LAVA Laboratory for Visionary Architecture

Tomorrow Never Dies in Newsletter „in medias res"

2012-02-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

Our exhibition has been extended to 13.02.2012.

http://medien.region-stuttgart.de/services/publikationen/newsletter-in-medias-res/

Bosse and Rieck speak at WAM, Austria

2012-01-29T19:36:00.000-08:00

Imagine Bjarke Ingels, a snowboard, a campfire and parametric mega cities at the same time! That's the World Architecture Masters according to Chris Bosse.

And in a couple of days time Chris Bosse and Alexander Rieck will be speaking at the next WAM in Ischgl, southern Austria.

Bosse will focus on recent LAVA projects in the Asia Pacific region and Rieck's talk is on Visions ‘Building 2020’.

Other speakers from around the globe include Jakob Lange, Jürgen Mayer H., Li Edelkoort, Assaf Biderman, Astrid Piber, Florian Gschwandtner and Robert Miles Kemp.

The WAM open 2012 is on 2 -5 February 2012. The first WAM attracted 2,000 participants from 13 nations.

A special event for the international architecture scene.

www.wam-open.com

LAVA talk tonight at 'Tomorrow Never Dies' exhibition

2012-01-25T00:33:00.000-08:00

Invitation to

"LAVA LIVE" with Amber Sayah, facilitator,

tonight at 19.00 in the Wechselraum

at the Association of German Architects BDA, Zeppelin Carré (courtyard), Stuttgart.

And our exhibition "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" has been extended to 13.02.2012.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Love LAVA

FINISSAGE "LAVA LIVE" mit Amber Sayah, Moderation,

am 25.01.2012 um 19 Uhr im Wechselraum des Bund Deutscher Architekten BDA, Zeppelin Carré (Innenhof),

unserer Ausstellung "TOMORROW NEVER DIES", welche bis zum 13.02.2012 verlängert wurde.

Wir freuen uns über Ihr Kommen und Ihre Fragen.

Ihr LAVA-TEAM

Bionic Tower features in Sudkurier

2012-01-16T16:06:00.000-08:00

Thanks 'Landscape Architect' magazine, Dalian University of Technology, China

2012-01-04T02:27:00.000-08:00

for putting LAVA's emergency shelter on the front cover of your latest issue!

we LAVA the 4 page spread inside too!

Re-invisioned Youth Hostel on Bavarian TV

2011-12-18T15:23:00.000-08:00

Berchtesgaden statt Abu Dhabi: Umbau einer Jugendherberge durch LAVA Architects

Sebastian Schott, from LAVA's Stuttgart office, presents the reconstruction concept for the youth hostel on Bayerisches Fernsehen.

http://www.architekturvideo.de/

Classroom of the future wins commendation

2011-11-28T14:06:00.000-08:00

LAVA and ARUP received a commendation in an Australian competition to design relocatables - classrooms for the future.

LAVA and ARUPs proposal was one of 116 submissions exploring diverse ideas for future-proofing relocatable learning spaces.

Relocatables are the decades old solution to changing demographics, remote community needs, and natural disasters. Unsightly, they are perceived as cheap and unpleasant spaces. This idea is upturned with spaces that are sustainable, practical, cost-effective whilst making learning fun and exciting.

The aim of the ideas competition was to produce effective spaces for 21^st century learning that are sustainable, integrate with the landscape and connect with the school environment, suitable for prefabrication and mass customisation.

The exciting solutions are on show from 12 – 22 December 2011 at the Wunderlich Gallery, University of Melbourne.

The Future Proofing School competition was funded as an Australian Research Council Linkage Project.

http://www.msdincubator.com/gallery/

L A V A wechselraum stuttgart exhibition

2011-11-23T23:20:00.000-08:00

Der WECHSELRAUM präsentiert in der Ausstellung „Tomorrow never dies“ das Büro L A V A – Laboratory for Visionary Architecture – das 2007 von Chris Bosse, Alexander Rieck und Tobias Wallisser gegründet wurde. Die drei Grenzgänger arbeiten nicht nur auf drei Kontinenten, sondern auch zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit. So entwickeln sie visionäre Kombinationen aus Hightech und Natur und finden spektakuläre und doch oft einfache Lösungen für ein humanes urban design. Was gestern Zukunft war ist heute schon real. Und wieder gibt es ein neues Morgen…

WECHSELRAUM Bund Deutscher Architekten BDA
Zeppelin carré (Innenhof), Friedrichstrasse 5
70174 Stuttgart
T +49 (0)711 6404039 F -602950
www.wechselraum.de

Vernissage 01 Dez, 19 Uhr
Begrüssung: Dieter Ben Kauffmann, Freier Architekt BDA
Vortrag: Tomorrow never dies, L A V A

Finissage 25 Jan 2012, 19 Uhr
L A V A live Moderation: Amber Sayah

Öffnungszeiten: Di–Fr 10–13 und 15–18 Uhr
geschlossen vom 23 Dez 2011 – 09 Jan 2012
zusätzlich geöffnet Sa/So 11–17 Uhr
14/15 + 21/22 + 28/29 Jan 2012

Masdar city centre features in German school program

2011-11-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

The city centre of Masdar in the UAE, designed by LAVA, is featured in a new brochure on sustainability designed for school children in Germany.

The brochure shows visions of the city of the future, and explores land use, energy supply, climate change, biodiversity, mobility, urban planning, demographic change and social integration as the challenges facing sustainable development.

Masdar city centre is presented as a Post-Oil City in a section focussing on urban utopias and trial cities across the globe.

Designed for school kids it is used in the context of education for sustainable development and was published as a special issue for the city Department for Environment, Climate and Energy Economics, Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The Plan interview podcast

2011-11-17T20:44:00.000-08:00

Chris Bosse spoke on the Adelaide based radio show The plan after his lecture at the university of south australia
http://www.theplan.net.au/?p=1113

great opportunity to exchange some thoughts with JohnByleveld and his colleagues.
JohnByleveldCreator of 'The Plan' on Radio Adelaide 101.5fm - architecture, environment and affect

Youth Hostel reimagined

2011-11-10T16:14:00.000-08:00

LAVA has created a new typology for youth hostels with the revisioning of the Berchtesgaden near Munich, Germany.

Gone are the daggy dormitory rooms and impersonal spaces of your typical hostel.

The new design features individualised rooms, bold colours, local materials and craftsmanship, and multipurpose zones.

The sustainable makeover includes a low energy facade, floor heating, and the installation of a bimass pellet heating system.

Built‐in furniture and integrated storage avoids the ubiquitous barracks style environment.

The hostel refurbishment was a unique opportunity to explore some of LAVA's experiments in space and apply sustainable technologies to an existing building.

And if you want to sleep in one of LAVA's funky new bedrooms check out the hostel site http://www.design-jugendherberge-berchtesgaden.de/

Shelter in Trama magazine equador

2011-11-09T16:22:00.000-08:00

Thank you Revista Trama in Ecuador for nice spread on LAVA's emergency shelter in #108!

http://www.trama.ec/espanol/index.php

Bosse debates the harbour city at Woollahra festival

2011-11-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

Chris Bosse debates the harbour city at the Woollahra Festival with President of the Australian Institute of Architects, Brian Zulaikha, Helen Lochhead, Phillip Thalis and Chris Johnson.

Chris would like to see more young architects involved in the future of Sydney's architecture, considering most of the current developments, Barangaroo, Frazers and UTS are all designed by the likes of Foster, Grimshaw, Rogers, Gehry and Nouvel, all great architects of the older generation.

Brian Zulaikha, President AIA, tests LAVA's Emergency Shelter at Customs House

The ‘Beautiful and Damned: Planning and the Harbour City' discussion is on Sunday, 13 November at 10.30am.

WAF winners

2011-11-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

Chris with some of the winners of the WAF leisure award...

and David Cook from Behnisch, Stuttgart whose Inzell Speed Skating Stadium won the 2011 WAF Award for World Sport Building of the Year.

Chris Bosse judges at WAF again

2011-11-02T16:55:00.000-07:00

Just spent the day judging 15 entries in the leisure category.

While most of the entries were of outstanding quality, including Australians Kerry Hill and WOHA, and a resort in Tasmania,

Lotus : Raas Jodhpur

the Prize went to Indian firm The Lotus Praxis Initiative for the Raas Jodhpur, a luxury boutique hotel in the old city of Jodhpur, which brilliantly combined old and new, showing a new way for contemporary architecture in the existing context of India.

A mention went to the Master Isay Weinfeld from Brazil for his resort in Uruguay and Tham & Videgård Arkitekter for their outrageous Treehouse, combining hi-tech and nature lifestyle.

Domenic Alvaro blitzed the residential category with his small house in Surry Hills, Sydney – I was on the jury with Howard Tanner and Genevieve Lilley that gave this project an AIA award.

http://www.worldarchitecturefestival.com/news-detail.cfm?newsId=209

WE LAVA IRAN/PERSIA!!

2011-10-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

Chris Bosse and Jarrod Lamshed from LAVA's Sydney office just got back from Iran where they gave lectures at the 14th Advanced Architectural Workshop in Tehran.

Organised by an independent group of Iranian architects the aim of the workshop is to create a forum for contemporary architecture and engage young Iranian designers with architects across the globe. Previous speakers have included Atelier Bow-Wow, Juergen Mayer H, Vicente Guallart, Bjarke Ingels BIG architects and Nader Tehrani.

Chris Bosse and Kamran Afshar Naderi

Our host was MAM Architecture Office and Mr Hashemi of Physical Development Research Center. We gave lectures on LAVA’s work, including Digital Cathedrals of the 21st century; Humankind Nature Technology - Building More with Less; and Digital Design to Fabrication - Parametric Urbanism.

And we were on the jury of MEMAR Award 2011- along with some legends such as Bahram Shirdel and Kamran Nader. While we didn’t necessarily agree on everything, we had a great time and saw some amazing work by a new generation of Iranian architects.

We held workshops at Bandar Abbas where our host was the Hormozgan Construction Engineering Organization - great place and great reception.

