While Arbel, prior to the pandemic, spent half the year in Berlin, where Bocci has a satellite office, Vancouver remains home.
#Omer arbel house series
Injecting soda water into hot glass, for example, resulted in Bocci’s 87 Series thanks to a pearlescent shimmer created by trapped air. Most experiments yield nothing, but some prove interesting enough to pursue. Here, Arbel experiments with materials with little thought to what might one day become of his discoveries. For Bocci, this process begins inside the company’s sprawling headquarters and glass-blowing facility on Railway Street in Vancouver, right near the city’s ports. More than 15 year later, Arbel speaks of his role as a designer at both Bocci and his eponymous design studio, Omer Arbel Office, as an “instigator.” His job isn’t to imagine forms, but to uncover the surprises and beauty embedded within materials. “What I started to consider was: what if I build an entire practice based on the pursuit of these kinds of surprises?” It was an awakening the magic of glass outpaced Arbel’s own imagination. And they loved the light’s glow, a result of the imperfections - the little rifts, folds, and bubbles - inherent to cast glass. People liked the horizontal seam bisecting the two hemispheres. Nonetheless, 14 proved a critical and commercial success in large part due to two elements Arbel had never intended. To Arbel, this union was a creative compromise. Arbel had originally envisioned the fixture as a single cast-glass globe, but his rudimentary knowledge of the material, along with time constraints, meant that the final light was made of two hemispheres, their edges ground down and stuck together. A pendant light made of two cast-glass spheres joined together, 14 made a splash in New York - not big enough for any established lighting manufacturer to edition it, but enough to motivate Arbel and Randy Bishop, a Vancouver entrepreneur who happened to be attending a different tradeshow in the same convention centre, to return home and found Bocci.ġ4 proved to be a blueprint for Arbel’s creative process. Three weeks before the exhibition, he designed a fifth piece: the 14. In 2005, Arbel, then a young designer, was planning to show four prototype furniture pieces at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City. Later this year, Arbel is set to receive an honour that’s evidence of his stature in the design world: a Phaidon monograph covering his career - or, more accurately, its first act. Aside from its pumped-up scale, the installation was typical of the work he’s famous for: grand but not mass-produced, inventive yet imperfect. Things like the weather or people’s moods have a tremendous impact,” says Arbel. “Every single time craftspeople makes a piece, it’s substantially different from the previous piece and the next one made. Each light, a distorted glass sphere housing a smaller milk-glass diffuser, was unique. In 2013, he occupied the main hall of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum with a tangled, 100-foot-tall chandelier made from 280 of Bocci’s 28 Series lights. Commercial success, however, hasn’t slowed Arbel’s creativity. Its fixtures are sold in high-end showrooms and hang in the lobbies of Ritz-Carltons and Shangri-Las and above dining tables and kitchen islands in cities everywhere. Bocci is one of the most successful lighting manufacturers on the planet. To consumers, whether Bocci’s lights are functional or not appears beside the point. It’s different than furniture or art or architecture in that there is this moment where your spirit is engaged in some mysterious way,” says the Jerusalem-born, Vancouver-raised designer. “There is a kind of allusion to human emotion or metaphysical or even existential conditions that lighting evokes in us as humans. We’re hoping to use light to discover what’s happening inside the piece, not to make enough light for you to cook with.”Īrbel is one of today’s great sculptors of light precisely because he’s fixated not on his fixtures’ functions, but on light’s more poetic qualities. But for Arbel? “Our consideration is that are not a source of lighting. While Modernism first fell out of favour nearly half a century ago, the idea that a successful design is one that fulfills a purpose remains. A light, as it goes, should illuminate darkness. Design has been obsessed with functionality ever since the late 19th century, when architect Louis Sullivan wrote the famous (and oft-misquoted) Modernist maxim: “form ever follows function” - the idea being that a building or object’s design should communicate its purpose.
“That’s a common complaint they’re not good lights,” he says, with a laugh on Zoom one March morning from Vancouver. I find myself momentarily surprised when Omer Arbel, co-founder and creative director of Bocci, readily admits that his lights, beautiful hand-blown glass orbs, don’t produce much light.
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