Chaises Longues Conquered, Ron Arad Designs a Museum
Published: February 26, 2010

The museum's undulant curves display the designer's trademark irreverence.


HOLON, Israel— The world of Ron Arad is defined by the whimsical names of his iconoclastic designs: the Bookworm Shelves, the Misfits Seating, the Reinventing The Wheel storage system, the Not Made By Hand/Not Made In China lights. But Arad’s latest brainchild goes by the more straightforward moniker Design Museum Holon, and it both marks his first architectural project — his most ambitious undertaking to date — and represents a significant homecoming for the Israeli-born designer, who moved to London in 1973 to escape military service.




Arad rejects the label of daredevil (“It’s the stupid word of curators," he says, "I’m just active and curious”), but his status as a creative reprobate who became a design darling is deeply attached to his reputation. The designer famously came to attention when he affixed a junkyard car seat to a metal frame from a dairy and promptly got an order for six more “Rover chairs” from a customer who had happened to wander into his Covent Garden gallery, One Off: Jean-Paul Gaultier. (When the chairs were featured in an exhibit at the Pompidou Centre in Paris last year, Arad was asked to wear white gloves while handling them.) But while the 58-year-old designer's work has defied pigeonholing, even definition, his venture into building a museum is hardly outlandish. Having spent five years at the Architectural Association, Britain’s celebrated private architecture college, Arad has tried his hand at the occasional public space, such as the foyer of the Tel Aviv Opera House.





From his youth, Arad remembers Holon as a sleepy suburb four miles south of Tel Aviv. “I failed my driving test there,” he says. But in recent years municipal authorities have launched a campaign to turn the turn area into a cultural destination, opening in succession the Israeli Cartoon Museum, the Israel Children’s Museum, the Israel Center for Digital Arts, and the Museum of Historical Vehicles. The original idea for the Design Museum called for converting an old library, but Arad persuaded the government officials that such a halfway measure would be a false economy. Design museums also have a history of tradition-challenging design, with architects like Frank Gehry creating otherworldly white swirls for the Vitra in Weil-am-Rhein, Germany, and Brad Cloepfil distinguishing his Museum of Arts and Design in New York City with textured terracotta and semi-transparent fritted glass.



Arad’s master plan for Holon juxtaposed two simple rectangular galleries, enveloped in five sinuous ribbons of Cor-ten, the famously tough “weathering” steel prized by Richard Serra. (It’s also the same material that Robert Indiana used 30 years ago to create a Hebrew version of his LOVE sculpture for the Israel Museum Art Garden in Jerusalem.) Arad’s team did research at the University of Milan about treating the ribbons with chemicals so that they look like the colors of the earth. Hana Hertzman, the CEO of Holon, says she asked Arad to make the ribbons red, “and he chose his own red.” They’re always in the sight line of visitors, creating a colorful trail that orients them inside the space. 





Arad’s always had a thing for spirals and coils, from his Bouncing Vase to the lobby of the Tel Aviv Opera House that he wrapped in bands of steel and concrete. When asked what his psychologist wife might say about such a predilection, he offers, “I don’t know, but I can give you her number.” It’s perhaps unexpected that he credits as an influence the predominantly Bauhaus architecture of his Tel Aviv upbringing, with its efficient linear construction. “Everything that happened until four o’clock yesterday is an influence,” he says. “Everyone is trapped in his own childhood and early imprints.” 





For Hertzman, giving the job to Arad was a no-brainer. “Who, if not him?” she asks rhetorically. “He knows what suits designers, what they need.” And according to Arad, designers need space-age tools at their disposal. He regularly employs techniques such as “laser-sintering” to fuse small particles of metal or plastic into a mass and “stereolithography,” or the tracing of patterns on the surface of a liquid resin with, again, lasers. “I use technology as a raw material,” he explains. “It used to be science fiction, but it’s commonplace now.” The public has come to expect wit and pyrotechnics from Arad — tables that climb the walls or chandeliers that can display text messages — but the best fillip at Holon is really quite practical: a retractable ceiling, almost a giant venetian blind, that allows the main gallery to be bathed entirely in sunlight. “One of the things that’s free in a Middle East village is natural light,” says Arad. “It would be criminal not to take advantage of it.”





The museum’s inaugural exhibition, “The State of Things,” features more than 100 objects reflecting 21st-century ingenuity by employing the latest technological breakthroughs. Among the work on display is Ted Ciamillo’s Lunocet fin, which enhances swimming performance; Joris Laarman’s swirly Wirepod outlet for electric appliances; and Fabrication’s Lifelines textile, which is decorated with a pattern of AIDS cells. The ambitious long-range mandate of the museum is to engage the public in a dialogue about aesthetics. “We want to give people tools,” says Hertzman, and provide inspiration for “how to choose colors for their house, even how to get dressed.” The building itself, however, is likely to remain the main event. As for whether he thinks people will automatically compare his museum to Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, the notorious building that launched a thousand "destination" museums, Arad doesn’t seem to mind the parallel. “I can think of worse references,” he says.