Ron Arad: No Discipline

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Rover Chairs

Ron Arad. Rover Chairs. 1981

Painted tubular steel and leather, .1: 31 1/2 x 24 x 36" (80 x 61 x 91.4 cm) .2: 31 1/2 x 48 x 36" (80 x 121.9 x 91.4 cm). Architecture & Design Purchase Fund

RON ARAD: The Rover Chair is the first piece of furniture I've ever made. When I made this I had absolutely no idea that this piece was going to suck me into the world of design. I went to a scrap yard. I wanted to hunt for a leather car seat, to make a piece of furniture out of. In the back of my mind I had Picasso's "Toro," that's made out of a bicycle seat and a handle bar.

PAOLA ANTONELLI: And the legend goes that the fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier saw the Rover chair, and there were quite a few of them, and he bought them all. And Ron didn't even know it was Gaultier, and it was like this meeting of the minds and this creation of a new voice for art and culture in the early 1980s

RON ARAD: The chair you're looking at—the _Red Rover Chair_—it normally lives in my living room. And it's really funny that 26 years ago or so I went with my tools to yank it out of a Rover car seat in a dirty scrap yard and a few months ago, when we installed the show at the Pompidou Center I was not allowed to touch it unless I was wearing white gloves. So that means that both the chair and me went through quite a journey.