Interview

The studio is on Chalk Farm Road in North West London. You enter it by way of a flaky blue gate that opens onto a cobbled lane called Old Dairy Mews. You then climb a steel stair and find yourself, with a dislocating sci-fi effect, inside a bendy, asymmetrical space where, at first glance, the principal occupants are chairs. Then you note that there are assistants sinking into their computer screens, like Alice just before she slips through the looking glass, but they are outnumbered by chairs and models for other projects. A few models are rendered in graphics—one is graffitied Keep The Texture Make Reflective—but mostly they are in the round.

Ron Arad was at the far end, and, as usual, he was wearing a peculiar hat. Its brim was turned up in the front, like the other guy (not Jackie Gleason) in The Honeymooners, or like a Breughel peasant, and it was so well-worn that the round head-hugging part was at once crusty and shiny. Arad was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1951, with both his mother and father working as artists. In 1973, he moved to London to study at the Architectural Association and was tutored by Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi. In 1981, he set up his own design practice, One Off, with Caroline Thorman, who remains his partner today. Twenty years ago they started Ron Arad Associates in its current location. Arad says that nobody remembers a dairy near Old Dairy Mews—“just sweatshops”—so dairy life must have taken place when they were still farming at Chalk Farm.

Arad designed his first piece of furniture in 1981, a sleekly aggressive postmodernist piece that melded segments of 1930s scaffolding with the seat of a British car, a Rover 2000. The Rover Chair would be the first of a slew of objects and habitable forms that established ARAD as somebody whose eye and hand crossed conventional borders. One example: He has made pieces with Swarovski crystals and leds to receive and display text messages.

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Ron Arad is currently the head of the Department of Design Products at London’s Royal College of Art and he is one of the handful of most watched designers today, but he remains vehemently critical of the art world for what he sees as its reluctance to accept anything with even a hint of function in it. That said, he recently enjoyed a solo retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show will open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on August 2.

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST: Speaking of design, tell me about the hat.

RON ARAD: About hats in general? Or about this specific hat? HADEN-GUEST: This particular hat. It looks like it comes out of Breughel.

ARAD: Simply, some people have hair, and some people have hats. I wish I belonged to the first group, but I belong to the second. So it’s my hat. Alessi made and distributed 2,000 of them. I walked into a show in Milan and saw somebody wearing it. That was very strange.

HADEN-GUEST: Okay, the Pompidou. You wanted the show to be called “No Discipline”?

ARAD: That is what it’s called.

HADEN-GUEST: I like that.

ARAD: Yeah, I mean, it fits: (A) It’s my temperament; and (B) I don’t subscribe to any discipline. As you can see here, there’s very little demarcation between sculpture, design, architecture, and Ping-Pong. The problem with the French people is they have some rule that they can’t have names that are not in French. So I tried “Sans Disciplin.” I tried “Pas de Disciplin.” Nothing is as good as simply “No Discipline.” Like, no entry! No chance! And I don’t think I’m using words that a Frenchman doesn’t understand.

HADEN-GUEST: Contre Disciplin?

ARAD: I’m not against anything. I’m pro everything. Contre is more negative than no, maybe. Anyway, it seemed to be a good thing to fight over. You get very upset when you get a negative response. And you get quite pleased when you have your way. Which I did.