On a whirlwind trip we took a ferry, a minibus and a tin boat to see Hormoz Island, including a lovely old village with wind towers.

The architectural highlight was Isfahan, how amazing! Most people don’t know that Utzon based his Opera House interiors on the Friday mosque.

We had lunch at RYRA studio - best new office in Iran. Check out the work of Abbas Riahi Fard and Farinaz Razavi Nikoo http://www.archdaily.com/125915/barin-ski-resort-ryra-studio/

An architectural pilgrimage! Thanks so much for having us!

Vote for LAVA in People's Choice Award, IDEA 2011

2011-10-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

Voting is open for Designer of the Year in the People's Choice Awards, IDEA 2011.

LAVA's shell set for Myer [with Gloss Creative] is shortlisted and voting closes 18 November.

http://www.idea-awards.com.au/2011-shortlist/shells-architects-of-the-ocean-for-myer/

Bosse designs martian embassy in Sydney

2011-10-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

Chris Bosse is donating his time to design the fit-out of the Martian Embassy and Gift Shop in Redfern, Sydney.

The embassy is the home of the Sydney Story Factory, an exciting new initiative to encourage disadvantaged kids to be creative.

Bosse is working with creative collective The Glue Society and production company Will O'Rourke on the plans.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/movies/how-a-10yearold-boy-got-the-pm-and-mr-abbott-together-20111014-1lp7z.html

http://www.sydneystoryfactory.org.au/

World Architecture Festival discount for LAVA's friends

2011-10-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

Chris Bosse is a WAF judge again this year - and the WAF are offering LAVA's friends a special 25% discount off visitor passes.

Just use this voucher for the 25% discount.

LAVA directors Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck and Chris Bosse

at the 2009 WAF

We hope to see you at another inspirational event!!

Zu den Höhepunkten zählte eine Notunterkunft im Origami-Stil des Architekturbüros Lava.

2011-09-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

LAVA in Berliner Zeitung last weekend

http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump.fcgi/2011/0924/service/0011/index.html

Origami cave in Domus

2011-09-14T23:07:00.000-07:00

LAVA's shelter featured in story on Domus news

Australian and international architects highlight the need for emergency shelters in disaster zones and in the aftermath of natural disasters.

http://www.domusweb.it/en/news/emergency-shelter-exhibition/

Shelter moves to SCA for Sydney Architecture Festival

2011-09-12T00:50:00.000-07:00

Our origami cave is at Sydney College of the Arts

during the 2011 Sydney Architecture Festival (www.sydneyarchitecturefestival.org )

from 20th-30th October.

Emergency Shelter exhibition - see it this weekend

2011-09-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

The Emergency Shelter exhibition opening at Customs House last night was fantastic; great crowd, so good to see such diverse approaches from the other local and international architects.

Congratulations to Jun Sakaguchi and Elsie Attoh for organising such a wonderful exhibition.

The LAVA team had fun!

And if you miss the exhibition this weekend don't despair - its on at Sydney College of the Arts during the 2011 Sydney Architecture Festival (www.sydneyarchitecturefestival.org) which runs from 20^th-30^th October.

Our origami cave was only possible due to the generous donations and work of:

Builder and project management: www. Keystoneprojectsgroup.com.au

Recycled plywood: www.chhwoodproducts.com.au

CNC cutting: www.stagingrentals.com.au

LED Light: www.light2.com.au

Power: www.lionbatteries.com.au

Engineering: www.greenleafengineers.com/

Signage and Graphic: www.hesse-design.de

Student helpers from UNSW, UTS, University of Sydney

Exhibition organisation: Organiser: Jun Sakaguchi Architect and www.thearcagency.com.au/

Project management: www.redwoodprojects.com.au/

And thanks to the LAVA team:

Jarrod Lamshed, Verena Hoch, Klaus Hesse, Michael Mader, Angelo Ungarelli, Teresa Goyarrola, Chang Liu, Phillip Scherl, Guido Rivai, Sarah Regan.

LAVA - Laboratory for Visionary Architecture

Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck

Digital Origami Shelter opens tonight

2011-08-31T21:08:00.000-07:00

When disaster strikes how can architects help quickly, efficiently, sustainably and sensitively?

LAVA's solution is an origami cave. It features in a new exhibition opening in Sydney tonight.

LAVA’s Digital Origami Emergency Shelter is a concept for an inhabited molecule. The design is based on a water-molecule, referencing the Japanese Metabolist movement`s idea of prefabricated capsules as living space.

The base molecule can be shipped as a flat pack, cut out of local plywood, or dropped off by a helicopter. The interior can then be carved out of wood, cardboard, newspapers or other locally available materials.

Chris Bosse said: ‘the project plays with ideas of prefabrication and personalised inhabitation, as well as stacking of multiple units, while giving an opportunity for individual expression’.

Each unit contains sleeping space for two adults and one child as well as a little space for eating and reading. Battery or solar operated LED light brings the shelter to life, turning it into a lantern, a sign of hope.

The Emergency Shelter exhibition features shelters by local and international architects and will be on display at Customs House Sydney, Australia from 1-3 September 2011.

www.emergencyshelteraustralia.com

Thanks to Staging Rentals and Keystone Project Group for a great job!

LAVA's Emergency Shelter shapes up for new exhibition

2011-08-30T01:12:00.000-07:00

Our DIGITAL ORIGAMI SHELTER

is shaping up nicely

for the exhibition Emergency Shelter

opening at Customs House, Sydney on Thursday 1 September.

http://www.emergencyshelteraustralia.com

photos: James Lauman

Bosse on the Plan

2011-08-23T23:12:00.000-07:00

The Plan, a weekly design talk show on Radio Adelaide 101.5fm, features an interview with Chris Bosse tonight.

Bosse will talk about digital and biomimetic architectural innovations in the Beijing Watercube, and LAVA's Origami Tigers, Green Void and Re:Skinning - UTS.

The Plan discusses all things 'architecture, environment and affect'. Weekly features profile local designers, practices and thinkers from all corners of the built environment.

The Plan, Wednesdays 6-7pm on Radio Adelaide 101.5fm [6.30-7.30 EST]

http://www.theplan.net.au/

NB PODCAST NOW ONLINE:
http://www.theplan.net.au/?p=1113

LAVA's shell set shortlisted for IDEA awards

2011-08-04T18:26:00.000-07:00

LAVA's design for the Myer Spring/Summer Collection Launch 2010/2011 has been shortlisted under the 'event' category at the 2011 IDEA awards.

Created with Gloss Creative, LAVA's set, 'Shells, Architects of the Ocean', was a giant shell measuring 18 x 5 metres.

Using 2000 precisely cut pieces of pine intricately worked together, the sculptural piece was dramatically silhouetted with striking light effects. Inspired by the geometry of the triton shell it was digitised and sliced into buildable components to create a theatrical setting.

http://www.idea-awards.com.au/2011-shortlist/shells-architects-of-the-ocean-for-myer/

Photos: Rocket Mattler

LAVA's Evolution light in August issue of Handmade*

2011-08-02T18:52:00.000-07:00

LAVA's Evolution light is one of 62 designs featured in the latest issue of Wallpaper* magazine.

The August Handmade issue showcases the work of leading designers, craftsmen and manufacturers who were commissioned to create new products for the Handmade show in Milan earlier this year.

Photo: Tommy Voeten, 1212‐Studio

http://www.wallpaper.com/handmade/2011

Shanghai surprise

2011-07-28T21:42:00.000-07:00

Strolling through the busy airport terminal in Shanghai late last month we found LAVA's Bionic Tower on the front page of 'International Competition' published by Liaoning Science & Technology Publishing House in Shanghai.

The high-rise concept was designed in 2007 for a client in Abu Dhabi, and moves beyond the superseded modernist concept of extruded footprint and applied curtain wall.

The tower features a fully integrated intelligent façade that responds to its surrounding environment to create maximum energy efficiency and user comfort.

The tower unifies structure, space and architectural expression, similar to naturally occurring systems of organisation.

LAVA at the Sydney Design Festival

2011-07-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

LAVA’s reskinning proposal for the UTS tower Sydney, which won a UN partnered ZEROprize Award, is featured in a new exhibition in Sydney.

LAVA directors Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck and Chris Bosse

The impact of Australians working internationally, or based in Australia with an international focus, is celebrated in AU.THENTIC, July 30 - August 21 at the TAIT.Outdoor Sydney showroom, Elizabeth Street, Redfern. The exhibition is part of Sydney Design 2011.

The multicultural melting pot that is 21^st century Australia is a new global force in creativity across all disciplines with talents and products popping up all over the world. AU.THENTIC explores the way that Australia is engaged with the world by focusing on ‘visionaries whose work sends waves of antipodean influence across the globe’.

LAVA was founded by Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck in 2007 and works across 3 time zones and 3 continents.

The AU.THENTIC exhibition was initiated by Australian design studio one8one7, Christey Johansson and Marcus Piper.

http://www.au.thentic.org

And Chris Bosse will talk on More with Less at a sustainability networking event on Tuesday 2nd of August 2011, 6:00pm at Muse Gallery, Ultimo TAFE, 695 Harris St, Sydney.

The event, organised by Greenups, explores how design can be used to inspire positive change in communities, the environment and organisations.

More details: www.greenups.net

Experiments outside the box

2011-07-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

An eco city in Abu Dhabi and a smart 'home' on the rooftop of a Beijing mall are just two of LAVA’s visionary experiments.

Chris Bosse will speak on architectural innovation, invention, experiment and failure at the Experimental Arts Conference on Saturday 20 August 2011 at UNSW in Sydney.

Bosse’s talk is: MORE WITH LESS: Digital cathedrals and the ecocity of the 21st century

Bosse joins leading artists and design thinkers at the National Institute for Experimental Arts’ (NIEA) Conference to look at the experimental age, an age where ‘experiments are no longer conducted just in the laboratory’. Bruno Latour, 2004.

LAVA’s experiments outside the 'lab' include:

1. The city centre of Masdar in the UAE - the world’s first zero carbon, zero waste city powered entirely by renewable energy sources – with sunflower umbrellas providing the first mediated outdoor space in the middle east. LAVA won an international competition to design the city centre.

