MOROSO THE BIG EASY, MOROSO SOFT BIG EASY & NEW ORLEANS
DESIGN BY RON ARAD
SOFT
BIG EASY
Almost
fifteen years after she commissioned the Soft Big Easy, Patrizia Moroso asked
Arad to produce a plastic version of his original armchair. The latest addition
to the Big Easy family is made from rotation-molded polyethylene, in red,
white, black, or blue. The chair’s material is waterproof and resistant to
sunlight and changes in temperature, so it can be used both indoors and
outdoors.
NEW ORLEANS 1999
Fiberglass, Polyester, and Gelcoat
Dimensions: 91 x 122 x 74 cm
Edition by Ron Arad
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
NEW
ORLEANS 1999
The New
Orleans chairs are an edition of eighteen colorful armchairs made in the same
shape as the Big Easy. Arad made these for The Gallery Mourmans, each one built
up from the inside out, in pigmented polyester gelcoat applied in layers and
fiberglass-reinforced polyester. He painted the chairs by applying the gelcoat
in layers inside the molds before pouring in the polyester, thus making the
decorative element inherent to the chair’s construction, a method first used
with the Pic Chairs. For these chairs Arad favored bright primary colors in
abstract drips and bursts, with the occasional random message, such as
“Absolutely not for sale,” “No plan just do it,” and “The last one was not so
very brilliant, this one must be!”
SOFT BIG EASY 1990
Injected Flame - Retardant Polyurethane Foam,
Steel,
Polypropylene, and Wool
Dimensions: 100 x 123 x 80 cm
Manufactured by Moroso SpA, Italy
Courtesy Moroso SpA, Udine, Italy
THE BIG E 2003
Rotation-Molded Polyethylene
Dimensions: 93.5 x 130.5 x 84.5 cm
Manufactured by Moroso SpA, Italy
Courtesy Moroso SpA, Udine, Italy
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
DOUBLE SOFT BIG EASY 1991
BIG EASY
VOLUME 2 1988
Polished
Stainless Steel
Dimensions:
107 x 128.3 x 92.1 cm - weight 44 lbs (20 kg)
Edition by One
Off, London
Collection of
Michael G. Jesselson, New York
Image: Ron
Arad Associates, London
MOROSO HEADQUARTERS
DESIGN BY DAVID ADJAYE
MOROSO
Moroso has been working in close
collaboration with some of the world’s most talented designers to produce
luxury sofas and seating since 1952.
Today the company is headed by the second generation
of the Moroso family- Roberto, the CEO, and Patrizia, the Art Director,- and is
an example of how a small Italian artisan-owner company has evolved since it
was run until the nineties by Agostino Moroso. The company has always been open
to new ideas, from its origins in post-war Italy where there was a culture of
‘doing things and doing them well’, Moroso has been farsighted, daring and
certain of the advantage of combining craftsmanship and tailoring with
industrial processing techniques to create unique products and by drawing on
the worlds of industrial design, contemporary art and fashion.
Along with its product catalogue, the culmination of
thirty years work in design and expression, Moroso offers customers its design
and production expertise to create customized projects for the contract and
luxury residential sectors. Our ability to offer unique products is thanks to
the combined talents of our 70 master artisans, our network of trusted
suppliers, the use of high quality materials and a true attention to detail.
VALUES
The story of Moroso is about adopting
a different approach to the market.
It is a story told by our designs and projects, by people, the protagonists of contemporary living, who tell of our genuine, spontaneous passion for beauty, emotion, design and art.
It is a story of the dedication which we have shown day in and day out for more than 60 years to our production and working methods, to our artisanal care for each product, and to our honest and direct relationship with our suppliers and customers.
An active, and responsive, approach which has helped secure a solid financial position, creating long-term economic value which is shared with, and benefits, everyone involved, from industry to the arts, and which we believe is key to building a better world. Growth, development and being receptive to new ideas are only possible when there is respect.
This is the beauty of design, the project as a way of embracing life, a vision of the world. A colourful world which celebrates difference and diversity, making them a physical part of daily life and form of communication and interaction.
It is a story told by our designs and projects, by people, the protagonists of contemporary living, who tell of our genuine, spontaneous passion for beauty, emotion, design and art.
