When lighting moves beyond illumination, it gathers, softens, and begins to speak. In celebration of NeoCon 2025, Luminaire partnered with Bocci to host an exclusive evening at its River North showroom, honoring two decades of the lighting brand’s experimental approach to design alongside the unveiling of the new 141 pendant, conceived under the direction of Bocci’s co-founder and creative visionary, Omer Arbel.
Titled “Light Years”, the event welcomed members of the design community, including architects, enthusiasts, tastemakers, and press, for a night of conversation, cocktails, and illumination. Bocci’s newest creation, the 141 pendant, was revealed within this immersive environment, with a presence hovering somewhere between sculpture and atmosphere, form and feeling.
NeoCon and Luminaire: A Living Forum for Design
Held in tandem with NeoCon, one of the design world’s most influential gatherings, the evening extended beyond celebration. NeoCon has long been a site of convergence, a place where ideas are not only presented, but unsettled, expanded, and reconsidered. It is here that design sheds its surface and becomes discourse, shaped through dialogue, curiosity, and the shared desire to understand how we might live more meaningfully within the spaces we create.
Within this larger rhythm, Luminaire’s presence feels both natural and intentional, operating within a more expansive field where design is a cultural language, capable of holding emotion, intellect, and imagination at once. In partnership with Bocci, this ethos becomes tangible, offering not simply objects, but experiences that ask us to pause, to look again, and to consider the unseen forces that shape our surroundings.
Omer Arbel and the Poetics of Process
Founded in Vancouver and Berlin, Bocci has continually pushed the frontier of lighting innovation through its deeply conceptual and materially sensitive approach. Under Arbel’s direction, the work unfolds through a process that embraces uncertainty, where materials are not controlled so much as they are collaborated with. Molten glass shifts, collapses, and settles into form, carrying within it the trace of its own becoming. Light does not sit upon the surface, but emerges from within, diffuse and atmospheric, as though it has always been there, waiting to be revealed.
This milestone marks not only the brand’s 20th anniversary, but also the enduring strength of its creative partnership with Luminaire, which shares a commitment to design as both inquiry and expression.
“As we celebrate 20 years of Bocci, we’re thrilled to honor this milestone with Luminaire, one of our longest-standing partners in the United States. The 141 piece embodies our ethos: experimental, poetic, and grounded in material exploration.”
- Omer Arbel
An Atmosphere That Lingers
The event drew leading voices from Chicago’s design and architecture scene, offering a space to encounter and engage with Bocci’s ethereal collection through texture, atmosphere, and the simple resonance of light in space. And yet, like NeoCon itself, its significance lingers beyond the evening. It exists in the conversations it sparks, the perspectives it shifts, and the subtle recalibrations of how we come to see.
Step into Luminaire to encounter Bocci’s work and embrace this ongoing dialogue, one where light is not simply functional, but felt, where material is not fixed, but alive, and where design, at its most thoughtful, becomes a way of sensing the world more deeply.
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