Bocci’s Light as Medium: Twenty Years of Glass, Read Room by Room

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

Bocci names its work by number rather than by name, a private record of when an idea happened rather than what it is called. For Milan Design Week 2026, the Vancouver glass studio gave that numbering system a building to live in. Light as Medium turned every room of Bocci’s Milan apartment into one number’s complete argument, staged a year after the brand marked its twentieth anniversary in the same rooms.

---

Introduction

Bocci presented Light as Medium at its Milan apartment on Via Rovani 20 from 18 to 26 April 2026, during Milan Design Week. The exhibition was created by Omer Arbel, the Vancouver studio’s co-founder and creative director, and curated by David Alhadeff, founder of the New York gallery The Future Perfect. Each room of the apartment held a single, distinct installation built from existing Bocci glass series rather than a single showroom sequence, with the show remaining on view for a period after Milan Design Week itself concluded.

That structure, one room, one number, one complete idea, is not a curatorial device borrowed from elsewhere. It is how Bocci already organises its own work. The studio names every project by a number rather than a product name, and Light as Medium is what that private numbering logic looks like when it is finally given a whole building to argue its case in, rather than a page in a catalogue.

A brand that numbers its ideas instead of naming them

Omer Arbel founded Bocci in Vancouver in 2005 with the entrepreneur Randy Bishop. The studio’s first commercial success, the 14 series of cast and blown glass pendants, grew directly out of Arbel’s own material experiments rather than a brief for a lighting product, and that origin has shaped how Bocci has organised its output ever since. Every project is numbered in the order Arbel investigated it, not grouped by product type or material, which the studio describes as a chronological record of its own thinking rather than a marketing taxonomy.

The studio calls its working method Constrained Chance: a deliberate, partial surrender of control, in which glassblowers, chemists and engineers work within a set of guidelines rather than a fixed rulebook, so that no two finished pieces are identical. It is a philosophy built to produce variation, not repeat it, which is why a single Bocci series can look substantially different from one commission to the next while still carrying the same number.

The glass itself carries the evidence of that method. Air bubbles, density variations and small distortions run through Bocci’s cast and blown pieces, and none of them are corrected out during production. Each one is a record of the moment that particular piece was made, produced by the same unpredictable process that gives every finished object its own character rather than a uniform, repeatable finish. That is what Constrained Chance actually looks like once the glass has cooled: the visible proof that a human process, not a mould alone, decided the object’s final form.

The studio’s own team reflects that same horizontal structure. Designers, glassblowers, chemists, engineers and architects work as one collaborative ecosystem rather than in separate departments handing work down a chain, following guidelines rather than a rulebook so that each artisan’s own hand is still visible in what they make. Bocci now operates that structure across three cities, with production and studio space in Vancouver, Berlin and Milan, each one described by the studio as a space for creative exchange rather than simply a factory or a showroom.

Omer Arbel, from architecture to glass

Arbel was born in Jerusalem in 1976 and studied architecture and environmental design at the University of Waterloo before working with practices associated with Enric Miralles and Patkau Architects. That architectural training shows up throughout Bocci’s catalogue, and increasingly in Arbel’s own built work: 23.2, a British Columbia house framed in reclaimed Douglas fir; 75.9, a fabric-formed concrete hay barn that won a World Architecture Festival award in 2019; and 91.0, a residence on Galiano Island completed in 2024. Arbel treats architecture and lighting as the same practice at different scales, both governed by the same numbered, process-led investigations rather than by discipline.

Arbel’s recognition has followed the same pattern of blurring lighting design and architecture. Western Living named him Industrial Designer of the Year in 2011, and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada awarded him its Allied Arts Medal in 2015, an honour usually reserved for architects rather than product designers, which is itself a small sign of how little the distinction matters to Arbel’s own work. His architectural portfolio now includes 94.0, a 125-acre waterfront development in Bellingham, Washington, numbered into the same sequence as the lighting series that keep entering Bocci’s catalogue.

That background is what makes Light as Medium more than a product showcase. Arbel was not arranging glass objects inside rooms designed by someone else. He was doing what he does at every scale of his practice: treating the room itself as part of the material he was working with.

