A Non-Light Light
Bocci's 14p portable lamp (image: Fabian Frinzel).
Founded in 2005 in Vancouver, Bocci has become widely known for its experimentalism in design, creating commercial lighting and objects that are decidedly non-commercial in character. Instead of slick, precise industrial production, the studio’s creative director Omer Arbel delights in manufacturing methods that incorporate improvised implosions, mismatched expansion coefficients, and blended melting points, subjecting glass and metal to laboratory-style applications of heat, fire and electricity. The result are designs that are eccentric in both form and materiality: pendant lights where white glass has bubbled through an internal copper mesh, or brass coat hooks that extend in frills and loops like sea dragons. “In our factory, everything breaks,” Arbel tells me. “But the 14 never breaks.”
The 14 is the product that Bocci launched with 19 years ago: pendant lights that took form as near-solid balls of cast glass. Created through the purposefully imperfect pouring of two molten glass hemispheres – a process that leaves a distinctive horizontal seam across the middle of the pendant – 14 diffused its internal light through the dimpled surface of its material, as well as through the air bubbles trapped within the glass during the casting process. At roughly the size of a grapefruit, the 14 was typically sold and displayed in clusters to form lighting installations, but in 2023 Arbel decided to reconfigure the design to function as a portable, chargeable lamp: the 14p. “We have the 14 all over the place in our factory, as well as hardware like batteries,” he says, “so we thought we might as well try it. This was an incidental thing that happened as opposed to a more deliberate action.”
Nevertheless, portable lamps have become increasingly common additions to lighting brands’ portfolios, providing flexible lighting at a price point that is more accessible to younger consumers than purchasing multiple fixed lamps – the 14p, for instance, retails at $250. “As our ambitions have grown from an exploratory perspective, so have production costs,” Arbel acknowledges, “which does mean a narrower audience – we very consciously want to go the other way with this and make it as accessible as possible.” The product may, therefore, have been incidental, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t commercially beneficial. “We sold out the first batch almost immediately, so it has been successful,” Arbel says. “14 has always been my lucky number.”
Yet despite fitting a broader industry trend for portable lighting, there are ways in which the 14p breaks the mould. Whereas most portable designs are purposefully lightweight, the 14p is unashamedly heavy. “It’s like carrying a bowling ball,” says Arbel. “It’s solid glass, which is the reason it doesn’t break when you knock it about or drop it – there’s just a lot of mass there.” A glowing crystal ball, the 14p has, Arbel notes, a certain theatricality that sets it apart from competitors, becoming almost prop-like in its glazed inscrutability. “A lot of portable lights can be quite techy, whereas this is like you’re holding a magical orb,” he says, “and there’s really no correspondence between its mass and function, so it’s almost quite counterintuitive.” It is, in this regard, a classic Bocci product – a design that disregards conventional wisdom in favour of following wherever the material takes it. “It’s a light that kind of weighs you down,” says Arbel, “which is definitely a strange thing to have around. But for that reason, I like it.”
Words Oli Stratford
Photograph Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #37. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.