It is a story of the dedication which we have shown day in and day out for more than 60 years to our production and working methods, to our artisanal care for each product, and to our honest and direct relationship with our suppliers and customers.
An active, and responsive, approach which has helped secure a solid financial position, creating long-term economic value which is shared with, and benefits, everyone involved, from industry to the arts, and which we believe is key to building a better world. Growth, development and being receptive to new ideas are only possible when there is respect.
This is the beauty of design, the project as a way of embracing life, a vision of the world. A colourful world which celebrates difference and diversity, making them a physical part of daily life and form of communication and interaction.
SKETCH FOR BIG EASY VOLUME 2 1989 İKİLİ CİZİM
Polished Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 107 x 128.3 x 92.1 cm - Weight 44 lbs (20
kg)
Edition by One Off, London
Collection of Michael G. Jesselson, New York
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
SKETCH FOR BIG EASY VOLUME 2 1989
Stainless Steel and Antirust Paint
Dimensions: 101.9 x 140.7 x 114.9 cm
Edition by One Off / Ron Arad Associates, London
Private Collection, USA
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
MOROSO HEADQUARTERS
DESIGN BY DAVID ADJAYE
RON ARAD
THE DESIGNER AS AUTHOR BY PAOLA ANTONELLI
At the beginning of the 1980s, design’s need to break
with the disciplinary boundaries of modernism had grown out of its most heated
and rebellious phase and reached a new maturity. Gone were the 1970s attempts
to annihilate objects and tear form-and-function tyrants from their pedestals;
gone were the efforts to debunk the power of corporations and technocrats by
refusing to design anything that could actually be produced and sold; and gone
were the activists and thinkers who sided with the people and preached that
everyone was a designer. It was time to reclaim the creative role of designers
as givers of soul in addition to form, uniquely positioned as they were to
break with the past and model the world’s future.
Ron Arad—who studied art at the Bezalel Academy in
Jerusalem and moved to London in 1973 to attend the hotbed of experimentation
that was the Architectural Association—emerged on the other side of the 1970s
an unscathed (emboldened, if anything) creative maverick. In 1981, the same
year the Memphis group was founded in Milan, he opened One Off, his studio,
together with Caroline Thorman. This was also the year in which he
designed—almost by chance, according to myth—his legendary Rover Chair. In 1983
One Off became a showroom in the Covent Garden market, a vibrant group of small
stores, galleries, and restaurants, in which One Off stood out as a laboratory
for design experimentation, with Arad showing his work and that of other
budding, talented British designers such as Tom Dixon and Danny Lane.
Calling the lab One Off was a statement unto itself.
Each object, albeit functional, was treated as a focused experiment in the use
of materials, techniques, and process. If the human bodies for which these
objects were intended still hovered above as the measures for true design
accomplishment, the creative act in itself was unencumbered by definitions. The
studio’s trust in inspiration—whether it be found in a construction system like
Kee Klamps, a car seat, or a volume to be pummeled and sculpted and molded—transcended
disciplines.
The relationship between art and design has been
carefully examined in terms of the perceived juxtaposition between them.
Designers have been accused of borrowing art methods and markets; artists have
been accused of cavalier gestures such as adding a bulb to a sculpture and
calling the work a lighting fixture. Are art and design both ways to act out
ideas, or is art self-expression, while design is inherently driven by
consideration of other human beings and their needs? Some critics point to
comfort as the distinction between the two; others cite economic
considerations, sale price, social relevance. Some simply move between the two
spheres by switching the number of end users—from oneself to a few collectors
to a wider public to the consumer market. Once upon a not-very-remote time,
these two disciplines lived happily together and shared the same conceptual
roof with architecture and other forms of cultural production, each informing
the others with generosity and benevolence. History is dense with examples of
universal donors, the O-positives of creativity—Peter Behrens, Bruno Munari, Ettore Sottsass—whose curiosity and openness have defied
disciplinary confines. Schools, academies, and movements, from the Bauhaus to
Black Mountain College, from de Stijl to Radical Design, rejected any hint of
hierarchy of creative expression.
In the heated contemporary debate on what
distinguishes design from art, and in an art market that has been built around
the degrees of separation between them, Arad’s spontaneous posture, assumed in
the 1980s and never since abandoned, has become a postmodern archetype. He is
the unwitting father of what we now call Design Art (a term he is frankly
allergic to), of all the six-figure sales of objects too functional to be
full-fledged art and too sculptural and expensive to be considered real design.
