Ron Arad

Ron Arad is an industrial designer, artist and an architect. The Rover chair kickstarted his career as a designer. This chair, which was made in 1981, is the coming together of two readymades. The postmodernist design combines a Rover P6 car seat and a hollow structural tubing frame from a Klee Klamp milking stall.

Furniture maker Joe Hall visited Ron Arad in his Covent Garden shop in the 1980s. Together they made more chairs that sold for around three times the production cost (£99 each). Since 1981 hundreds of chairs have been made and some have sold for thousands at auctions.

I like this chair as it is simple and still looks like a car seat. I like how each seat is unique as because they are second hand so they all have different wear and tear. I think this adds to the appearance of the seat. The unusual shape of the milking stall gives the chair a look that isn’t traditional but because it is used with a normal shaped seat means it is still obvious what it is meant to be. Another thing that I like about this chair is that it uses materials found in scrap yards that would otherwise just rot away.

Some of Ron Arad’s most notable designs include the Bauhaus Museum in Tel Aviv, The Design Museum in Holon (what he designed with Bruno Asa) and The Big Easy Chair made out of Chrome.

                                                

His work has been described as “scary” because of its “macho concrete and cut metal; tense sheets of tempered steel and guillotine edges”.