October 31, 2015

MOROSO THE BIG EASY, MOROSO SOFT BIG EASY & NEW ORLEANS DESIGN BY RON ARAD




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.








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

1984  Zeus Gallery, Milan