Room by room, what Light as Medium actually contained

The hallway held 147 Wave, roughly two hundred illuminated sheet-glass pieces in alternating colours and forms, arranged to build an undulating effect along the full length of the corridor. The stairwell held 28 Stream, cascading pendant lights descending in fluid bands that changed direction as they followed the building’s vertical space. The bathroom was fitted entirely with silver-coated pieces drawn from across Bocci’s back catalogue, and the kitchen ceiling carried a field of suspended glass tiles. Elsewhere in the apartment, new dual-coloured fixtures from the 141 series appeared in sepia and six further colour pairings, shown for the first time, alongside hand-blown glass spheres from the 100 series scaled up in size from room to room.

Arbel has described his own approach to the show as treating light itself as a material rather than an effect: “I like thinking of light as a volume, almost as if it were liquid being poured into different containers.” That is a literal description of how Light as Medium was built. Each room was a different container, and the same idea, light with physical weight and colour, was poured into each one differently.

The choice to spread several distinct series across one apartment, rather than concentrating the show around a single new product, is itself a statement about how Bocci wants its work read. Light as Medium gave an established series like 100 the same weight in the rooms as the newly shown 141 colourways, because in Bocci’s own numbering logic, an older idea and a new one sit on the same continuous timeline rather than in an old range and a new one.

A second act, one year after the twentieth anniversary

Light as Medium followed directly on from Bocci’s 2025 Milan presentation, The Numbers Between the Numbers, a retrospective staged in the same apartment to mark the studio’s twentieth anniversary since its 2005 founding. Both exhibitions were curated by David Alhadeff, which makes 2026 at least the second consecutive year of the same curatorial partnership at the same address. Where 2025 looked back across two decades of Arbel’s numbered investigations, Light as Medium used the year immediately afterward to ask what a single one of those investigations could do if it were allowed to fill an entire room on its own terms.

That sequencing is worth noticing on its own. A twentieth-anniversary show is normally a full stop. Bocci and Alhadeff used it as a comma instead, and Light as Medium is the sentence that came after it.

The title itself makes the same point about continuity that the 2025 show’s title did. The Numbers Between the Numbers pointed at everything Bocci’s own catalogue does not show on the surface, the process and years of investigation sitting behind each numbered release. Light as Medium narrows that same idea down to a single material, treating light not as the by-product of a finished object but as the thing being actively designed, in the same way an earlier Bocci show might have treated glass, or concrete, or metal as its subject. Read together, the two shows amount to a two-year argument for what Bocci’s numbering system is actually for: not cataloguing finished products, but tracking a continuous investigation into how individual materials behave once Arbel gives them room to misbehave slightly.

An apartment on Via Rovani, not a fair stand

Bocci has held a presence at the same style of domestic space in Milan since at least 2024, when the studio described the apartment showroom as playing “a pivotal role in the developing relationship between our brand and the city.” Alhadeff’s own curatorial reputation was built on the same instinct at a larger scale: since founding The Future Perfect in New York in 2003, he has staged collectible design inside residential settings across four locations, in Manhattan’s West Village, the Hollywood Hills, Miami’s Little Haiti and San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, on the basis that a chair or a light reads differently in a room built for living than it does on a plinth. The New York Times has described him as the foremost champion of American design, and his own account of the approach, that a piece is not there to decorate a space but to change how a visitor experiences it, is close to a direct description of what Light as Medium was built to do. Pairing that instinct with Bocci’s apartment gives Light as Medium a second, less visible argument underneath the glass: that a piece of lighting is only finished once it has a room, and a life, to answer to.

The opening days carried that domestic register through to the smallest details. The exhibition’s aperitivo preview included a culinary installation by the food writer and cook Andy Baraghani, known for his cookbook The Cook You Want to Be, folding a meal into the same rooms as the glass rather than treating catering as a separate event held alongside the show.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Light as Medium works because it takes Bocci’s own logic seriously rather than dressing it up for a fair. The studio has always numbered its ideas instead of naming them, treating each project as a dated entry in an ongoing investigation rather than a finished product with a story attached. Arbel and Alhadeff gave that investigation a building for a week, one room per number, and let each one make its full argument at real scale rather than catalogue scale. A year after Bocci looked back across twenty years of that numbering system, Light as Medium is what it looks like moving forward.