He is also, however, a champion of creative freedom, admired and emulated by
many designers, especially now that the production and distribution of
artifacts has become so diversified, and the channels for expression so
tentacular, that any disciplinary definition is deeply hindering.
No Discipline celebrates Ron Arad’s spirit by avoiding
any separation between industrial design, one-off pieces, architecture, and
architectural installation. Objects are grouped in families whose common blood
is a form, a material, a technique, or a structural idea, revealing a
conceptual evolution that is still amazingly solid with the designer’s
beginnings at One Off. As much a creature of habit as a versatile artist, he
has formed long-lasting relationships with collaborators (Caroline Thorman is
still his partner in the studio, which is now called Ron Arad Associates),
manufacturers, galleries, and even materials, and thus has built a firm
grounding that will continue to enable him to take even bigger leaps.
Paola Antonelli - Senior Curator
Department of Architecture and Design
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Information had taken by Museum of Modern Art New York USA press department.
You may visit Ron Arad’s exhibition news at Ivorypress
and in reverse at Design Museum Holon - Israel and design news of Moroso
Misfits to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/09/ron-arad-at-ivorypress-madrid.html
NEW ORLEANS 1999
Fiberglass, Polyester, and Gelcoat
Dimensions: 91 x 122 x 74 cm
Edition by Ron Arad
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
NEW
ORLEANS 1999
The New
Orleans chairs are an edition of eighteen colorful armchairs made in the same
shape as the Big Easy. Arad made these for The Gallery Mourmans, each one built
up from the inside out, in pigmented polyester gelcoat applied in layers and
fiberglass-reinforced polyester. He painted the chairs by applying the gelcoat
in layers inside the molds before pouring in the polyester, thus making the
decorative element inherent to the chair’s construction, a method first used
with the Pic Chairs. For these chairs Arad favored bright primary colors in
abstract drips and bursts, with the occasional random message, such as
“Absolutely not for sale,” “No plan just do it,” and “The last one was not so
very brilliant, this one must be!”
NEW ORLEANS 1999
Fiberglass, Polyester, and Gelcoat
Dimensions: 91 x 122 x 74 cm
Edition by Ron Arad for The Gallery Mourmans,
The Netherlands Private Collection
Image: Ron Arad Associates, London
RON ARAD
Born in
Tel Aviv in 1951, educated at the Jerusalem Academy of Art and later at the
Architectural Association in London, Ron Arad co-founded with Caroline Thorman
the design and production studio One Off in 1981 and later, in 1989, Ron Arad
Associates architecture and design practice. In 2008 Ron Arad Architects was
established alongside Ron Arad Associates.
From
1994 to 1999 he established the Ron Arad Studio, design and production unit in
Como, Italy. He was Professor of Design Product at the Royal College of Art in
London up until 2009. Ron Arad was awarded the 2011 London Design Week Medal
for design excellence and was became a Royal Academician of the Royal Academy
of Arts in 2013.
Ron
Arad’s constant experimentation with the possibilities of materials such as
steel, aluminium or polyamide and his radical re-conception of the form and
structure of furniture has put him at the forefront of contemporary design and
architecture.
Alongside
his limited edition studio work, Arad designs for many leading international
companies including Kartell, Vitra, Moroso, Fiam, Driade, Alessi, Cappellini,
Cassina, WMF and Magis among many others.
Ron
Arad has designed a number of Public Art pieces, most recently the Vortext in
Seoul, Korea, and the Kesher Sculpture at Tel Aviv University.
EXHIBITIONS:
Ron Arad's work is represented in
the permanent collections of many museum around the world, including The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The
Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein.
2013 –
In Reverse at Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli
2013 –
In Reverse at Design Museum Holon Israel
2013 –
Ivorypress Madrid
2009 –
No discipline at Museum of Modern Art New York
2008 –
No Disciplines at Centre Georges Pompidou Paris
2000 "Not Made by
Hand, Not Made in China", Galleria Giò Marconi, Milan
2000 "Before and
After Now", Victoria & Albert Museum, London
1996-98 "Ron Arad
and Ingo Maurer", Spazio Krizia, Milan
1990-95 "Ron Arad
- Sticks & Stones", Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein
1987 Documenta 8,
Kassel
