LEGACY: OMER ARBEL

Omer Arbel, founder of multidisciplinary design studio Omer Arbel Office and co-founder and creative director of Vancouver-based lighting company Bocci

PORTRAIT: FAHIM KASSAM

GRAY presents this year’s Legacy Award to Omer Arbel, a respected and influential member of the Pacific Northwest design community.

By Rachel Gallaher

A Bocci 44 light fixture.

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Bocci 28 lights.

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An installation of Bocci 100 lights at the Wilhelm Hallen gallery in Berlin.

PATRICIA PARINEJAD

As a child with a creative spirit and a penchant for crafting things, Omer Arbel knew he wanted to be part of the design industry. He set his sights on a career in architecture, but once he arrived at university, he discovered that his true passion was not for the planning or sketching stages, but for the physical act of making.

“I quickly saw that my talent, and the thing that brought me the most joy, was working with my hands,” says Arbel, who is best known as the co-founder and creative director of Vancouver-based lighting company Bocci, which he launched in 2005 with Randy Bishop. “In retrospect, it seems almost random,” he says of his association with lighting. “I was making other things at the time too, but lighting is the one that stuck on a mass scale. What really interests me are the materials and processes. The work is the method that we’ve developed, and the artifacts produced are interesting but secondary.”

Originally from Jerusalem, Arbel moved to Vancouver with his family at age 13. As an adolescent, he was a competitive fencer who made the Canadian Junior National team and ranked in the top 20 at the Junior World Championships. After high school, Arbel studied architecture at the University of Waterloo, and five years after graduating, he established Omer Arbel Office (OAO), a multidisciplinary creative studio with a broad output that includes architecture, lighting, art, and materials studies (Arbel designed the medals for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter games, held in Vancouver). OAO and Bocci work synergistically, with a focus on experimentation and the development of ideas.

“Architecture and industrial design are not separate in our studio,” Arbel says. “Our process is to make work without a brief, then we sit down a few times a year and look at everything we’ve made to see what the works want to be. Some things apply to architecture, others to product, and some are too expensive and difficult to create.”

Bocci launched with the 14 pendant light—a cast-glass sphere that can be hung individually or in large clusters—and grew to offer various lighting options, from wall sconces to table lamps. The company’s popularity soared as homeowners and designers saw Bocci’s customizable lighting solutions as »

Designer Omer Arbel.

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pieces that blur the line between art and design, while tapping into the Northwest’s history as a glassblowing hotspot. Arbel’s unique approach to his work also captures the region’s creative spirit.

“Vancouver is only around 130 years old,” he says. “I enjoy that sense of youthfulness. There’s less infrastructure for really cerebral work, but on the other hand, the newness has a kind of optimism that’s exciting and refreshing. It’s a wonderful place to make new work and think about new ideas.”

In September 2022, Arbel used the annual London Design Festival to explore ideas surrounding materials, history, art, and creation, transforming the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria & Albert Museum into an immersive glassblowing experience that was part maker demonstration and part art performance. Titled Material Experiments, the nine-day project produced a series of 113 sculptures. The pieces were the results of a process in which glass forms are filled with copper alloy that causes the glass to shatter as it cools, revealing sculptural shapes that capture the moment of transformation.

“In my fantasy, I wanted to use objects from the museum’s permanent collection,” Arbel says, “but obviously they said no, so we used pieces we found at flea markets and secondhand stores.”

Rebellion is a throughline in much of Arbel’s work. But what initially comes off as irreverence is actually part of a deep-seated curiosity that the designer uses to evolve his craft and challenge entrenched notions about design. Currently, the studio has three residential projects on the books, and there are plans for a studio in Berlin and a five-story Bocci headquarters in Vancouver. When asked what keeps him working in the design industry, Arbel replies with a hint of incredulity: “What else would I be doing? I don’t really have much of a choice.” h

Material Experiments, which debuted at the 2022 London Design Festival, was a nine-day project by Arbel that produced a series of 113 sculptures at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

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The 64 candle—the result of a project by Arbel in which molten beeswax is cooled around a wick inside a centrifugal chamber filled with shards of ice.

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