Well Tempered Chair

Ron Arad is regarded as one of the most unconventional designers of recent decades. In contrast to smooth, formalised commercial design, he creates objects of an almost archaic and poetic character that consistently operate at the boundary between design and art. With the Well Tempered Chair, he designed one of the key works of experimental design of the 1980s.

Sheets of stainless steel of varying thickness, folded and connected with wing nuts, form an armchair that initially appears as a purely formal experiment. Owing to the material’s inherent spring properties, however, it offers a surprisingly comfortable seating experience, which Arad himself referred to as the “waterbed effect”.

The example presented in this auction is titled Object X and dated September 1992. It belongs to the further developed second series, in which an additional metal sheet was fitted beneath the seat to increase structural stability and prevent material fatigue in the doubly curved steel elements. Vitra did not disclose production numbers at the time; according to a dealer source, total production is estimated at around 150 examples.