects and it is almost the first time they have seen it. I don't want that."
Right now Arad and his studio are playing with the design of a 31-metre-high public sculpture, two enormous and rotating stacks of silver pipes called Safe Hands, to open in the centre of Toronto; the renovation of the Watergate Hotel in Washington, set to open in 2016; a curving steel-and-concrete house in the Shibuya-ku area of Tokyo; a reworking of his Rover chair, the scrapheap improvisation that made him a design star three decades ago; and a brilliantly simple reinvention of the carpet.
The first piece of work Arad wants to show WIRED is a series of frames sitting in the lobby. Each has glass in it, but otherwise is blank. "We have this from Christian Marclay [the Swiss-American artist best known for the 24-hour movie montage The Clock]. Do you like it?" Arad jokes. He turns on a sidelight in the frame and an image appears -- a series of circles scratched in light on the glass. There are other scratchy light-line drawings: a self-portrait by the cartoonist David Shrigley; a series of messages (including "Fuck your Motherland") from the studio of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; a pair of self-portraits by British art duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster; a drawing of Richard Wilson's monumental "Slipstream" sculpture, recently installed at Heathrow; an image from American avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson; and others by Cornelia Parker and Gavin Turk. "Grayson Perry is coming in to do one this week," he adds.
The images are produced by a contraption installed on the other side of the lobby. The device is a large, glass-fronted metal box.
Behind the glass, a fist floats in front of a black curtain. "I made a machine that scratches glass," he explains. "There is a cast of my fist with a diamond ring inside and what you draw on the iPad is scratched on to the glass in real time."
All the pieces were produced for an exhibition called Last Train, commissioned by Steinmetz Diamonds and shown at the 55th Venice Biennale last year. Arad got the idea after watching a man scratching messages on the window of a train in Naples using a ring. "What I might do next is talk to Transport for London and ask them to get a carriage and put edge lighting on the glass and invite people to scratch it."
This is partly what Arad does these days: collaborations and contraptions, art for both public spaces and white cubes, using design and technology to develop new creative tools that are then offered to others. He has been scathing about art's failure to engage with technology and, unlike many designers, is not afraid of whimsy ("Ron likes to play," notes the Italian designer and Arad acolyte Martino Gamper). He has an eye for almost theatrical showmanship and has little time for accusations that he might be wasting his time and talents with these "diversions".
In a Guardian review of the Arad Barbican retrospective in 2010, design writer Justin McGuirk acknowledged that Arad has been an early adopter of new technologies, but also suggested that he "abandons them before he's achieved anything of substance", and that, essentially, he collaborates with the wrong sort of people.
He should be introducing this technology not to artists, he wrote, but to scientists.
Throw this at the pretenaturally laidback Arad and he gets as close to irate as he's able to. "Look, I really apologise that we aren't solving the world's problems. I'm sorry that we aren't exploring everything commercially," he says.
Is Last Train as far as he wants to take the technology his studio has developed? "I don't have to make a decision about that now," he says. "We didn't know much about that technology when we started the project. But maybe the experience and knowledge that we accumulated building this will be useful one day. "If you work on something you can only follow one route. Later down the line you realise you could have gone down another route maybe, you could have tried something else. And maybe you will get round to trying that something else. And of course other people see what you have done and say: 'Have you seen this? You might find this interesting.' And you might. And interesting things might come out of that."
It's a reasonable defence but you might, perhaps, question the time and effort his studio expended on working out how to crush six original Fiat 500s to maximum aesthetic effect for last year's
Pressed Flowers exhibition, for instance.
It is also true that, by his own admission, Arad is not one for long-term engagements, which is partly why he keeps the architecture team downstairs. He has said that he never really wanted a career, just something that would keep him interested and excited every day. His studio is currently working on 20 projects and he seems to jump from one interest-piquing design challenge to the next.
Something else he is keen to talk about is Curtain Call, a project he developed in 2011 with the Roundhouse, the landmark arts venue just across the road from his studio. "I met Marcus Davey
[the Roundhouse's chief executive and artistic director] on the street one day. He asked me if
I wanted to do something with its summer installations. I said,
'Yeah, lets do something really big and round, 360-degree images that people can walk through.' It just came into my head as a bit of a joke."
Of course, once the idea was set in motion Arad had to make it happen. "We really researched it. Spent a lot of time and effort on it. And then we got together with this amazing company called Blitz Communications which is an expert on creative projections." "He is one of the most prolific ideas people I've come across,"
Davey says. "You sit down with him and the ideas just keep coming.
He threw himself at it fully. He's inspiring to work with and he brings out the best in those around him."
Between them they developed a system using 5,600 eight-metre-long translucent silicon threads that were hung to create a giant, fluid cylindrical screen. Videos were projected on to the threads, enabling visitors to watch the images both inside and out. By walking between the two, they could enter and exit the screen.