2. A Home of the Future integrates smart technology with a space that embraces nature under an ETFE geodesic sky dome providing a year-round microclimate. Located on the rooftop of a new furniture mall in Beijing, China it will be a showcase for future living, with nature, technology and man in a new harmony.

The Conference will look at: What is experimentation and what makes art ‘experimental’? What are the results of aesthetic experiments and why do we need them? Could artists invent new modes of experimentation with/for science? What are the differences between experiments and inventions; experiments and failures; experiment and innovation?

The NIEA at UNSW is an experimental research facility integrating the College of Fine Arts' research centres, groups and galleries.

http://blogs.unsw.edu.au/niea-experimentalartsconference/

LAVA screens new offices in Melbourne

2011-07-10T21:56:00.000-07:00

A new office fit out in Melbourne features screens designed by LAVA for Schiavello's Climate range.

The workspace at at 500 Collins St, Melbourne for pharmaceutical and medication delivery company, Hospira, was designed by interior architecture consultancy Artillery and used Schiavello's latest workplace program, Climate, for all 190 work points.

LAVA's 'forest' markers were chosen as the markers to accompany Climate; they were chosen in meadow, a vibrant green shade, invoking the rainforest.

http://www.facebook.com/workclimate

Photo Credit: Andrew Iser

Linden trees, amber and lady bugs

2011-06-29T18:53:00.000-07:00

LAVA’s competition design for a new airBaltic terminal in Riga integrated Latvia’s provincial beauty with the future of air travel.

Inspired by regional imagery - linden trees, amber and ladybugs - it is infused with global concerns: sustainability, ease of movement, environmental efficiency, commercial viability, connectivity and leisure.

The terminal’s ovoid form recalls the Latvian ladybug and appears to float above the landscape. Two thirty-metre high amber-coloured ovoid windows flank the main entrance that face stands of oaks and linden trees. Nature and artifice meld in the central courtyard with its grand oak tree.

The geometry of the terminal structure is based on surface tension. Services are located centrally, below the building, designed with long-term operation and maintenance in mind.

Sustainable features abound: low-carbon, geothermal heating/cooling, tri-generation, water collection and circulation for re-use, maximized natural light, passive design principles, flexible solar roof and even resident bees are used as environmental indicators.

This Hub of the Future embraces cutting edge technologies for the 21st century, with a design like a 'piece of amber on the forest floor catching a stray sunbeam'.

LAVA collaborated with Dale Jones Evans and Aspasia Sagiotis on the design.

Jury duty

2011-06-29T18:32:00.000-07:00

Chris Bosse is on the jury of the WAF in Barcelona again this year.

http://www.worldarchitecturefestival.com/judging_judges.cfm

And all three LAVA directors, Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck and Chris Bosse, are on the jury for the eVolo 2012 Skyscraper Competition.

http://www.evolo.us/category/competition/

Special mention for Green Void at Dedalo Minosse International Prize

2011-06-29T18:23:00.000-07:00

Green Void, commissioned by Customs House Sydney, received a special mention at The Dedalo Minosse International Prize for commissioning a building.

The prize is promoted by ALA-Assoarchitetti, the Italian association for professional architects, and recognises the client's role as a fundamental partner in generating high-quality work.

Chris Bosse was at the presentation at Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Palladio's city, this week.

http://www.dedalominosse.org

Reskin hits the news

2011-06-29T18:13:00.000-07:00

LAVA's award winning reskinning technology for the UTS tower hit the Australian media this month with stories on Channel Ten News (Sydney)  And on page 3 of the Sun Herald

http://ten.com.au/ten-news-syd

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/how-to-transform-an-ugly-university-just-dont-call-it-the-condominium-20110618-1g8un.html?from=smh_sb

And in the Straits Times Singapore, and The Star Malaysia:
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/8/3/business/9218006&sec=business

LAVA invited to think bricks

2011-06-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

Think Brick Awards

LAVA is one of six Australian firms selected to compete for The About Face Award.

The invitation-only award is a conceptual design competition challenging architects to design a sustainable, two-bedroom suburban home.

The brief calls for “architectural concepts that engage with the suburban by envisioning a future for the Australian suburb that embraces increased densities while accepting our established desire to engage with suburban life.”

Think Brick's annual awards program promotes the design possibilities of building with brick.

www.thinkbrick.com.au

LAVA creates miniature Panton chair for touring exhibition

2011-06-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

LAVA creates miniature Panton chair for touring exhibition

Chris Bosse sliced up the Panton chair as part of the Miniatures and Multiples exhibition at SGAR Gallery Brisbane 1st April – 1st May, 2011. The exhibition features 18 of Australian designers and artists who explore ways to create finely crafted one-of-a-kind and limited edition products not meant for mass production.

He chose a design classic that relates to current design and manufacturing techniques.

The gravity defying Panton chair c1967 by Danish designer Verner Panton was a radical departure from traditional design and manufacturing techniques. It anticipated the digital revolution by 30 years and is the first freeform, organic molded piece of furniture.

“I’ve chosen to represent this shape as slices, similar to an MRI scan in order to make visible its complex 3dimensional content. The chair is carved out of a box and sliced and the negative box is exhibited as well,” says Bosse. “The project retro-digitises the chair design, although it was the chair that preceded the digital design revolution.”

“What made the Panton chair so spectacular when it came on the market and what makes it so interesting today in terms of design history is not only its shape, which is as extravagant as it is elegant, but also the fact that it was the first chair made out of one piece of plastic. It exploited the possibilities offered by the raw material both consistently and to the limits of what was technically achievable.”

“In the nineties digital architecture was more interested in the generation of form, rather than its buildability, materiality, assembly. The slicing enables us to read the geometry like the pages of a book, slice by slice. It is also the only way to approximate 3-dimensional curvature in a 2-dimensional way and make it buildable at any scale.”

Bosse believes that today we understand better how to derive form from geometry, underlying geometries in nature, and incorporate buildability into the form from the inception, through parametric modeling techniques.

LAVA WINS SPECIAL MENTION AT WT AWARDS, MILAN DESIGN FAIR

2011-06-01T20:06:00.001-07:00

LAVA won a Special Mention in the Sustainability Category of the international Well Tech Award, announced at the Milan design fair.

Alexander Rieck accepts the award

The prestigious WT award, in its 10th annual edition, recognizes materials, products, and technologies that bring innovation in sustainability, accessibility and quality of life.

LAVA won the award for its Masdar UAE city centre project. LAVA won the international competition to design the centre of the 50,000 person city, parts of which opened last year. The city centre will include a hotel, shopping centre, cinema complex and a conference centred around a plaza of the 21st century.

Solar powered 'sunflower' umbrellas create the first mediated outdoor plaza in the middle east, inhabitable throughout the year. They shade the space, moving with the sun, and store heat and release it at night.

LAVA hopes that ‘One day all cities will be like this’.

LAVA's model of Masdar was on display with other winning designs at Palazzo Isimbardi, Milan.

more info:

WT award: www.well-tech.it/award

LAVA COMMENDATIONS AT 2011 Australian Interior Design Awards

2011-06-01T20:05:00.001-07:00

LAVA won a Commendation, Installation Design for two projects : Digital Origami Tigers and Myer Fashion Set with Gloss Creative.

www.australianinteriordesignawards.com

LAVA Desklight in MILANO SALONE 2011

2011-06-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

LAVA LIGHTS UP MILAN

LAVA was chosen by Wallpaper* magazine to create a light in collaboration with Philips, the global leader in lighting. The lamp, EVOLUTION, was on display at Handmade during the Milan Design Fair in April.

Chris Bosse, Asia Pacific Director of LAVA said: ‘the challenge was to re-imagine an object that everybody knows, to break up preconceived ideas. The playful reinterpretation of a sculptural table lamp resembles a plant rather than a desk light’

Rogier van der Heide, Chief Design Officer at Philips Lighting, said: "With the EVOLUTION desk light, Chris Bosse of LAVA has created a new design language in luminaire design. The desk light is also a great representation of Philips’ people-focused approach to lighting: a friendly product, based on a humanistic design concept while delivering state of the art LED technology, all of this in a very attractive way. The design posed many technical challenges such as thermal management and a complex double curved shape - however, close collaboration between LAVA and Philips has ensured that the EVOLUTION lamp exceeded our expectations in terms of design and engineering.”

EVOLUTION is inspired by the growth in plants. LAVA’s design and architectural concepts emulate the structural principles of nature such as cells and leaves in order to be more efficient - lighter, stronger, and ultimately more beautiful.

LAVA imagines the design at many scales, from a living room lamp of human height to a desk light.

LAVA has designed a number of furniture and lighting objects on various scales. ‘But design in that sense is scale-less, the scale can be transferred up and down. The organisational pattern of a leaf can be the same as that underlying a plan for an entire city,’ adds Bosse.

The Handmade show at the Brioni Palazzo celebrated collaboration with leading international designers, manufacturers and craftsmen creating a unique collection - cape suits, jet seats, bottled books, a very modern makeup kit, a pop-up barbers shop and a lunch box.

www.wallpaper.com/handmade

www.lighting.philips.com

Nachhaltig Bauen Baukultur im Wertewandel Düsseldorf 9. Juni 2011

2011-06-01T20:01:00.000-07:00

Nachhaltig Bauen

Baukultur im Wertewandel

Düsseldorf

9. Juni 2011

Zukunftsfähiges und nachhaltiges Bauen ist in aller Munde. Zahlreiche Zertifizierungssysteme und Gütesiegel sowie die Vergabe eines „Energiepasses“ sollen künftig die Gesamtenergiebilanz von Gebäuden transparent und kontrollierbar machen, und zwar nicht nur Neubauten, sondern auch zahlreiche Bestandsgebäude. Ein Thema also, das nicht nur Kommunen oder Investoren vor neue Herausforderungen stellt, sondern auch die Architekten selbst.

