Bocci

Bocci is at once a design studio, a research lab and a factory, based in Vancouver, Canada. It is best known for its blown-glass lamps, each one different from the next, which can be combined into large suspended installations.

Omer Arbel and the numbered projects

Bocci was founded in 2005 under the creative direction of the designer Omer Arbel, born in Jerusalem in 1976 and trained as an architect, in partnership with the entrepreneur Randy Bishop. At the heart of the work is a system of numbered projects: each of Arbel's ideas receives a number in the order in which it was conceived, whether a lamp, a building or an experiment left in the archive. That is why Bocci products are named with numbers. The first lamp, the 14, was made in a converted barn in rural British Columbia.

Letting materials act

Bocci's method is to let materials, glass, metal, concrete, behave according to their own properties, accepting chance as part of the design. Every piece is made by hand in the Vancouver factory by a team of designers, glassblowers, chemists, engineers and architects, and no two are alike. The most famous series is the 28, made of glass spheres: in 2013 Arbel hung 280 of them in London's Victoria and Albert Museum, in a cascade of light more than 30 metres high, an installation that earned him the Allied Arts Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

Bocci today

Besides lamps, Arbel has worked on architecture, sculpture and special projects: in 2010 he co-designed the medals for the Vancouver Winter Olympics with the Indigenous artist Corrine Hunt. Bocci has showrooms and studios in Vancouver, Milan and Berlin, where it invites designers, artists and architects to collaborate.

Sources

• Bocci – Story
• Wikipedia – Omer Arbel