#Omer arbel full
#Omer arbel series

('Spaz' is a term he uses.) And when I speak with Mark Dennis, one of Arbel's onsite collaborators, he describes working there as an 'amorphous' experience, full of 'huge but practical dreams.' Arbel's a man who smiles when he explains things, like he's always about to deliver a punch line. Yet Arbel admits to being a less-than-sober designer. And it's true that it has become difficult to pick up a home magazine where his lights aren't featured-his influence has, quite suddenly, become ubiquitous. Sales numbers at Bocci are under strict guard, but he says that figures have doubled every year since he founded the company in 2005. Watching him play with sugar beet foam, it's worth remembering Arbel has become one of the most commercially successful creative minds in Canada, and certainly one of the world's great designers of lights. When the foam hardened, we took the hay away and revealed these great cavities.' He feels around inside the cave/wall and I nod at the monstrosity it's typical of the work here, which always begins with thoroughly impractical exploration. 'We stacked all these bales of hay,' Arbel explains, 'and shot a polyurethane foam rendered from sugar beets around it all. When I climb up a strange industrial staircase at Bocci headquarters I find Arbel looking at a massive wall of white 'shelving' that more resembles a bank of miniature whitewashed caves. At Bocci, his design firm, these ambient lights are the moneymakers-the products that pay for a studio playground. Today he is 37 and stands beneath chandeliers of white spheres, glass echoes of those paper lanterns. There was no apparent purpose to this behaviour, except to see the thing he loved and know it better.

He photographed his installations obsessively and cut those photos up to make collages (à la David Hockney). By this method he gave himself a constellation that went wherever he did. In each new city, Arbel painted his bedroom white and hung these lights around his bed at every height (some just inches from the floor). Each move, he brought with him a suitcase stuffed with 40 white paper lanterns, cheap collapsible things he'd scrounged from Chinatowns. His conceptual approach, now fueled by an infrastructure for prototyping, fine craft, manufacturing and distribution, has given birth to a collection of conceptually driven lighting, furniture, electrical accessories and objects, which have since gained significant presence and impact within the design community.Between the ages of 18 and 24, the designer Omer Arbel lived in Mexico City, New York, Toronto, Rome, and Barcelona. In 2005, Arbel became Bocci’s creative director. Conversely, critics have noted that the practice’s built works appear to be inspired by an obsession with the object, the possibilities implicit in the process of making, and the intrinsic quality of materials. It has been said of Arbel’s practice that its industrial design works, in both limited edition and mass produced formats, appear to be motivated by larger scale concepts which can only be considered architectural. After apprenticeships at Miralles Tagliabue Architects and Patkau Architects, in 2005, Omer Arbel founded a multidisciplinary design studio focused on blurring the boundaries between the fields of building, industrial design, and materials research. London Design Festival.- 14-22 September 2013. Victoria and Albert Museum - Cromwell Road, London SW7 2R ‘28’ pendants result from a complex glass blowing technique whereby air pressure is intermittently introduced into and then removed from a glass matrix which is intermittently heated and then rapidly cooled.The result is a distorted spherical shape with a composed collection of inner shapes, one of which is made of opaque milk glass and houses a light source.ĭate.- From 14th September to 21st November 2013. Instead of designing form itself, here the intent was to design a system that haphazardly yields form, almost as a byproduct.

#Omer arbel series

He explains,Ģ8 Series is an exploration of a fabrication process which is part of our quest for specificity. The installation is made up of 280 individual 28 Series glass pendant lamps, each of which is handmade at design brand Bocci’s glass factory in Canada using a fabrication process developed by Arbel. Hung from the Cupola, the highest point of the building, the installation spans the vast height of the Museum, cascading more than 30 metres through the centre of the Ceramics Galleries, past the coffered ceiling beneath and finally appearing above the main doorway as visitors enter the museum. Here you are greeted by the 28.280 custom-made chandelier by Canada-based designer Omer Arbel.

Enter through the Grand entrance of the V&A and look up.