Location

Grohe AG
Feldmühleplatz 15
40545 Düsseldorf

Podiumsgäste

Prof. Bernhard Franken,
Franken Architekten
Annette von Hagel,
Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben
Max Schultheis,
URS Deutschland
Jan Störmer,
Störmer Murphy and Partners
Prof. Dr. Karsten Tichelmann,
TU Darmstadt
Prof. Tobias Wallisser,
LAVA

Forum „Nachhaltiges Bauen in Neubau und Bestand“ Am 7. Juni 2011

2011-06-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Forum „Nachhaltiges Bauen in Neubau und Bestand“

Am 7. Juni 2011 veranstalten Eternit, Keimfarben und Sika das Forum „Nachhaltiges Bauen in Neubau und Bestand“ in Berlin. Ziel des Forums ist es, die verschiedenen Aspekte des zukunftsorientierten Planens und Bauens zu beleuchten und anhand von beispielhaften Projekten konkrete Handlungsempfehlungen zu geben.

Neben einem Vortrag von Prof. Dipl.-Ing. M. Sc. Econ. Manfred Hegger, TU Darmstadt und Präsident DGNB, zum nachhaltigen Bauen und Zertifizierungen auf nationaler wie internationaler Ebene, stellt Prof. Dr. Karsten Tichelmann, TU Darmstadt, Geschäftsführer Tichelmann & Barillas TSB Ingenieurgesellschaft mbH, Praxisbeispiele aus dem Neubau und Bestand vor. Prof. Dr. Ernst v. Weizsäcker, Co-Präsident International Resource Panel, diskutiert die Rolle des Bausektors als Nachhaltigkeitspionier und Alexander Rieck (LAVA, Fraunhofer Institut) gibt einen Ausblick in die Zukunft des Bauens. Moderiert wird die Veranstaltung von Burkhard Fröhlich, Chefredakteur BundesBauBlatt.

LAVA on show at a new exhibition Home - Real and Ideal at Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney.

2011-02-10T22:11:00.000-08:00

The real and the ideal come together in home designs by the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] on show at a new exhibition Home - Real and Ideal at Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney.

HOME OF THE FUTURE

FUTURE HOTEL

LAVA is one of 19 architects presenting their ideas for homes of the future by the gallery as part of its annual Art + Architecture 11 show. LAVA has 2 projects: Home of the future and Future Hotel.

LAVA’s Home of the future is a showcase for future living with man, nature and technology in harmony.

Home of the future will be built later this year on the rooftop of a new shopping mall in Beijing.

An artificial sky dome will provide a year-round microclimate that opens up the home to a tropical garden filled with sun, light and fresh air, an oasis in the city.

The fluid design and organisational strategy based on the structure of cells is easily adapted to suit specific requirements. Visitors will experience 15 different living spaces, from internal/external bathroom zones, to kitchens flowing to veggie patches and outdoor decks, to sunken bedrooms with dream-inducing lighting.

LAVA’s Future Hotel was a demonstration project focusing on meeting the requirements of hotel guests using tomorrow’s technology.

The showcase, in partnership with the Fraunhofer IAO (Institute for Work Organisation) Stuttgart was completed in 2008. At 36.7 sq metres, the prototype’s infrastructure and services are integrated into a continuous wall system, the free-form outer skin creating the infrastructure that becomes the interface between technology and the human body.

A combination of fluid and edgy forms with hard and soft materials provides a contemporary atmosphere within a highly responsive environment. Innovations included anti-jet-lag lights, an active comfort bed, a personal spa area, an intelligent mirror and a large media display window.

Art + Architecture 11 - Home - Real and Ideal

10 - 26 February 2011

BOUTWELL DRAPER GALLERY

82-84 George Street

Redfern NSW 2016

t 61 2 9310 5662

Wed - Sat 1 - 5

www.boutwelldrapergallery.com.au

talk fest at LAVA

2011-02-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

the inaugural computational design talk @ LAVA

courtesy of Ben Doherty ( BVN) where held last night.

Stuart Bull, Verena Hoch, Michael MAder and MAtthew Austin

delighted the audience with insides into works by Arup Zaha Hadid Architects and LAVA

Computational design talks at LAVA

2011-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:00

Sydney #4 at LAVA!

http://compdesgrp.org/?p=158

Our three speakers this time are: Stuart.Bull from Arup, Verena Hoch from Zaha Hadid Architects, and Matthew Austin from LAVA.

Stuart will talk briefly about the use of multiple software including Generative Components, Rhino, Bentley Structures and Tekla Structures to deliver one of the spectacular structures, the Art & Science Museum by Moshe Safdie, within Singapore’s new Integrated Resort at Marina Bay. If time allows a brief presentation on the new bolted stone art installation within the botanical gardens by renowned stone sculptor Chris Booth, using Rhino to create the complex models of the layered stone stratas and fabrication level models.

Verena Hoch will be talking about about the façade design development of cairo stone towers and Bonn Symphony Hall competition

Matthew Austin will talk about a recent LAVA project (the Astana railway station competition) in respect to how MEL scripting and the Rhinoceros toolset were used to negotiate design outcomes, structural efficiency and the digital fabriation process.
the Talks are part of the series organised by Ben Doherty of BVN <Ben_Doherty@bvn.com.au>

Australian Digital Origami Tigers to Tour USA

2011-01-30T22:12:00.000-08:00

Two giant Digital Origami Tigers from Australia are on a USA tour as part of G'Day USA.

The Digital Origami Tigers will be centre stage at the San Francisco Zoo from the 17th January to 12 February 2011. They will then charge off to Dallas, Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.DigitalOrigamiTigers.com.

pictures

@Tim Griffith

The big cats have been on a World Wildlife Fund [WWF] global tour to raise awareness about the endangered status of tigers. Less than 3200 tigers remain in the wild.

The Digital Origami Tigers were designed by the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture [LAVA] and Customs House Sydney to mark the lunar Year of the Tiger.

“San Francisco is a perfect start for the U.S. tour. Sydney and San Francisco share a special city partnership, a similar spirit, topography, an exciting multicultural and especially Chinese community and … great zoos,” said Chris Bosse, director of LAVA.

The Digital Origami Tigers started their 2010 world travels playfully celebrating Chinese New Year at Customs House, Sydney in February, went to Kuala Lumpur as part of KL Design Week, Berlin for the WWF awareness campaign, and Singapore as part of the i-Light Marina Bay Festival.

The crouching Digital Origami Tigers combine ancient lantern making methods with cutting edge digital design and fabrication technology, bringing east and west together through tradition and innovation.

The Digital Origami Tigers are inspired by “zhezhi”, a Chinese term for paper folding, more popularly known by its Japanese name “origami”. Traditional Chinese lantern makers in Sichuan province, where lantern making has been taking place for over 800 years and local artisans were consulted.

The Digital Origami Tigers are the size of a boat at 2.5 metres high and 7 metres long yet weigh only 200kgs and use fully recyclable materials, aluminium and barrisol, a new light weight reusable stretch material. Pulsating low energy LED lighting brings the sculptures to life.

The project continues LAVA’s mission in lightweight structures to build MORE WITH LESS. Formed by Chris Bosse, Alex Rieck and Tobias Wallisser, LAVA has created and developed a wide range of projects in Europe, Australia, and U.A.E. They won an international competition to design the centre of Masdar, UAE the world’s first eco-city.

G'Day USA [15-29 January 2011] is an annual program designed to showcase Australia in the USA. The 14-day program brings exciting new business, art, education and tourism events to eight US cities.

More information:

LAVA - Jane Silversmith, jane_silversmith@mac.com +61 408 029 118

G’Day Australia – Evan Mistills Evan.Mistills@business.nsw.gov.au

WEBSITES

http://www.l-a-v-a.net/

www.digitalorigamitigers.com

http://www.australia-week.com/

ANIMATION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc0BFfmcXTI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QYbYm1QFv8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cZE_AgPb-k

PRACTICE CREDITS

Concept: Jennifer Kwok, Customs House and Chris Bosse, LAVA

Fabrication: Sydney Stretch Ceilings

USA TOUR

Exhibition management company: TrinityEight PR. TrinityEight is a company Dedicated to The Arts. Parasoled under the TrinityEight brand are the culturally enlightened companies 38PR and 38ART. 38PR is the first modern public relations, marketing, cultural development, and exhibition management firm devoted specifically to the arts.

PHOTO CREDITS

SYDNEY – Peter Murphy

BERLIN – David Biene

SINGAPORE - Patrick Bingham Hall

SAN FRANCISCO @Tim Griffith

TOUR DATES

Customs House, Sydney, Australia; February 2010

KL Design Week Kuala Lumpur Malaysia; May 2010

WWF launch Hauptbahnhof Berlin, August 2010

i-light Marina Bay, Smart Lights Festival Singapore October – November 2010

San Francisco Zoo, California, January 17th, 2011 - February 12th, 2011

Dallas, Texas - dates TBC

Chicago, Illinois - dates TBC

New York City NY - dates TBC

Washington, D.C. - dates TBC

LAVA BOOK NOW IN SHOPS

2010-12-08T21:41:00.000-08:00

Lava Laboratory for Visionary Architecture - Mono-Mono - Welcome to BigBros Workshop Store http://store.bigbrosworkshop.com/?store=42&categories=8328&keywords=&item=312641

Lava Laboratory for Visionary Architecture # T000053 USD 25.00

Quantity

Bookmark | Tell Your Friends

Share on

LAVA at TEDX

2010-12-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

http://tedxberlin.de/2010/09/tobias-wallisser/

On November 15th, Berlin was treated to the 1000th TED event worldwide, as the German capital held its second major TEDx conference: TEDx Berlin 2010. The symposium marked a milestone in the history of the TED organization, proving once more that ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ are a currency with enormously high value.
Read more »

Book announcement: Re-inventing Construction

2010-12-08T20:44:00.000-08:00

LAVA is included in the latest book
Inspired by the 3rd International Holcim Forum 2010, Mexico City

How must architecture, engineering and construction evolve so that considerations of sustainability are automatically embedded in the way that the built environment is designed, constructed, used and recycled? This challenging question was the nucleus of the 3rd International Holcim Forum held in Mexico City and inspiration for Re-inventing Construction. The 440-page book features articles and case studies by 38 internationally renowned architects, engineers and scholars including Keller Easterling, Bjarke Ingels, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Amory Lovins, Elinor Ostrom, Jeremy Rifkin, Michel Rojkind, Werner Sobek, Michael Sorkin, and many others.

