Trained architect Omer Arbel founded Bocci in 2005, a Vancouver-based company specializing in sculptural lighting. More recently, Arbel has returned to his profession- al roots with OAO (Omer Arbel Office), focusing on a series of ground-up buildings in the Pacific Northwest. Photo by Fahim Kassam, courtesy of Bocci.
“The accidents are always way better than the intentions,” Omer Arbel says. For Arbel — architect, maker, benevolent mad scientist — those words could be a sort of motto. Of all the varied paths the designer has taken over his nearly three-decade career, none has proceeded linearly: beginning as an architect, Arbel found his way to the product side, teaming up with business partner Randy Bishop in 2005 to launch Bocci, an oddly Italian-sounding lighting brand actually based in their hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. In the years since, the duo have careened from projects like the arboreal 16 Series stanchion lamps (a group of them permanently installed on a busy Vancouver street) to the shell-like 21 Series pendants (unveiled last year at the company’s new showroom in Milan).
Along the way, Arbel and company have conducted countless experiments, some of which yielded results not quite destined for commercial sale — a candle too delicate to move; combinations of glass and copper that shatter as soon as they cool — but others have produced runaway sensations on the international market. These products include not just lighting, but innovative hardware and wiring solutions, as well as their debut: the 2.4 (Arbel’s work is all numbered in this way), a candy-striped resin chair that caught Bishop’s eye and led him to reach out to Arbel. “We’re like Elton John and Bernie Taupin,” says Bishop about their working relationship. “Sometimes we sit and have a glass of wine and just think how amazing it is we’ve gotten here.”
Bocci co-founder Omer Arbel in his Vancouver studio, where he experiments with various materials, from fabric-formed concrete (pictured) to floating lamps connected to a wireless ceiling-mounted power source. Photo by Fahim Kassam, courtesy of Bocci.
Omer Arbel, 75.10, fabric-cast concrete, Surrey Art Gallery off-site project, 2019. Photo by Fahim Kassam, courtesy of Bocci.
The most recent turn in their years-long journey together is the expansion of Omer Arbel Office (OAO), which finds the Bocci team designing a series of ground-up buildings in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a return, in effect, to Arbel’s professional roots, having spent years in a large corporate office before striking out on his own. “I always thought, if I could be an architect again, I would want to do it, but without the pressures.” The success of his and Bishop’s enterprise has enabled Arbel to do just that — and in grand fashion. As the Bocci team continues to fire up wild confections in their custom production facility, they’re working on buildings that are equally as inventive as any of the chandeliers and electrical systems that came before.
The office’s realized work currently comprises three houses, two in the Vancouver suburbs and a third on scenic Galliano, a forested island west of the city in the Strait of Georgia. The first predates the practice’s recent architectural turn: completed in 2010 for Bishop and his family, the 23.2 house served as a proof of concept, its bouquet of aslant concrete slabs offering a glimpse of what Arbel’s process-focused technique might yield at a larger scale. Just a short walk away is 75.9, an investigation into the possibilities of fabric-formed concrete that OAO completed last year. Its huge, tree-like piers — the rough, burlap grain of their fibrous molds still visible on their surfaces — serve as planters for actual trees above, the whole house subsumed into the rural landscape that surrounds it. The Galliano project is a more sedate meditation on the natural world, conceived as a sequence of bridges over a shallow ravine. On a site visit this summer, Arbel leaped excitedly around the wooden structure, pointing out its concealed sleeping quarters and peekaboo cut-throughs.
In 2024, Bocci launched 14p, a portable and rechargeable version of its best-selling spherical light series 14, which also exists as sconces, pendants, and floorlights. Photography by Kingsley Ifill for Bocci.
In 2024, Bocci launched 14p, a portable and rechargeable version of its best-selling spherical light series 14, which also exists as sconces, pendants, and floorlights. Photography by Kingsley Ifill for Bocci.
For one of their current projects, Arbel is once again pushing concrete to its limits, this time using a water-based formula to forge an outrageous drip-castle of a house not far from their combined factory, studio, and distribution hub. And halfway across town, the designers are filling a large warehouse space with prototype sections — “foam monsters,” as Arbel calls them — of a future exhibition space in Berlin, imagined as a vast, spongy structure with soft cavities for displaying their own and others’ work. The warehouse itself will soon be getting the OAO treatment: the firm is looking to move their offices to a new building on the site, yet another concrete fantasia made with hay bales that give it a mottled, geological exterior. “In this otherwise liquid form, you’ll see these endless horizontal cuts,” says Arbel, re-astonished at how materials can mutate and metamorphose, springing aesthetic ambushes on maker and viewer alike.
As a lodestar for his early thinking on architecture and process, Arbel points to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. “The world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen,” Borges once wrote — another motto, perhaps, for the Arbel approach. At Bocci HQ, the mad science continues unabated: current schemes include a floating lamp with a wireless ceiling-mounted power source and a speculative multi-house development in Washington State where each building is sheathed in nut-shaped wooden blocks like the hoard of some gigantic squirrel. “The way we do things is definitely risky,” Bishop says. “But in some magical way, things have just aligned.”
Photo by Fahim Kassam, courtesy of Bocci.
Photo by Fahim Kassam, courtesy of Bocci.