During the summer of 2011, artists, performers, bands and orchestras used the curtain for shows and events. Arad noted, however, that the audience was slow to experiment with the screen's immersive potential. "Brits walked in and just sat down in front of it, as if they had been told how to behave."
In 2012, Arad and the Roundhouse installed Curtain Call, rechristened 720 Degrees, in the sculpture park of the Israel Museum's art garden in Jerusalem. "I used the Wailing Wall as a screen saver. I was expecting a bit of trouble but I didn't get any." Much to his disappointment. Next year they are hoping to take it to Brazil. Unless someone has a better, more interesting idea.
Ron Arad was born in Tel Aviv in 1951. His mother, Esther, was an artist; his father, Grisha, was -- and at 97, still is -- an artist and photographer. In the early 70s, Ron Arad studied art at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem before moving to London in 1973 to study at the Architectural Association, at the time one of the last bastions of utopian idealism. His tutors included influential figures such as the deconstructionist Bernard Tschumi and architect Peter Cook. Zaha Hadid was a classmate.
After graduating he went to work for an architectural practice in Hampstead, but he was soon bored. It was the late 70s and there was little construction going on. He left for lunch one day and never went back. In 1981 he formed his first company with Caroline Thorman, who is still his business partner. Arad called the company One Off, a cheeky boast and a statement of intent. (He has always been good with titles and wordplay: in 2011, he and his team designed a bike with wheels made of sprung-steel loops for Elton John's Aids Foundation. It did not deliver a comfortable ride and Arad tagged it the Two Nuns Bicycle. "You know the joke about the two nuns who go for a cycle ride to the village," he says, explaining the christening process. "One says, 'I've never come this way before'. 'It's the cobbles,' says the other.")
That year he picked up two leather seats from an old V8 Rover 200 in a scrapyard. He mounted one on scaffolding poles and called it The Rover Chair. He made some more and the first six were bought by Jean-Paul Gaultier. Arad was soon a design star, although he thought of the chairs as more Duchampian ready-mades rather than design. He is also keen to point out that the lookalike chairs used on the Top Gear TV set are not the genuine article. "In the first season they did hire some Rover seats. But after that they made their own."
His early designs were, often literally, sharp-edged. A trained welder, Arad created armchairs using nuts, bolts and bent steel sheets. The work was post-punk, post-industrial, urban and exciting. Once he was installed in the Chalk Farm studio there was more room for metal bashing and bending: he produced the Bookworm, a spiraling metal bookshelf, versions of which are ubiquitous in the homes of today's creative workers. After this there were shows at the Pompidou Centre and the V&A. Soon the blue-chip Italian design companies were calling, wanting to produce industrialised versions of his designs in consumer-friendly materials. He began to explore new methods and mass-manufacturing.
There is some irony, then, in the fact that Arad has become the late-middle-aged poster boy for the application of technology in design. Even he admits that he's a little surprised by the move from metal-shop to advanced technologies. "There was a time when I thought I was going to be left behind by the IT revolution," he says. "I didn't see myself clicking a mouse, sitting in front of a screen. Now I am completely addicted to my tablet. I still use my pencil but it is a light pen."
Arad's friend and fellow collaborator with Swarovski on its Digital Crystal projects, the American designer Yves Behar, suggests that it was Arad's post-punk, do-it-yourself approach that made him so receptive to new technology and so quick to see its potential. "Ron came of age in the late 70s and 80s, this rebellious anti-establishment, rebellious era in England," says Behar. "He has this punk approach to the world of design where he can be provocative, figure things out his own way, build and sell his ideas largely outside the traditional channels of design. What's interesting to me is that independent punk approach of the 80s has informed our current era of often self-taught, internet-connected makers. And Ron is the bridge between these two generations."
Arad isn't just pioneering by using technology to aid the design process, but also in the manufacturing of the finished objects. "In 2000, we did a show calledNot Made by Hand Not Made in Chinain Milan. And we 3D-printed -- it was called rapid prototyping then -- jewellery and lights. I was excited about this discovery, that you could grow stuff in a tank."
He has continued to experiment with these technologies and last year the eyewear company pq launched a range of Arad-designed 3D-printed glasses. Arad, however, is irked that this has become the defining aspect of his story and warns against the hype surrounding the application of new technology. "I see technology, digital stuff, completely as a tool," he says. "Same as concrete. Same as cotton wool, whatever. There is this sort of hysteria now about 3D printing. I was so appalled with the V&A for getting the 3D-printed gun. It was pure marketing.
There are more exciting uses for 3D printing. "Yeah, you have these amazing technologies: selective laser sintering, stereolithography, all these different things. But people abuse them, rather than use them. I tell the producer of the pq line, don't harp on about 3D printing. I don't care. Say what is good about these glasses, that they are light, they are agile, talk about that, not the 3D printing. The five-axis milling machine is equally exciting. It does what Michelangelo did with David."