The urgent demands of climate change, depleted raw material resources, radical demographic shifts and urbanization require both knowledge and new technologies be applied to transform the built environment. Re-inventing Construction asserts two complementary approaches to achieve this metamorphosis: the book gives an overview of new construction technologies, material research, energy concepts, as well as ownership models and development strategies in architecture – but also rediscovers the wisdom of vernacular architecture with its smart use of locally-available building materials, building methods and typologies, as well as the ingenious understanding of natural principles.

Wiping off the dust of any quaint technocratic allure formerly associated with construction, this book celebrates its re-invention with an engaging contribution to research and practice. The book also presents an illustrated index containing more than 230 glossary entries that take the reader on an eye-opening journey across the expanding universe of construction.

The book unfolds this differentiated understanding of construction across four central issues: how architecture and urbanism are affected by the shift to renewable energy; embracing the specificity of any project without simplifying its complexity to tried and tested models; conceptualizing the material assets of the built environment which are the resources of future building; and, delineating the various agents, interest groups, and users who are instrumental in current processes of transformation in construction.

Further information on the Holcim Forum is available at
www.holcimforum.org

November 18, 2010 – Zurich/Switzerland

La Rinascente Window digital Origami Milano

2010-12-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

LAVA has created a window installation for the famous Italian department store la Rinascente for its Contemporary Christmas Art windows.

LAVA’s window installation is an origami coral reef using 1500 recycled and recyclable cardboard molecules that explores the intelligence of natural and architectural systems.

The sculpture plays with space by climbing up walls and arching over to create coral caves. Based on the geometrical structures of sea foam and corals, the colourful reef comes to life through dynamic lighting and sound.

Chris Bosse is one of seven designers from around the world to be commissioned to create a window – others are Kirsten Hassenfeld, Gyngy Laky, Andrea Mastrovito, Satsuki Oishi, Richard Sweeney, Margherita Marchioni and Tjep.

The store windows are at la Rinascente's Piazza Duomo store, in the centre of Milan, design capital of the world. This is the first time la Rinascente have commissioned artists to do Christmas windows.

The installation shows how a particular module, copied from nature, can generate architectural space, and how the intelligence of the smallest unit dictates the intelligence of the overall system.

Ecosystems such as coral reefs act as a metaphor for an architecture where the individual components interact in symbiosis to create an environment.

Bosse says: "In urban terms, the smallest homes, the spaces they create, the energy they use, the heat and moisture they absorb, multiply into a bigger organisational system, whose sustainabilty depends on their intelligence".
Current trends in parametric modeling, digital fabrication and material-science were applied to the space-filling installation.

Team:
LAVA
Chris Bosse
Roberto Salvà
Omar Basilico
Victor Trentini
Anna Romani
Angelo Ungarelli

Art direction: Independent Ideas.
Lighting: ERCO, Sydney/Milan

Photography:
Filippo Patrese

LAVA LIGHTS UP for ARTEMIDE

2010-12-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

LAVA LIGHTS UP
LAVA’s new installation LIGHT VOID is touring in an international exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Artemide, the famous Italian lighting company.
LAVA was one of 50 architects/designers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland invited to design a light installation. The designers were each given a blank, black box 35 x 35 x 35 cm in which to create a personal, visionary work about light for ‘DAS "BLACK BOX" PROJECT’. The only criteria were architectural quality and the use of light. Artemide says the results are 'philosophical, emotional, and mysterious light impressions'.

LAVA's LIGHT VOID is a minimal surface structure digitally modeled and prototyped. The transparent object articulates an imaginary space carved out by light entering through holes in the surface of the box.

LIGHT VOID continues LAVA’s investigations into creating space applying the principles of geometry found in nature.

LAVA’s piece is part of the international exhibition touring Europe in 2010/2011 and will feature in a new publication later this year 'Fifty years Artemide' published by Jovis Verlag. Shows have already been held in Frankfurt, Vienna and Zurich and are planned for Berlin and Munich in 2011.

Artemide was founded by Ernesto Gismondi and Sergio Mazza.

LAVA TAKES SUSTAINABILITY TO SCHOOLS

2010-12-08T20:21:00.000-08:00

LAVA TAKES SUSTAINABILITY TO SCHOOLS
LAVA'S amazing renderings for the eco city centre at Masdar in the UAE were the backdrop for the recent State Drama Festival produced by the Arts Unit, NSW Department of Education and Training. The performances were at the Seymour Centre on 28th - 29th October and featured performances on movement and a dialogue about future cities by primary aged kids from across the state.

Designed by Stukel Stone architects the set featured large scale drawings of the sunflower umbrellas opening and closing in the piazza in Masdar. Bosse said: 'this was a wonderful way to engage young kids with environmentally responsible solutions for the cities of their future.'

Patrick Bingham-Hall took the best photos ever last night!

2010-11-05T21:46:00.000-07:00

Patrick Bingham-Hall took the best photos ever last night!

patrick@pesaropublishing.com

tigers in singapore

2010-11-02T00:10:00.001-07:00

The i Light Marina Bay festival, Asia’s First Sustainable Light Art Festival

The free outdoor event directed by Mary-Anne Kyriakou runs from 15 October to 7 November 2010, and features LAVA's giant digital origami tigers.

The big cats playfully celebrated Chinese New Year on the forecourt of Customs House, Sydney in February 2010, and went on to tour Kuala Lumpur, and Berlin as part of a WWF Year of the Tiger awareness campaign.

The crouching digital tigers combine ancient lantern making methods with cutting edge digital design and fabrication technology, bringing east and west together through tradition and innovation.

panorama sunset

singapore morning tv interview

The tigers are inspired by “zhezhi”, a Chinese term for paper folding, more popularly known by its Japanese name “origami”. Traditional Chinese lantern makers in Sichuan province, where lantern making has been taking place for over 800 years.

The tigers are the size of a boat at 2.5 metres high and 7 metres long yet weigh only 200kgs and use fully recyclable materials, aluminium and barrisol, a new light weight reusable stretch material. Pulsating low energy LED lighting brings the sculptures to life.

The tigers are a project by Chris Bosse of LAVA and Jennifer Kwok of Customs House.

they made it!!!!!!!!!!!!! the LAVA tigers are in Berlin

2010-08-10T07:48:00.000-07:00

Digital tigers on WWF world tour

Sydney’s digital origami tigers have been adopted by the World Wild Fund for Nature (WWF) for their international Year of the Tiger campaign.

The official launch of the giant origami tigers was at Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s central station, where they will be on display until 30^th August.Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck opened the exhbition with the WWF.

The Tigers world trip to raise awareness for tiger conservation will continue to Singapore, where they will be at the Smart Light Festival in October.

Earlier this year they ushered in the Chinese New Year at Customs House Sydney and created a roar at KL design week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in May.

Stefan Ziegler, WWF Tiger expert said. “The giant origami tigers are a powerful eye catcher. WWF is very pleased that they raise public awareness for tiger conservation. There are only 3,200 tigers left in the wild and we need to act now to save the greatest cat for the future.”

The giant digital origami tigers fuse ancient lantern making methods with cutting edge design and fabrication technology, bringing tradition and innovation, east and west together.

The crouching tigers were designed by multinational architectural practice LAVA with jennifer Kwok , customs house sydney, and are the size of a truck at 2.5 metres high and 7 metres long, yet weigh only 200kgs.

Made of fully recyclable materials, aluminium and barrisol, the big cats are brought to life with low energy LED lighting.

LAVA designs screens for Schiavello

2010-08-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

6 August 2010

LAVA designs screens for Schiavello

Soap bubbles, coral reefs and trees will soon be at an office near you.

Chris Bosse has created a series of distinctive geometric desk screens for Climate, a new office furniture system produced by Schiavello. LAVA’s three Climate screens, with matching office supplies, will be launched at Saturday in Design in Melbourne on Saturday 07 August 2010.

Drawing on the design and structures of trees, soap bubbles, coral reefs and spider webs they bring a quirky yet practical feature to the workplace.

“Inspired by the efficiency and beauty in nature’s geometries, we created a playful sliding screen that allows the porosity or openness to be controlled, providing flexibility in creating work spaces,” says Bosse.

“Developed using a digital workflow, the sliding animates the screens and allows them to create additional patterns, in line with the LAVA philosophy of creating more with less.”

ClimateÒ is Schiavello’s latest answer to future workplace design. The holistic approach shapes a new work scene that promotes empowerment, collaboration and diversity within the workplace. Five designers were commissioned to design elements: LAVA, fashion designers Akira Isogawa and Melbourne-based S!X (Denise Sprynskyj & Peter Boyd), and Italian colour and textiles designer Giulio Ridolfo.

Bosse will also collaborate with other Climate designers to create an improvised installation on Saturday 07 August 2010.

The showcase spaces at Saturday in Design reference previous LAVA architectural projects:

1. LAVA reef – is bright orange, recalling the Digital Origami Tigers which fused ancient Chinese lantern making methods with origami and the latest digital design and fabrication technology.

2. LAVA forest - the lime green membrane of Green Void replicated the structure of a tree with minimal surface tension.

Designed with the end user in mind, Climate grows organically with the user’s needs thanks to its highly intelligent malleable design that allows teams and individuals to adjust their space quickly .

Saturday in Design

9.00am to 5.00pm, Saturday 07 August 2010

Schiavello Showroom

31-49 Queensbridge Street, Southbank, Melbourne 3006

www.workclimate.com http://www.saturdayindesign.com.au/

WE LAVA MYER

2010-08-06T02:13:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Hawkins struts out of seashell sculpture for spring/summer show

Summer, sand and seashells were the inspiration for the set designed by LAVA`s Chris Bosse and Amanda Henderson Gloss Creative for the Myer Spring Summer11 Collections Launch in Sydney Australia last night.

