Book Description

Combining playful forms and experiments with advanced technologies, Ron Arad (1951-) has emerged as one of the most influential designers of our time. Born in Tel Aviv, he moved to London in 1973 to study architecture and made his name in the early 1980s as a self-taught designer-maker of sculptural furniture. Although Arad has been better known as a designer than an architect in the years since he graduated the Architectural Association, architectural projects have been continuous. Commissions for retail and restaurant interiors followed the opening of his Covent Garden and Chalk Farm studios, notably the Belgo restaurants in London 1994 and 1995, the 2001 technology floor of the Selfridges department store in London and the 2003 Y's Store for the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo. Arad's largest built project is the 1994 Tel Aviv Opera House, for which he and his then architectural partner Alison Brooks designed a series of autonomous curvilinear structures within the foyer of a building which was the work of another architect. This book is the first to survey Arad's architecture from 1991 to the present day.