Jonathan Olivares

Jonathan Olivares was born in Boston in 1981 and graduated from Pratt Institute. In 2006 he established his industrial design practice, which is based in Los Angeles.

His designs engage a legacy of form and technology, ask to be used rather than observed, and are conceived in relationship to the architectural environment.

His projects include a showroom for Kvadrat (New York City, 2022), a retail shop for Camper (Rockefeller Center, 2019), the installations Brujas Training Facility (Performance Space New York, 2018) and Room for a Daybed (Kortrijk Biennale Interieur, 2016); the Aluminum Bench (Zahner, 2015); the Vitra Workspace, an office furniture showroom and learning environment (Vitra, 2015); the exhibition Source Material, curated with Jasper Morrison and Marco Velardi (2014); and the Olivares Aluminum Chair (Knoll, 2012). In 2018 Selected Works, a monograph about Olivares work, was released by powerHouse Books. Olivares’ work has been published internationally, granted design awards—including Italy’s Compasso d'Oro—and is included in the permanent design collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Vitra Design Museum.

In April 2022, Olivares joined Knoll as SVP of Design. As a custodian of the Knoll legacy, he oversees the development of future Knoll designs with a community of celebrated international designers.