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Image: Last year’s winning design: Breathing Bathtub by Xi Li, China
Roca, the leading global bathroom brand, together with BCD, the Barcelona Design Centre is launching the fourth edition of Jump the Gap 2010/11, Roca’s international design competition. The competition will officially launch on Roca’s stand (G30) at this year’s 100% Design.

The competition offers talented designers across the world the opportunity to showcase work based on innovation and design within the bathroom area. The winning project will receive a prize of 5000 Euros which will be presented at 100% Design 2011. The winner will also benefit from a targeted PR campaign that will promote the winning design along with its creator(s).
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MARC NEWSON Important early “Pod of Drawers”, 1987 Fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin core, blind-riveted sheet aluminum, paint. 50 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 17 1/4 in. (128 x 69.9 x 43.8 cm.) Produced by Basecraft for Pod, Australia. From the edition of ten plus two artist’s proofs and one prototype. ESTIMATE $300,000-500,000

Phillips de Pury announced the highlights from its June 9th New York Design auction. The sale will offer additional works from The Halsey Minor Collection. Part I was sold in a single-owner evening sale held at Phillips de Pury on May 13th, including Marc Newson’s prototype Lockheed Lounge for $2,098,000, a new world record for the artist.
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Ron Arad’s multi-disciplinary work has long been described to defy categorization, covering an array of genres including art, design, sculpture and architecture. In his current exhibition at the Barbican Centre, Arad’s work is presented in such a way that it responds to each of the categories. The opening room encourages visitors to play, touch and interact with the work in such a way that reminds viewers that each piece is a functioning object, designed for every day life.
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On Thursday 6 May the Barbican Centre hosted an evening of fantasy and imagination in the form of a whimsical Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The Barbican’s Garden Room was transformed into a dream like wonderland adorned with floating edible treats and fantastical fairy lights while the fancy costumes worn by guests added to the atmosphere of wonderment.

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On 29th October 2010, a panel of top-notch professionals from the two, supposedly delineated worlds of Art and Design, came together to take on the debate of ‘design versus art’. Throughout the past four decades, the face and public perception of design has changed dramatically, mutating from the post punk, DIY rebellion of the 1970’s, to standardised mass production in the 80’s .
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Spanning three decades, the show traces the development of Arad’s designs from his early postpunk approach, assembling works from readymade parts to his technologically-advanced sculptural objects made of highly polished metals. Featuring a dramatic installation design by Ron Arad Associates using the latest LED display technology, the exhibition also includes architectural designs and instantly recognisable mass-produced objects.

Kate Bush, Head of Art Galleries, Barbican Centre, said:
“Ron Arad first hit the headlines in 1981 with the opening of his now legendary studio and workshop
One Off in Covent Garden and he has been an unstoppable and uncategorisable force in world design ever since. I am delighted that Barbican Art Gallery is to present Ron Arad’s first major British exhibition, and to share with our audiences the many different facets of this extraordinarily creative artist. “

Bringing together over 120 works, Ron Arad: Restless features some of Arad’s most celebrated pieces. Rover Chair,1981, a car seat salvaged from a scrapyard mounted on a steel frame, that famously caught the eye of Jean Paul Gaultier, and catapulted Arad firmly into the design world’s Hall of Fame; Well-Tempered Chair,1986, a reinterpretation of the overstuffed club chair using four thin sheets of tempered steel bent and held together by wing nuts; and animated in the gallery space Reinventing the Wheel, 1996. Inspired by a children’s toy featuring a globe floating inside a sphere, this bookcase has a wheel-within-a-wheel construction and can easily be rolled around while the shelves remain level.

Movement, play and an element of risk or surprise are key characteristics of Arad’s work: chairs rock or roll; shelves flex and sway, spiral-shaped vases bounce and lights coil in a snake-like motion.

For this exhibition, Arad’s team have devised special mechanisms for some of the works to demonstrate
their range of motion but also to bring them to life. The exhibition culminates in a large area
featuring Arad’s own ping pong table, made from stainless steel, surrounded by a wide selection of
manufactured chairs ranging from modular sofas and screw stools to sprung chaises and upholstered armchairs of exaggerated forms. Visitors are encouraged to experience the works, sit or recline or play a game of table tennis.