The giant seashell set was a sand-coloured plywood installation 18m long and 5m high, digitally designed and CNC cut and consisted of 2000 pieces put together like a puzzle.

pictures by Rocket Mattler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-VnyeIj4CY

“We essentially used the geometry of a triton shell which is strictly mathematical but occurs in many beautiful manifestations. We digitised the idea and sliced it into buildable components. The models moved through the shell and then onto the catwalk,” said Bosse.

The seashell theme allowed many moods, from sea goddesses at sunrise to sirens at sunset, creating another world for the thirty Australian designers on show.

“The shell is reflective of both the blonde colours of this season and the bleached beauty of the Australian beach. I love shells for their organic shapes, they really are the ‘architects of the ocean’ with their efficient and beautiful mathematical formulae,” said Henderson.

The three-dimensional installation is another collaboration between Chris Bosse and Amanda Henderson. They worked together on the award-winning bubble Melbourne Cup Moet Marquee in 2005.

The Myer Collections Launch SS11 took place at the Eveleigh Carriageworks in Sydney on 5 August 2010. Myer’s vision is to create original creative environments for its fashion launches reflecting its own innovative approach to design.

Creative Concept: Amanda Henderson, Gloss

Architectural Co-creator: Chris Bosse, LAVA

Production: Rizer

Manufacturing: Staging Rentals

Laboratory for Visionary Architecture Asia Pacific

Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser, Alexander Rieck

with Jarrod Lamshed, Erik Escalante

www.l-a-v-a.net

Sydney – Stuttgart- Abu Dhabi – Shanghai

For media images and interviews contact:

Jane Silversmith, +61 [0] 408 029 118, jane_silversmith@mac.com

and links to media coverage

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/jennifer-hawkins-at-the-helm-for-flirtation-with-nudity/story-e6frg6nf-1225901835817

http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/hawkos-golden-sirens-come-out-of-their-shells-for-slick-show-20100805-11kuz.html?autostart=1

[also video on line of channel 10 news] and [great shots of shell online]

http://www.couriermail.com.au/lifestyle/fashion/nude-tones-flesh-out-show-as-australian-fashion-dominates-myer-season-launch/story-e6frer4o-1225901842678

http://www.perthnow.com.au/lifestyle/myer-fashion-season-kicks-off-with-a-bang/story-e6frg3s3-1225901852561 [ you get a good mention]

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/entertainment/confidential/its-jens-new-season-sneak-peek/story-e6fredqc-1225901303765

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/akira-isogawa-first-designer-to-quit-david-jones-after-sex-case/story-e6frez7r-1225901886612

lava on future story

2010-08-03T01:11:00.000-07:00

FutureStory is an engagement project of Live Futures 2020 and is part of Sydney Design 2010, presented by the Powerhouse Museum. This project is about gathering future stories from Sydneysiders.

Through short videos of people sharing their story, FutureStory will inspire Sydneysiders to comment on other stories. Responses can be submitted using different forms of media such as written or video responses. After moderation all content will be displayed at participating venues, on www.futurestory.com.au and at the Live Futures 2020 Festival on 14th August 2010.

PLASTIKI meets plastic house

2010-07-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

we attended an inspirational breakfast discussion this morning with David Rothschild.

David sailed accross the pacific in his catamaran made form recycled plastic bottles in order to raise awareness for the huge amount of discarded plastic in the oceans.

check out the website http://www.theplastiki.com/

The ship is amazing and very Buckminster Fuller inspired, who is also LAVA s inspiration for designing

MORE with LESS

on this occasion we want to republish the plastic house, which was designed a couple of years a go, but never got up. (until now)

This may be the time to revive the ideas for a more resource-conscious design approach on any scale from product, to house, to city.

re-LAVA ed: Geometries beyond the blob

2010-07-26T16:59:00.000-07:00

LAVA`s Chris Bosse has sliced up the 1967 Panton chair as part of the Re-loved: designer stories at the Powerhouse Museum 31 July – 30 September.

Bosse, director of innovative architectural firm LAVA, is one of several designers commissioned by the Powerhouse to use a pre-loved chair to tell a story about a piece of furniture they love.
http://www.sydneydesign.com.au/2010/index.php/exhibitions/re-loved-designer-stories

“We’ve chosen to represent this shape as slices, similar to an MRI scan in order to make visible its complex 3dimensional geometry. The chair is metaphorically and physically carved out of a sliced box, ” says Bosse.

“The project retro-digitises the chair design, although it was the chair that preceded the digital design revolution.”

Bosse believes that today we understand better how to derive form from geometry, such as the underlying geometries in nature, and can incorporate buildability into the form from the inception through parametric modeling techniques.

Re-loved is on display at the Powerhouse Museum from 31 July – 30 September 2010 during the Sydney Design Festival.

sydney design website
http://www.sydneydesign.com.au/2010/index.php/exhibitions/re-loved-designer-stories

LAVA
Laboratory for Visionary Architecture Asia Pacific
Chris Bosse Alexander Rieck Tobias Wallisser

with Catherine Zhuang
and Erik Escalante , AAron Brown

LAVA on DETAIL GREEN ISSUE

2010-07-25T19:28:00.000-07:00

What impact is climate change having on building design? And: How do you go about planning a zero-carbon city in the desert of Abu Dhabi? Masdar City, an urban development supplied exclusively with renewable energy, inspired the cover design for this issue. It shows the shading over the city’s central plaza, in a complex to be built in the coming years to designs by LAVA Architects.

http://www.archdaily.com/60682/detail-green/

While DETAIL Magazine brings us the insights of buildings in terms of highly detailed drawings, DETAIL Green focuses on sustainability in architecture trough data & analysis.

The issues moves between concepts -such as lessons learned from the proposed zero-carbon Masdar City- to case studies, on which several experts analyze a series of case studies in terms of lighting, materials, energy, etc.

Sustainability is high on the agenda of public debate, but the variety of interpretations of what this term actually means is bemusing. They range from idiosyncratic definitions to “greenwashing”, or giving a veneer of sustainability to buildings, products and services that are definitely not environmentally sound.

Certification systems like LEED, BREEAM and DGNB are aimed at bringing more transparency to the business of rating sustainability. They claim to cover and assess all the aspects of sustainability that are relevant to buildings. But precisely this is what some architects are sceptical about: Once these schemes are introduced, will all those other qualities of a building be neglected – the ones that can’t be expressed in figures? Or do such labels simply broaden the way people look at architecture? In future issues of DETAIL Green, we will be looking more closely at these issues. Certainly, the certification criteria do leave scope for a wide variety of architectural solutions, as the projects featured here show. Among them is Germany’s most sustainable office building, rated according to the DGNB system, and the first building fulfilling the requirements for Swiss Minergie-P-Eco certification.

Other questions explored this month by contributors to DETAIL Green include: How sustainable are constructions made of timber or timber-based products? What impact is climate change having on building design? And: How do you go about planning a zero-carbon city in the desert of Abu Dhabi? Masdar City, an urban development supplied exclusively with renewable energy, inspired the cover design for this issue. It shows the shading over the city’s central plaza, in a complex to be built in the coming years to designs by LAVA Architects. Masdar City, too, has had accusations of “greenwashing” levelled at it. Too expensive and exclusive to qualify as sustainable, say the critics. The supporters respond by pointing out that, as a test lab for sustainable technology, the city will spur on advances from which we will all later benefit. Find out more about the different types of technology behind this venture and how they are integrated into the energy concept for the city in the “Background” section. As well as DETAIL Green the magazine, we also offer our readers regular up-to-date information on sustainable architecture on our website. Just go to www.detail.de/english and click on the “GREEN” tab.

- Jakob Schoof, DETAIL Green

Architektur: Vorbild Natur Tobias Wallisser studio at AKA stuttgart

2010-07-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

Das Wüstenkäferprinzip

Erik Raidt, veröffentlicht am 17.07.2010

Modell aus Pasta: Boris Rüther und sein erster Entwurf Foto: Zweygarth

Stuttgart - Er balanciert mit seinen langen Beinen auf dem Dünenkamm wie ein Artist. Plötzlich reckt er sein Hinterteil gen Himmel, senkt seinen Kopf und wartet auf die Nebelschwaden, die vom Atlantik aus in die Namibwüste ziehen. An diesem Ort, an dem es niemals regnet, ist der schwarze Käfer ein Überlebenskünstler: Feine Tröpfchen verfangen sich in winzigen Furchen auf seinem Rücken, sie vereinigen sich zu immer größeren Wassertropfen, die schließlich hinabrinnen in seinen Mund. Der Käfer trinkt aus dem Nebel und gräbt sich in der Glut der Mittagsstunden in den Sand ein, um sich zu kühlen.

Ein Foto des Wüstenkäfers hängt am Arbeitsschrank von Ilyas Mehmet Ekizoglu in der Stuttgarter Kunstakademie. Der 27-Jährige studiert dort Architektur, so wie zuvor auch in Istanbul. Ekizoglu wuchs in Stuttgart auf, lebte dann in Antalya und in der türkischen Hauptstadt. "Ich weiß, wie sich extreme Hitze anfühlt." Eines Tages ist er auf den Käfer gekommen und hat sich die Frage gestellt: "Was kann ich als Architekt von ihm lernen?" Seine Antwort ist eine Jalousie, an deren Spitze Solarzellen eingebaut sind und deren elastischer Körper eine raue Oberfläche besitzt, die jener des Wüstenkäfers ähnelt. Die Lamellen leiten das gesammelte Wasser schließlich ins Gebäude und kühlen es auf diese Weise im Sommer auf eine angenehme Temperatur herab.

Ein Hotel wird zum Technokaktus

In Ekizoglus Computermodellen überziehen Tausende dieser stabförmigen Lamellen das Hotel am SI-Centrum in Möhringen, das er aufgrund seiner Lage jenseits des Kessels ausgesucht hat. Sie sind so beweglich wie menschliche Muskeln, sie folgen im Verlauf des Tages der Sonne, sie spenden Schatten und entziehen der Luft die Feuchtigkeit. Auf Ekizoglus Flachbildschirm im Arbeitsraum der Kunstakademie ist das Hotel kaum mehr als solches zu erkennen. Mit seinen vom Gebäude abstehenden Lamellen ähnelt es einem Technokaktus.