Arad didn't return to architecture until 1988 when he won a competition to design the public spaces at Tel Aviv Opera House, which was completed in 1994. He then worked on smaller projects -- a Belgo restaurant in London, a Maserati showroom -- and larger undertakings, including the Mediacite shopping centre in Liege, Belgium. In 2010 Arad's first grand cultural institution, the Design Museum Holon in Israel, opened its doors. As an architectural showcase it demonstrated that Arad could mix it with household names such as Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel.
But for all the success of the museum in Holon, Arad is still the man who walked away from the architecture practice to find something more interesting to do. Architecture's gestation periods don't suit Arad. He likes a quick fix. "In architecture there is a lot of convincing, negotiation and compromise," he says. "We are not what you would call a service architect and there are easier people to employ than us.
And people come here, they say, because they want something different. But they don't really. They just want names. "There are lots of good architects, idealistic, devoted, talented architects, but I wish there were more good clients."
For now, he picks and chooses projects, just enough to keep the team downstairs busy. For the last three years Arad and his team have been working on a 150,000m<sup>2</sup> development project in Tel Aviv. They are also working on the renovation of the Watergate Hotel in Washington and on a mixed-used development and apartments in a stretch of defunct commercial buildings in Miami christened Iron Side by local developer Ofer Mizrahi. Arad is hopeful about this project: "Is it an oxymoron to say an idealistic developer?
Anyway, he might be one."
Arad still seems to be working out how architecture fits into his story, how he can apply his magpie intelligence to make it better, to design something that doesn't currently exist. And how he can find people who will let him. "Ron is unique as he is the only contemporary designer that has successfully reconciled two separate branches of design: the artist and maker of unique sculptural pieces, and the designer of successful production objects," says Yves Behar. "When Ron shares his work with me, he goes from design-art pieces to design production ideas fluidly. It's just the ambition to do both, it's just the way he thinks."
Design is now a complex, splintered discipline: at one end still developing, in a qualified way, the modernist mission to make better things for a large number of people, using machines; at the other disassembling design's defining principles, creating conceptual interrogations, one-off experiments, moving into art spaces and perhaps asking the question that art should be asking.
And it was Arad, as much as anybody, who encouraged that splinter.
From 1998 to 2009 he was professor of design products at the Royal College of Art in London. During that time, he helped turn it into a global academic super-brand by completely changing the way students were taught. He started by combining the furniture and industrial-design departments as he considered the distinction between the two irrelevant. He then established a series of platforms that were led by working designers like Jasper Morrison, Tom Dixon and Konstantin Grcic who taught just one day per week. "I only wanted people who were too busy to teach," he says.
Arad thought of the course not as a kind of professional preparation but as guided exploration for his charges. The RCA was not a place for perfecting dovetail joints but for asking fundamental questions about what design was, could and should be. "I wanted to extend their freedom. The word 'should' was never used, it was an illegal word."
RCA alumni who studied under Arad are known for a refusal to accept traditional boundaries between art and design, between craft and making and technology and engineering, between functionality and spectacle and pure wonder. In that, they are all part of Arad's story. "Arad fostered a generation of questioning designers eager to experiment with form and technologies," says Corinna Gardner, curator of contemporary product design at the V&A, and who worked on the Barbican's Arad show Restless.
Italian designer Martino Gamper is also clear about Arad's influence. "Ron shaped a whole generation of designers," he says. "His impact will be felt for decades."
Arad describes his own practice as "being curious and earning the freedom to act on that curiosity. If no one was interested in the things I was curious about, I'd be in trouble. But luckily other people have joined me in that delight."
Arad's rules of innovation
1. Do it yourself The rise of the designer-maker has been much heralded in the past couple of years. But Arad was at it three decades ago, hammering out and bolting together radical designs using sheet metal and found objects. The lesson: don't just sit there.
2. Look at things differently There is no technology or engineering principle, ancient or modern, that can't be applied in new ways. Arad is as much about re-appropriation as invention itself. As he says: "We had suitcases and we had wheels but it took a long time for someone to put them together."
3. Be competitive "I see things and think: 'Why didn't I think of that?'" says Arad. "So I take pictures and sketch on them and see if I can make them better. And it works the other way: if I come up with an idea, I imagine if I had just seen it and ask myself if I would be jealous. If the answer is yes, then we move forward."
4. Pick wisely Arad has an expansive comfort zone. It is territory gained by picking his battles carefully, accepting challenges he knows he is equipped to answer but will also push him into new areas. It means acquiring new skills and meeting and working with useful new people.
5. Don't rush it As Arad will tell you, ideas are cheap, so don't be afraid to take them so far, park them, and move on. They will still be there, waiting for your return -- if you get round to it. Arad might one day reinvent the bicycle wheel -- or he might not. There is other stuff he has to be getting on with.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
