Ron Arad

Born in Israel 1951

Architect & Designer

Studied at the Belzalel Academy of Fine Art, Jerusalem.(1971-1973)


Then at the Architectural Association, London, under the mentorship of Peter Cook. A key founder of the Archigram movement. 

Worked briefly as an architect.

Formed One-off With Dennis Groves, 1981. 

Established Ron Arad Associates, 1989. 

Established Ron Arad Architects, 2008, to run in conjuncture with the above.

Professor of Design Product at the Royal College of Art in London, 1997-2009

Awarded London Design Week Medal for design excellence, 2011.

 Royal Academician, Royal Academy of Arts, 2013.

Considered a sculptor of furniture and spaces, Arad has pushed the boundaries of acceptability with his choices of materials and decorative components.

He has cultivated a high tech/post punk/post apocalyptic aesthetic, utilising deliberately coarse industrial materials, coupled with found objects and scrap. 

However, he is also highly selective of his materials and the ways in which they are manipulated.  

His initial aesthetic is most prominent in his interior design during the 1980's, such as his work for Bazaar on London's South Molton Street, 1984, in which cast concrete features where accompanied with an air of dislocation, destruction and decay. 

Arad's furniture takes a more ironic and playful vain that is undeniably present in the form of his "Big easy" chair. 

The big easy series was intended to demonstrate that comfort could be obtained using industrial materials, that would not normally be associated with soft furnishings.

Later Arad moved toward mass producing some of his earlier designs, Such as his "Book worm" Bookcase, that was first produced in limited numbers and constructed from steel, and later re released made out of translucent plastic for more general consumption and manufactured by Kartell. 

The Polygon Nuclear Test Sea 1 (After the event), Kazakhstan 2011 

 Kurchatov IV (Telephone Exchange), Kazakhstan, 2011

 The Aral Sea (Officers Housing), Kazakhstan 2011

 The Aral Sea III (Fishing Trawler), Kazakhstan 2011

The Polygon Nuclear Test Site I (After the event), Kazakhstan 2011

NUCLEAR TEST CITIES ABANDONED BY THE SOVIET UNION

5 Clever Ways To Handle Small Interiors

"CALCULATION" DRAWINGS BY RAFAEL ARAUJO

Source

Rafel Araujo is a Venezuelan artist/illustrator who's stylistic influences include both Da Vinci and M.C. Escher. 

Working on an old drafting table, Araujo began drawing his own perspective illustrations, eyeballing the trigonometry to plot dot sequences that would allow him to create curved shapes like double helixes and cones. If you look closely at Araujo’s drawings, you’ll notice each of the main shapes sits within a line-drawn square or rectangle—he began adding this to his works after realizing these scaffolding boxes created a more reliable way to correctly position the dots. “There is naturally a learning curve,” he says. “And as problems are solved, you become more adept and, again, daring.”

As Araujo became more confident in his skills, he began adding ink-drawn butterflies, insects and shells to the canvas and painting them with acrylic in order to add visual complexity to his work. Each illustration takes him upwards of 100 hours, and that’s if he doesn’t mess up. “Painting is very similar to cooking,” he says. “You’ve got to be always careful!”

Source II