Ein Dutzend Studenten entwirft in diesem Sommersemester an der Kunstakademie ein Bild von Stuttgart, das dem heutigen Betrachter fremd und vertraut zugleich vorkommt. Im Jahr 2050 wölbt sich über die Gebäude rund um das Neckartor eine Art Fell, das den Feinstaub aus der Luft filtert und den Lärm schluckt. Die Fassade des Kaufhauses Breuninger ist von röhrenförmigen Algen ummantelt, die Energie liefern sollen. Auf der Frontseite des Filmhauses laufen nachts Videoclips. Die dafür nötige Menge an Strom hat es selbst tagsüber produziert. In Stuttgart glitzert ein kleiner Times Square.

Fantasie trifft auf Fakten

Von Donnerstag an können die Besucher in der Kunstakademie am Weißenhof die Architekturideen für übermorgen in einer Ausstellung besichtigen. In der Klasse für digitales Entwerfen von Professor Tobias Walliser trifft Fantasie auf Fakten, Wissenschaft auf wahnwitzig anmutende Einfälle. "Künftig müssen wir uns in den Städten der Frage stellen, wie wir mit unseren alten Gebäuden umgehen", sagt der Architekt. Sein Denkansatz: bestehende Gebäude könnten dereinst bis auf den Rohbau zurückgebaut und mit einer neuartigen "Biohülle" ummantelt werden. Intelligente Fassaden reagieren dabei auf die Umwelt, indem sie beispielsweise aus Wind und Sonne Energie gewinnen. So wie bei einem Gebäude an der Paulinenstraße, das Licht einfängt und dieses in das Untergeschoss einer zuvor düsteren Parkzone weiterleitet.

Water Cube set to reopen soon with a big splash

2010-07-19T20:33:00.000-07:00

(China Daily) 2010-07-19

Water Cube set to reopen soon with a big splash

A worker toils near the Water Cube on Sunday. [Wang Jing / China Daily]

The Water Cube will reopen to the public at the end of this month after reconstruction and Asia's biggest indoor water park will open inside on Aug 8.

Beijing State-owned Assets Management Co Ltd, business owner of the Water Cube, said the reconstruction cost 200 million yuan in total and enlarged the Water Cube's open area from 50 percent to 78 percent.

The reconstructed Water Cube will include four main sections, including a warm-up pool, a major swimming pool, an Olympic demonstration area and the indoor water park.

The Water Cube will continue to host national and international sports events and large-scale performances at the major swimming pool, which is surrounded by 6,000 fixed seats.

The new water park is 12,000 square meters and includes some equipment and facilities that have never been used elsewhere in Asia, or in a few cases, the world.

In the 30-meter high park hall, there are 11 entertaining spots such as Deep Sea Windstorm, Crazy Tsunami, Seafloor Shuttle, Dream Drift and 11 slides, the tallest of which is 23-meters high.

According to Water Cube staff, the water park will be open from 10 am to 10 pm, 365 days a year and will likely get 3,000 to 5,000 guests per day, and 1,500,000 guests a year.

Starting Aug 8 tickets to the Water Park will cost 200 yuan for adults and 160 yuan for children 1.2 meters to 1.39 meters tall. The park will be free for children shorter than 1.2 meters.

Groups of more than 10 will be eligible for discounts, a ticket to just see the inside of the Water Cube (but not use the facilities) will be 30 yuan and a ticket to go swimming (but not use the water park) will be 50 yuan for two hours.

Metro

DIGITAL ORIGAMI TIGERS on the prowl for the WWF

2010-07-19T16:56:00.001-07:00

The giant digital origami tigers are on the prowl again. After having been adopted by the WWF, the World Wildlife Foundation, for their Year of the Tiger program, they created a roar in KL for the KL Design Week they’re have just arrived in Europe, where they will roam Berlin and Moscow before going back to Asia to Singapore for the Smart Lights Festival in September .

http://www.wwf.de/

LAVA
Laboratory for Visionary Architecture Asia Pacific
Chris Bosse Alexander Rieck Tobias Wallisser

with Niklas Muhlich
and Jarrod Lamshed

LAVA judges at World Architecture Festival Barcelona

2010-07-19T16:55:00.002-07:00

Chris Bosse Asia Pacific Director of LAVA has again been invited to be a judge at the World Architecture Festival Barcelona 3-5 November 2010. Super Jury Chair is Arata Isozaki and other judges include Barry Bergdoll, John Patkau, Daniel Bonilla, Isay Weinfeld, and James McAdam.

www.worldarchitecturefestival.com

LAVA nominated for the Iakov Chernikhov International Prize 2010

2010-07-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

LAVA has been nominated for the 2010 Iakov Chernikhov International Prize.

Established in 2006, the biennial 50,000 Euro Prize is given to an architect/s aged less than 44 years for an original and innovative architectural concept that both responds to our time and offers a professional challenge to the future.

Previous winners were Pier Vittorio Aurelli and Martino Tattara, studio DOGMA in 2006 and Junya Ishigami of junya ishigamy+associates in 2008.

Prize curators were Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher in 2006; Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in 2008; and in 2010 Stefano Boeri.

LAVA was nominated by the "prize experts" Bjarke Ingels and Tom Kovac.

The goal of the prize is the: “stimulation of creative architectural work aimed at solving current social and cultural problems.. and the support of experimental, educational and research works in the field of innovative architecture and town planning.”

An international jury will select the prizewinner who will be announced in November 2010.

www.icif.ru

KL design week starts with Tiger origami launch

2010-05-04T00:09:00.000-07:00

Kuala Lumpur:

on the weekend the 2010 KL designweek opened its doors with a ROAAARR, welcoming Sydneys Digital origami tigers, previously exhibited at Customs House.

The tigers further the realationship between sydney and KL and their respective design communities.

Chris Bosse will attend the Design week and speak on behalf of the AIA and Asialink on saturday 8th at the National Art Gallery Malaysia (Balai Seni Lukis Negara)

the tigers are on show at the Pavilion Kuala Lumpur 1st May - 13th May 2010

thanks to Izu, Juan, Suzanna and the entire KLdesignweek team, Century Logistics for freightforwarding and Jennifer Kwok customs house city of Sydney for their generous support and creativity.!!!
special thanks to WWF

LAVA's raises the BAR AT DESIGNEX

2010-04-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

LAVA have designed the new Australian Institute of Architects Bar at designex in Sydney 22-24 April 2010.

The bar design is conceived as a "facade mock up" of Tower Skin, LAVA's innovative and award winning "Re-skinning" of the UTS Tower in Broadway.

The speculative proposal recently won a prize in the United Nations partnered 2010 ZEROprize Re-Skinning Awards competition in Rio and showcased in the Sydney Morning Herald and on ABCTV.

Tower Skin featured in 'they got us under their skin' by The Independent newspaper UK architecture critic Jay Merrrick today http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/condom-architecture-1949391.html

The bar showcases new technologies in outdoor membrane facades and incorporates new lighting concepts developed in collaboration with Mary-Anne Kyriakou, ERCO and Color Kinetics.

The Australian Institute of Architects Bar is located in the centre of Form & Function, and is the place to network at the 2010 National Architecture Conference.

The bar highlights LAVA's commitment to architectural culture and to building more with less. More architecture with less material, less energy and less money.

Following a spectacular series of indoor membrane installations such as the MOET marquee 2005, the Entry Paradise Pavilion 2006, the Poloxygen Pavilion and the Green VOID 2008, the MTV stage and the DOHA Tennis Lounge in 2009, the AIA bar explores membranes as an outdoor material, replacing traditional building façade systems.

Developed by MaK Max Australia, the steel substructure can be attached to a building with minimal intervention and the membrane shape follows the flow of forces within geometry.

LAVA's membrane designs merge digital design and fabrication technologies with formfinding in nature, popularized by Frei Otto with his Munich Olympic Stadium 1972. Chris Bosse was instrumental in the design of the Watercube Beijing 2008, a membrane clad lightweight structure, ( PTW ARUP CSCEC) which won the Venice Architecture Biennale award in 2006 for its “deliberate morphing of molecular science, architecture and phenomenology.”

more info and images:

www.l-a-v-a.net/press/lava RAIA bar mockup.zip

www.makmax.com.au http://www.makproductions.com.au http://www.erco.com http://www.colorkinetics.com/

http://www.designex.info/architectsbar.php

The Independent London April 21, 2010 "they got us under their skin"

2010-04-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

The Independent

London April 21, 2010

Condom architecture
A team of Sydney-based designers are the pioneers behind an unusual proposal for encasing buildings with hi-tech sheaths. Jay Merrick unwraps 'condom architecture'

Picture, for a moment, the buildings you really loathe - the ones you think are such a brutish affront to humane urban life that they should be flattened. The NatWest tower in London, perhaps? Or, if you want to think mendaciously big, what about the whole of the centre of Croydon? Now re-imagine them, but this time encased in giant condoms. You needn't be too shocked, because that's exactly what a trio of Australian-based high-tech architects called LAVA are proposing - and they've said the Barbican in London is a suitable case for treatment.

