OMER ARBEL

Biographical Statement
Beauty is never experienced as a determinate thing. We do not experience beauty directly, although it is always implicated in our experiences of the world. This aspect of the world's structure cannot be seen, cannot be verified, but is always at work, so to speak, behind the scenes. Omer Arbel's work attempts to define a path in this difficult-to-chart territory of human endeavor.

Omer Arbel was born in June of 1976; He graduated from the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in 2000. Omer collaborated with Barcelona Architect Enric Miralles in 1998 on three winning international design competition entries—The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh (First Place), The IUAV School of Architecture in Venice (1st Place), and the extension to the San Michel Cemetery, also in Venice (2nd Place).

Omer worked in the studio of John and Patricia Patkau in Vancouver 1999–2001, and there was involved with the Gleneagles Community Centre Project. In 2002 he started a small experimental design company, with a mandate of pursuing material and process-based investigations.

Omer's debut piece, the 1.1 shelf, was a finalist for a 2003 D&AD Yellow Pencil award, and narrowly lost in the final round of judging to the G4 iMac by Apple Computers. The 2.4 cast resin lounge chair won a Chicago Athenaeum's 2003 Good Design Award, a 2004 ID Magazine Design Review Honorable Mention, and was also a finalist for a 2004 Yellow Pencil. Omer was selected from an international pool of candidates by the 2003 Wallpaper magazine Design Review as one of 15 exemplary "next generation" designers.

Personal Connection
I emigrated to BC when I was a child. I remember looking through the window of the plane at the rocky mountains (a sight which, at the time, was utterly foreign to me) and feeling that this was going to be a new place for me—new in a more profound way then I had ever understood previously. Now, many years later, I find that on a fundamental level I still feel the same way about BC—professionally and personally. For me, BC is still a place which embodies new possibilities—the possibility of not being reactionary, of finding unexpected combinations, of creating new things, and new relationships—on every level.