Ali Tayar Archive

Ali Tayar was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1959. Tayar attended the Deutsche Schule Istanbul before entering the architectural engineering program at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. In Stuttgart he received an education in keeping with the modernist traditions of minimalism, functionalism, building system design, and prefabrication. Following his time in Germany, Tayar received his Masters of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his graduate thesis, “Design Approaches to Structural Optimization,” was published in 1986.

Tayar’s first job after graduate school saw him designing airplane hangars for Lev Zetlin Associates in New York. In 1988 he joined the team that designed the Carlos Moseley Music Pavilion for the Metropolitan Opera, a portable band shell that facilitated outdoor performances in the New York area. Tayar spent the majority of his career working in and around New York City where, in 1993, he founded Parallel Design Partnership with Ellen Levy, a close friend and early patron of Tayar who serves as an associate professor in the Media Studies Department at Pratt Institute. In 1995 his ‘NEA Table,’ a recycled particleboard construction designed while he was living on the funds from an National Endowment for the Arts grant, was featured in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition ‘Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design,’ curated by Paola Antonelli.

Tayar embraced the streamlined functionalism of modernist design combined with cutting-edge technology. Tayar’s furniture and interior designs, which were engineered to function as a “kit-of-parts,” were inspired by Fritz Haller’s modular furniture designs for the Swiss firm USM Modular Furniture. International Contract Furnishings (ICF) and USM briefly mass produced several of Tayar’s designs, including the Rasamny chairs and the Plaza Screen. Tayar’s architectural portfolio includes the interiors for Pop and Waterloo restaurants in New York City, the Omnia Hotel in Zermatt, Switzerland, and numerous private residences in the United States, South Africa and Lebanon.

Furniture and products such as Ellen’s brackets, the Plaza screen, and the ICON work wall were regularly lauded by architectural and design critics in the 1990s and early 2000s, and these objects were featured in exhibitions such as “Workspheres,” at the Museum of Modern Art, “Aluminum by Design,” at the Cooper-Hewitt, and “U.S. Design, 1975-2000,” at the Denver Art Museum. Tayar’s work is represented in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Carnegie Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal.

Sources consulted during preparation of biographical note:

Antonelli, Paola. “The New York Design Renaissance.” Abitare 384 (May 1999): 176-185.

Bernstein, Fred. "Ali Tayar, New York-Based Architect and Designer, Dies at 57." Interior Design, February 24, 2016.

Kellogg, Craig. “Texas Tech.” Interior Design 83, no. 12 (October 2012): 178-185.

Ngo, Dong. "Ali Tayar: Systems and One-Offs." New York: R & Company, 2017.

Tayar, Ali. "Design Porfolio." Parallel Design Partnership, Ltd., 2008.