Photo Gallery Good Press for the Cinquecento
A 12-centimeter-thick metal sandwich. Israeli architect and designer Ron Arad's exhibit "Pressed Flowers" is now on at the Design Museum Holon in Israel.
The show features six different Fiat 500's, which, despite being flattened, retain their recognizable shape.
Ready for the presses: The six Fiats sit waiting for their fate at the shipyard in Groningen, Netherlands, where they are to be flattened.
"Pressed Flowers" will run until Oct. 19, 2013 as part of a Ron Arad retrospective with the title "In Reverse."
What now looks like a wooden sculpture is an original form used to produce the Fiat 500. It comes from the Cinquecento designer Dante Giacosa.
The exhibition room in the Holon Museum. Across from the Giacosa form is a sculpture, the "Roddy Giacosa" by Ron Arad.
"Roddy Giacosa": Arad says the sculpture pays homage to Dante Giacosa.
Arad says each flattened car had an A and a B side, and could have been displayed like sculptures to be seen from all angles. He chose instead to hang them like pictures.
Before the exhibit started, Arad was visited by John Elkann, the grandson of Giovanni Agnelli and the current president of Fiat. Arad said Elkann's wife held her hands in front of her face when she first saw the smashed cars, but eventually let her hands drop.
The outline of an old Cinquecento on a modern Fiat shows how small they were.
The so-called "Rover Chair" made Ron Arad famous in the 1980s. The chair is made using a seat from a Rover 600 and structural tubing.
Ron Arad, born in Israel, has a studio in London.