Arad continues to expand the boundaries of design by constantly experimenting with new technologies. For Swarovski, Arad designed Lolita, 2004, a chandelier made up of 1050 LED lights embedded within 2,100 crystals and the first to have its own mobile phone number. Text messages appear at the top of the chandelier and wind down the ribbon curves, creating the impression that it is slightly spinning. Lo-Rez-Dolores-Tabula-Rasa, 2007 is a table made of a thin sheet of Corian illuminated with images using 22,000 fibre-optic pixels. It is displayed in a dark room for full effect.

The exhibition also features a specially designed set of eight floor-to-ceiling LED screens.
Dramatically placed near the entrance of all the upper galleries, each screen transmits a changing
display of words and images relating to the surrounding works, including digital renderings of chairs
or quirky facts about the design process and materials used.

Architectural projects featured include the rotating mountain-top restaurant and gallery Les Diablarets, Gstaad, Swizerland; the recently opened Mediacite shopping complex, Liege, Belgium;
and the Design Museum in Holon, Israel. Due to open February 2010, this dramatic new building,
Arad’s most ambitious yet, is characterised by five bands of Corten Steel which undulate dynamically
around the museum’s internal spaces.

Highlighting the significance of process and the innovative use of materials in Arad’s work, the exhibition also offers an insight into the development of objects from initial idea to end product. Rarely seen prototypes, from different stages of the design process, are displayed together with finished works. Short films including early footage of Arad at work in the studio or pieces being manufactured are shown. The exhibition also includes two workshop settings which feature pieces part-way through the production process, offering visitors a real sense of how the works are crafted and made.

Over the past two decades, Arad has collaborated with leading manufacturers, including Alessi, Capellini, Moroso, Notify and Vitra, successfully adapting his designs to affordable materials and industrial techniques. Initially a one-off piece made of sprung steel, Bookworm (1993), a flexible yet sturdy curving shelf with built-in bookends, was later produced in plastics by Kartell in three different lengths that could be endlessly combined and arranged. Whilst Vitra produces the now classic, moulded plastic stacking chair,Tom Vac (1999), the chair was originally conceived for a sculpture entitled Domus Totem consisting of a stack of 100 chairs made for the 1997 Milan Furniture fair.

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel in 1951, Arad attended the Jerusalem Academy of Art. He moved to London
in 1973 and studied with Peter Cook and Bernard Tschumi at the Architecture Association. He launched his career in the early 1980s with the opening of One Off, the Covent Garden studio he created with his business partner Caroline Thorman. In 1989 they established, Ron Arad Associates, an architecture and design practice, with One Off merging as part of the company by 1993.

In 1994 Arad first taught a class in furniture design at the Royal College of Art, London. Three years
later he was appointed Professor of Furniture and Industrial Design. He merged the two departments to create the Department of Design Products, a more open, interdisciplinary and experimental programme, which has had an enormous influence on a new generation of designers, including Paul Cocksedge, Peter Marigold and members of Troika and rAndom International.

In 1987 Arad participated in two important exhibitions and attracted the attention of the art world:
Nouvelles Tendances: Les avant-gardes de la fin du XXème siècle at the Centre Pompidou in Paris
and Documenta VIII in Kassel. Recent solo exhibitions include Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, 2008;
Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2008; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009 and Ben Brown Fine Arts,
Hong Kong, 2009.
More on Restless: www.barbican.org.uk/
www.timeout.com/
www.dexigner.com

Beautiful and practical products for everybody! This idea is almost as old as the industrial fabrication of furniture and interior decoration itself. The furniture manufactory IKEA founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad held up this ideal from the very beginning. The huge success and international reach of the biggest brand name in furniture worldwide is the motive for the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe to investigate how far the furnishing company has been successful in realising the promise inherent in the idea of “Democratic Design for everyone” propagated by the Deutsche Werkbund, the Bauhaus and their successors. FENOMEN IKEA shows some 250 exhibits, including IKEA products spanning six decades as well as many examples of massproduced goods and high-quality product design which were made long before IKEA and apart from it, such as design classics by Thonet, Panton, Henningsen and others, or the celebrated Frankfurt kitchen from the year 1926 and the most commonly found German living room in 2009. NON IKEA is the name of a special section within the exhibition devoted to the reactions of international artists such as Thomas Schütte, Tobias Rehberger, Morten Steen Hebsgaard and others as well as designers to the phenomenon IKEA.
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Ron Arad Rocking Chair
We asked some exhibitors  from 100% Design this year what their favourite design objects where, here is the first answer from Fukutoshi Ueno. www.idee247.com
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