Material King

I WENT TO SCHOOL TO BECOME AN ARCHITECT and discovered I was really good at making other stuff too. Now I lead two intertwined sister companies, based in Vancouver and Berlin: Omer Arbel Office, my design practice, and Bocci, our contemporary design and manufacturing house. We employ 40 people in total and create everything from chairs and chandeliers to private residences and public art.

We don’t have a specific focus in terms of scale. We work on tiny objects that can fit in your hand all the way up to huge buildings. What links our projects together is our approach: The point of departure is always the material. We develop unique techniques for manipulating the materials. We’re like alchemists.

Our works are catalogued chronologically, in order of creation. We’re currently working on 94, a house on the Pacific Northwest coast. Bocci and OAO were both launched in 2005 with 14, a series of chandeliers. Its compositional intent is to thicken the atmosphere. In Mexico City and other very polluted places, you’ll see spectacular sunsets. That’s because the particulate in the atmosphere catches the rays of the sun crossing the surface of the earth. Compositionally, 14 has the same intention: It thickens the volume of the space, capturing ambient light but also emitting light from within.

Looking at it today, 14 has a strident, slightly immature quality to it—it’s like a beautiful teenager. We now have a much more sensitive approach to light. Buildings are more difficult. They need to fulfill many different goals, whereas an object has only one or two. But we aim to invent techniques on that scale as well. With 94, the house, we’re developing a way to manipulate wood we find on the land. It’s a beautiful site.

AS TOLD TO STÉPHANIE VERGE