Page 114 - Sharp: The Book For Men SS21

IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, architect Louis Sullivan, the father of the skyscraper, wrote the famous (and oft-misquoted phrase) “form ever follows function.” Namely, a building or object’s design should serve its purpose. A house should facilitate domestic life. A bicycle should transport people. A light should illuminate darkness. Modernists, accordingly, stripped their designs of any flourish that might impede function.
Of course, modernism first fell out of favour nearly half a century ago — the cracks in its ambitions too large to ignore — but the idea that a successful design is one that fulfills a purpose remains. So I find myself momentarily surprised when Omer Arbel, co-founder and creative director of Bocci, readily admits that his lights, beautiful hand-blown glass orbs, don’t produce enough light. “That’s a common complaint,” says Arbel with
a laugh, speaking on Zoom from Vancouver one March morning. “They’re not good lights. [But] our consideration is that they’re not a source of lighting. We’re hoping to use light to discover what’s happening inside the piece, not to make enough light for you to cook with.”
Arbel is one of today’s great sculptors of light precisely because he’s fixated not on his fixtures’ functions, but on light’s more poetic qualities. “There is a kind of allusion to human emotion or metaphysical or even existential condi- tions that lighting evokes in us as humans. It’s different than furniture or art or architecture in that there is this moment where your spirit is engaged in some mysterious way,” says the Jerusalem-born, Vancouver-raised designer. “That suits me.”
To consumers, whether Bocci’s lights are functional or not is beside the point. Bocci is one of the most successful lighting manufacturers on the planet. Its fixtures are sold in high-end showrooms and hang in the lobbies of Ritz-Carltons and Shangri-Las and above dining tables and kitchen islands in cities everywhere. Commercial success, however, hasn’t slowed Arbel’s creativity. In 2013, he occupied the main hall of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum with a tangled, 100-foot-tall chandelier made from 280 of Bocci’s 28 Series lights. Each light, a distorted glass sphere housing a smaller milk-glass diffuser inside, was unique. “Every single time [one of our] craftspeople makes a piece, it’s substantially different from the previous piece and the next one made. Things like the weather or people’s moods have a tremendous impact,” says Arbel. Aside from its scale, the installation was typical of the work he’s famous for: grand but not mass-produced, inventive yet imperfect.
Later this year, Arbel is set to receive an honour that’s evidence of his stature in the design world: a Phaidon monograph covering his career — or, more accu- rately, its first act. In 2005, Arbel, then a young designer, was planning to show four prototype furniture pieces at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City. Three weeks before the exhibition, he designed a fifth piece: the 14. A pendant light made of two cast-glass spheres joined together, 14 made a splash in New York — not big enough for any established lighting manufacturer to edition it, but enough to motivate Arbel and Randy Bishop, a Vancouver entrepreneur who happened to be attending a different tradeshow in the same convention centre, to return home and found Bocci.
14 proved to be a blueprint for Arbel’s creative process. Arbel had originally envisioned the fixture as a single cast-glass globe, but his rudimentary knowl- edge of the material, along with time constraints, meant that the final light was made of two hemispheres, their edges ground down and stuck together. To Arbel, this union was a creative compromise. “The magic was gone,” he says. Nonetheless, 14 proved a critical and commercial success in large part due to two elements Arbel had never intended. People liked the horizontal seam bisecting the two hemispheres. And they loved the light’s glow, a result of the imperfections — the little rifts, folds, and bubbles — inherent to cast glass. It was an awakening; the magic of glass outpaced Arbel’s own imagination. “What I started to consider was: what if I build an entire practice based on the pursuit of these kinds of surprises?”
More than 15 year later, Arbel speaks of his role as a designer at both Bocci and his eponymous design studio, Omer Arbel Office, as an “instigator.” His job isn’t to imagine forms, but to uncover the surprises and beauty embedded within materials. For Bocci, this process begins inside the company’s sprawling headquarters and glass-blowing facility on Railway Street in Vancouver, right near the city’s ports. Here, Arbel experiments with materials with little thought to what might one day become of his discoveries. “We keep it loose,” he says.
“We’re entering into this era of human history where all we have to do is imagine it, and we can manufacture it.”
114 BFM / SS21 FEATURES / PERFECTLY IMPERFECT