GUIDE | Design
Give This Lighting Designer a Medal (he designs those, too) By Matthew Hague
Omer Arbel is undeniably sophisticated: a champion-fencer-turned-architect who runs Bocci, one of the premier industrial lighting design firms around (yes, you need to care about lighting design firms. His has been featured everywhere from Dwell to The New York Times). His Avatar-esque light fixtures—surreally coloured, beguilingly shaped and somehow bursting with ferns and succulents—are particularly covetable. While you’re figuring out how to incorporate his unique style into your space, we’ll let the Israel-born Vancouverite talk. Your designs aren’t like anything else out there. What inspires them? I find inspiration in the way materials behave, and the ways I have at my disposal to manipulate them. Each one of my 28 Series lights, for example, is subtly different in form and has a handicraft flavour because I used a new method in which the glass is cooled midway through the heating process.
As an architect, what are your favourite types of spaces to create? I am interested in spaces that have a measure of the irrational or the sublime. I think modernism was obsessed with cleanliness, lightness and order. For me, there is tremendous potential in weight, awkwardness and complexity.
66 SHARPFORMEN.COM / SEPTEMBER 2013
You were born in Israel, have worked in Barcelona and maintain an office in Berlin. Why settle in Vancouver? My parents emigrated from Israel to Vancouver when I was a boy. I chose to come back to Vancouver because I find it a strange hybrid city in many respects (culturally, economically, ecologically, historically), and, as such, it is ripe with potential.
Innovation, after all, always comes from the periphery. You used to fence competitively. Has the sport influenced your aesthetic? No. But I designed the medals for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games. It’s interesting because I almost made it to the Olympics as a fencer. I never dreamed that I would be involved in the games as a designer 10 years later.