Omer Arbel, born in Jerusalem, is a Vancouver-based, 33-year-old architect and designer. He is the founder of OAO, an award-winning architectural and design practice, and Creative Director of Bocci, an innovative manufacturer of industrial design objects, furniture, lighting and architectural building technologies. His latest projects include the designs for the 2010 winter Olympics medals and award-winning interiors for Ping's Café, a Japanese restaurant in Vancouver.
 
Arbel's projects cover a broad range, from luxurious private residences, such as the nearly complete 23.2 house, to bespoke lighting installations such as the 28 chandelier, to the innovative yet accessibly priced electrical wall units of the 22 series (which retail at $15 per component in North America). All of Arbel's projects are numbered in the sequence they were designed. "It's a great tool for self-reflection," he explains. "It helps me to look back and discover what I am doing, how my ideas are evolving."
 
Arbel describes his design as an intuitive process, taking inspiration from a material's properties and from fabrication methodology. He embraces mass production systems yet seeks ways of creating differentiation, so that each object becomes unique. Often this will involve inventing manufacturing processes that leave significant room for random 'imperfections'. "I like thinking of architecture and design as fundamentally romantic pursuits," he explains. "People are either for or against ornament but for me it's not so black and white. With our work an object is emotional and intuitive first of all - ornament, or style, is useful as a way to focus this intent. Only after we have had an initial successful material exploration, and have been satisfied that it produces something that evokes an emotional response, do we apply design theory, formal intent and criticism to the project. Rather than an epistemology of pure deduction, we are interested in the creative potential of intuition." The same approach applies to Arbel's architectural designs, where he seeks the "invisible emotional qualities of a space."
 
Arbel does not subscribe to distinctions between 'architecture' and 'design', preferring to work within the Bauhaus tradition which saw the two professions as related. "Its an inversion. Architecture is involved in making space and design creates objects. Its fun to collapse the scale and see what happens," Arbel points out. Most of Arbel's architectural projects also feature dedicated product designs developed for the space.
 
Often, Arbel's designs will feed off each other. An architectural commission might involve working with a new type of concrete, which in turn inspires a concept for a new type of chair. An example of this process is the 8.0 chair, part of a small collection of indoor/outdoor pieces developed in collaboration with concrete manufacturer Lafarge. The chair is made from a new, high strength concrete called Ductal, which OAO applied for the first time outside a construction context. The extraordinary strength properties of Ductal allowed the chair to be extremely thin with a tenuous looking cantilever for the seat. The final design looks thrillingly 'impossible'.
 
In other situations, a piece of design developed specifically for an architectural project will subsequently be put into production as part of a new Bocci range, such as the poetic 14 series chandelier, initially created for the 15.2 penthouse.  The 14 is a reinvention of the idea of a chandelier in that it is ambient -- the opposite of a traditional, central scuptural concept. The 'ambient chandelier' concept could only be born in the context of architectural space making.
 
Although OAO has created three lighting designs, (the 14, 21 and 28 series chandeliers), Arbel doesn't see himself as a lighting designer per se. "I love working with light - it's an exciting and beautiful medium," he explains. "Light brings a powerful emotional presence to objects - its almost metaphysics."
 
To date, the majority of Arbel's industrial designs are made by Bocci, the Vancouver-based manufacturer for which Arbel is also Creative Director. Unlike a traditional European manufacturing company, Bocci works as a loose affiliation or community of experts, craftsmen, suppliers and engineers which varies with each project. "If we can't make something, we know someone who can," Arbel explains. The company's approach to manufacturing is therefore based on relationships rather than on specific techniques. Bocci might work with electrical components manufacturers in China, glassblowers in Murano, felt mills in Denmark, or porcelain ateliers in Japan. Bocci has created objects as diverse as a range of chairs made from resin cast in layers around a steel skeleton, chandeliers featuring 'crumpled' porcelain, seating systems in which pleated felt does away with upholstery foam, minimal electrical components that can be set to lie flush with wall surfaces and concrete paving systems. The Bocci approach to manufacturing allows an agile response to different briefs and supports the open-minded creative process that characterizes OAO's designs.