For Bocci’s first piece of furniture, a surprisingly comfortable bench called “25”, the aim was to forgo the use of foam. It should come as no surprise that for Arbel, design is an intuitive process that draws inspiration from a material’s properties and from the fabrication methodology. For this series, Arbel developed a glass-blowing technique whereby air is intermittently blown in and then sucked out of a glass matrix that’s alternately heated and cooled. The most recent addition to the Bocci portfolio is the “28” series: pendants that feature distorted spherical shapes with a composed collection of inner shapes. “This means that the individual pieces are allowed to rub and scrape against each other, seemingly without order, in the same way that barnacles do on a rock face,” explains Arbel. The “21” series has no harmony and instead relies on discordancies for its strength. Meanwhile, the “21” series of lighting pendants are produced using thin wall raw porcelain that’s allowed to bend and fold according to its own intrinsic logic, thus ensuring each piece is entirely unique. “This chandelier exists throughout a room, not at its centre,” he says. In Bocci’s first lighting system, the “14” series (all of Arbel’s projects are numbered in the sequence they were designed), the designer explores the idea of an “ambient” chandelier-one that has no central focus but instead creates a composed cluster of varying density. “Instead of thinking of it in isolation as an object,” says Arbel, “we discovered all kinds of interesting latent, mutant possibilities.” Bocci’s lighting systems challenge the conventional idea of a chandelier as an object, one that is sculptural and central to the experience of a space. Though he embraces mass production systems, he strives to create objects that are unique and often involve coming up with a manufacturing process that leaves plenty of room for random “imperfections.”Īrbel is perhaps best known for his work with Bocci and his exploration of the chandelier medium, seen from a conceptual architectural point of view. “I like thinking of architecture and design as fundamentally romantic pursuits,” explains Arbel. At both companies, Arbel aims to collapse the boundaries between architecture and industrial design and discover the creative potential of being somewhere in-between. Then in 2005, he and entrepreneur Randy Bishop established Bocci, a design and manufacturing house where Arbel is creative director. First came his own design practice, Omer Arbel Office, in 2003, blurring the boundaries between the traditionally defined fields of architecture, industrial design and material research. The 34-year-old Israeli-born designer apprenticed with several notable architects, including Enric Miralles in Barcelona and John and Patricia Patkau in Vancouver, before establishing his two companies. “By investing thought, formal intuition, craft and ingenuity into the objects that surround us, we hope to create things that come to be integrated into people’s lives in a meaningful way,” he says. Indeed, the distinctive quality of an object and its ability to transcend the passage of time-preventing it from being thoughtlessly consumed and, ultimately, disposed of-is the common thread that dictates Arbel’s design projects. Not one of the medals he designed for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games with aboriginal artist Corrine Hunt is like another. Omer Arbel’s name may not be instantly recognizable, but if you turned on the television or flipped through the sports pages of any newspaper a few months ago, chances are you saw the designer’s work dangling from the necks of hundreds of triumphant athletes.
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