The second instalment of a four year partnership between the Royal Academy of Arts and HS1 Ltd (owners of St Pancras International station) for the station’s public sculpture series will be a work by Ron Arad. Previous artists for the commission have included Cornelia Parker RA, David Batchelor and Lucy + Jorge Orta.
Terrace Wires is a public commissioning programme for new artwork by leading international artists, suspended from St Pancras International’s iconic Barlow Shed roof. It offers 48 million travellers each year the chance to experience the latest contemporary art as they pass through the station.
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 in 1981 the design and production studio One Off. Later, in 1989, Ron Arad Associates architecture and design practice was established, and from 1994 to 1999 Ron Arad Studio – a design and production unit – was formed in Como, Italy. In 2008, Ron Arad Architects was formed alongside Ron Arad Associates to concentrate on larger architectural commissions.
Ron Arad was awarded the Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) in recognition of his “sustained excellence in aesthetic and efficient design for industry” in 2002. He was Professor of Design Product at the Royal College of Art in London from 1997 until 2009. Ron Arad was awarded the 2011 London Design Week Medal for design excellence. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 2013.
Ron Arad’s constant experimentation with the boundaries and possibilities of materials, from metals to composites, and his radical re-conception of the form and structure of objects and buildings, large and small, has put him at the forefront of contemporary design and architecture.
In 2011 Arad opened Curtain Call at the Roundhouse London, a suspended curtain of over 5000 silicon rods acting as a canvas for live performance, film and animation, a concept that travelled as 720° to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel in 2012. The exhibition No Discipline opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008 and travelled to New York’s MOMA in August 2010.Restless opened at the Barbican Centre in London in February 2010. In 2014 he showed In Reverse at the Design Museum Holon and the Pinacotteca Agnelli, Torino.
Arad’s public sculptures include Big Blue in Canary Wharf (2000), Evergreen! in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo (2003), Kesher, in Tel Aviv (2011) and Vortext in Seoul, South Korea (2011). Architectural projects include the foyer at the Tel Aviv Opera House (1994), Hotel Puerta America, Madrid (2005), Hotel Duomo, Rimini (2006), Mediacite shopping centre in Liege, Belgium (2009), and the award-winning Design Museum Holon, Israel (2010).