The idea of sheathed buildings is not entirely trivial. And the forms that LAVA, or the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, are proposing raise fresh ambiguities about architectural causes and effects. Will buildings with high- tech skins make architecture an increasingly superficial experience; or are we seeing the first strange expressions of a new kind of environmental design? These designers are not just theorists. Led by Chris Bosse, and working with engineers, Arup, LAVA created the visually and technically advanced bubble-wrap that formed the weirdly cellulitic facades of the Water Cube at the Beijing Olympics. This is very much can-do technology.
Buckminster Fuller would have approved. Fuller - aka Bucky, or Trimtab - was probably one of modern architecture's flawed geniuses; a mid-century genius who invented the geodesic dome and foresaw the threat of industrialisation to nature decades before most, yet proposed solutions that required mass-produced and impractical metal structures. In 1968, the fabled engineer and "spaceship earth" philosopher announced his grandest hallucination: to enclose most of New York city under a geodesic dome a mile high and two miles in diameter - a bizarre precedent for The Truman Show.
In the 21st century, the prospect of living under giant bell jars seems charmingly retro. But the lust for unusual architectural envelopes is stronger than ever. The boredom of architects caught in a reasons-to-be-uncheerful world, coupled with the availability of increasingly sophisticated facade materials, means that even the profession's greats often seem submerged in a deathly ennui of subjugation to corporate clients. This has led to a quite literal rash of unusual architectural surfaces - buildings whose textured or graphic facades are out-and-out 3D artworks.
Some reveal extraordinary architectural virtuosity. The bulging diamonds of glass enveloping Herzog & de Meuron's Prada Epicenter in Tokyo, for example; or the lush and subtly astigmatic coloured striping of Sauerbruch Hutton's Brandhorst Museum, Munich; and Toyo Ito's Tod's store in Tokyo, whose asymmetric criss-crosses of concrete are supposed to mimic the elm trees in the street.
Chris Bosse and his partners at LAVA, Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck, are taking this superficial game to another level, and one of their first proposals is to sheath the conveniently plug-ugly 1960s Broadway Tower at Sydney's University of Technology with a kind of high-tech negligee that glows in the dark - "a transparent cocoon", as Bosse puts it, "that acts as a high-performance micro-climate, generates energy with photovoltaic cells, collects rain water, improves day lighting and uses available convective energy to power the tower's natural ventilation". Architecture meets Christo. Ugly becomes iconic. Hazily seen architectural carbuncles become potential Turner Prize entries.
It's all very techie, of course. Bosse says the Broadway Tower could be wrapped in a three-dimensional lightweight and high performance composite mesh textile. "The surface tension of this material allows the membrane to stretch around walls and roof elements," he explains. "This achieves maximum visual impact with minimal material effort. The re-skinning technology could be easily applied to other buildings in need of a facelift, such as the Barbican Centre in London, and abandoned post-industrial buildings across Hong Kong. We can quickly and cheaply enhance their performance and aesthetics through this minimal intervention."
The technology of these skins allows some amazing forms to take shape, not least because Bosse's visions are descended from the original and most dramatic single use of tensile fabric - the 2002 Marsyas installation, whose stretched PVC sheath in Tate Modern's turbine hall was conceived by Anish Kapoor and co-designed with Cecil Balmond. Bosse has produced something equally spectacular called the Green Void, whose gloopy suction-cupped form fills the atrium space in Sydney's Customs House building. This stretched fabric installation, designed entirely on a computer, encloses 3,000 cubic metres of space.
But it's not all about sheaths or turning condominiums into architectural condomaximums. The quest for increasingly sophisticated facades - that extra effect which might make a building more valuable in environmental or corporate terms - has triggered an interesting project in Stuttgart. LAVA's design study for the zero-carbon LBBW company headquarters building proposes an exterior screen of thousands of circular photovoltaic discs, tipped at an angle to catch the most sun while shading the south-facing offices.
And it surely can't be long before some of LAVA's blue-sky research projects migrate into building skins or other architectural applications. Their recent Digital Origami installation demonstrated how 3,500 molecular shapes could be compacted to form an interesting, reef-like surface. Bearing in mind that the British designer Thomas Heatherwick proposed putting a hairy carapace onto a London building facade 13 years ago, it may not be very long before we see something very like these Digital Origami textures on the outside of a building.
Ultimately, though, it's one architectural skin in particular that will probably create splash-headlines for LAVA. Their facade design for the proposed Snowflake Tower in Dubai promises to take building skins away from condom metaphors and ugly building wraps into a potentially more significant realm. Covered in an array of "intelligent" skins, the 240m high buildings - currently being designed for an international developer - the Snowflake Tower is unashamedly meant to be a brandmark; but, more significantly, the high-tech facade will react to external environmental influences.
The key idea is that the structural organisation of the tower - which would look quite at home in 1970s Yes album cover artwork by Roger Dean - would mimic efficiencies found in both natural organisms and architecture. Instead of an array of individual elements, it's claimed that the building will behave like an organism or ecosystem, and its systems and skin would react to external influences like air pressure, temperature, humidity, air pollution and solar radiation.

"The architecture of the future," argues Bosse, "is not about the shape, but about the intelligence of the system. No building skin today approaches the performance of the biological world. The traditional curtain wall facade is passive, lacking the power to adjust to the fluctuating external environment. It should be able to intervene actively in the building's struggle to maintain its internal stability. Architecture has to perform as an ecosystem within the organic tissue of the city. There should be a unity between structure, space and architectural expression, similar to cathedrals, and any natural system."
How Buckminster Fuller would have loved that. What, though, will buildings like this do to our experience of places? If the super-objectified surface of a building is everything, won't it kill our interest in the more subtle qualities of place? It's true that if we look back in time, we find vivid facadism in all periods of architecture. But in the best cases, it makes sense in terms of the architecture as a whole, and the way buildings strike an intelligible relationship with their surroundings.

Unless visionary designers such as LAVA can create building skins that deliver quantum-jumps in environmental performance, their brand of high-tech architecture is at risk of becoming just as brilliant a curiosity as a battered, 37-year-old copy of Yes's most legendary album, Tales of Topographic Oceans. For further reading: Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture by Peter Zellner (Thames & Hudson)

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/condom-architecture-1949391.html

http://www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Meldungen-Architekturgespraech_mit_LAVA_in_Muenchen

2010-04-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

Visionäre der Baukunst

Architekturgespräch mit LAVA in München

Eine neue Haut für den UTS Tower in Sydney und um die Welt reisende Origami-Tiger: Dies sind nur zwei der zukunftsweisenden Projekte von LAVA. Die drei deutschen Planer des Laboratory for Visionary Architecture mit Büros in Stuttgart und Sydney sind ständig auf der Suche nach neuen Räumen mit nachhaltigen Konzepten.

Im Rahmen der Veranstaltungsreihe Architekturgespräche wird Tobias Wallisser in den Münchener Malerwerkstätten Heinrich Schmidt verschiedene Arbeiten von LAVA vorstellen.

Weitere Architekturgespräche sind geplant. Inhalte und Referenten der folgenden Termin werden noch bekannt gegeben.

Architekturgespräch: 22. April 2010, 19 Uhr
Ort: Showroom Heinrich Schmid, Brunhamstraße 21, 81249 München
Anmeldung: Die Teilnehmerzahl ist begrenzt, daher wird um Anmeldung unter www.ap35.de/architekturgespräche gebeten.

http://www.baunetz.de/meldungen/Meldungen-Architekturgespraech_mit_LAVA_in_Muenchen_1036199.html?source=nl

LAVA has six nominations in three categories of the 2010 Australian Interior Design Awards.

2010-04-06T21:48:00.001-07:00

LAVA has six nominations in three categories of the 2010 Australian Interior Design Awards.

MTV Awards Installation (NSW), Armstrong Installation (Germany) and Sherman Bibliotheca (NSW) are all in the INSTALLATION DESIGN shortlist. The MTV Awards Installation and Armstrong Installation are also nominated for the ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE DESIGN, whilst the Armstrong Installation is included in the COLOUR IN COMMERCIAL INTERIORS.

The awards recognise and celebrate interior design excellence and are a partnership event of the Design Institute of Australia, designEX and ARTICHOKE magazine.

Awards will be presented during the Awards Announcement Dinner on Friday 23 April 2010.

LAVA won 2009 Best International Interior Design for Future Hotel (Germany).

http://interiordesignawards.com.au/pages/home

LAVA'S UTS TOWER WINNER IN UNITED NATIONS ZEROprize Re-Skinning Awards competition

2010-03-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

LAVA'S UTS TOWER WINNER IN UN SPONSORED AWARDS

'Tower Skin' LAVA's speculative transformation of the UTS tower in Broadway has won a prize in the ZEROprize Re-Skinning Awards competition.

Zerofootprint, a leading organization in the global fight against climate change, announced the winners in Rio de Janeiro as part of the World Urban Forum 5 taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil March 22-26, 2010. Partner in the award is the United Nations Habitat, World Urban Campaign.

The ZEROprize Re-Skinning Awards are intended to 'stimulate market-disrupting improvements in the design and development of retrofitting and re-skinning technologies that enhance the energy efficiency and liveability of older buildings'.

‘Tower Skin’ offers a unique opportunity to transform the identity, sustainability and interior comfort of a once state‐of‐the‐art building and can easily be applied to 1960s icons across the world.

http://www.thezeroprize.org/winners/

Tigers go to Kuala Lumpur

2010-03-22T18:41:00.000-07:00

The DIGITAL ORIGAMI TIGERS are boarding a container ship tomorrow morning bound to Kuala Lumpur where they will be part of the 2010 KL design week.http://www.kualalumpurdesignweek.com.my

LAVA in RIO

2010-03-22T18:36:00.000-07:00

Zerofootprint to Unveil Winners of Re-Skinning Awards at World Urban Forum in Brazil

PR Newswire

TORONTO, March 16

TORONTO, March 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Zerofootprint, a leading organization in the global fight against climate change, today announced it is participating in the World Urban Forum 5 taking place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil March 22-26, 2010.
About the Re-Skinning Awards

The ZEROprize Re-Skinning Awards are intended to stimulate market-disrupting improvements in the design and development of retrofitting and re-skinning technologies that enhance the energy efficiency and liveability of older buildings. The award finalists are:

355 Eleventh (Aidlin Darling); GESOBAU AG (DAHM Architekten + Ingenieure); Brick Works (Du Toit Alsop Hillier, Diamond & Schmitt); Paris Docks (Jakob + MacFarlane); Tomamu Towers (Klein - Dytham); Hespeler Library (Kongats); Guelph Residence (Larkin); Sydney Tower (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture); 100 Park Ave (MOED de ARMAS & SHANNON); Now House (Work Worth Doing); West Park Court (Perfido Weiskopf Wagstaff + Goettel); Sparkasse Vorderpfalz (Thiemo Ebbert); University of Ulster (TODD); Nova Scotia Power (WZMH) and Sears Toronto (WZMH).

www.thezeroprize.org

UTS tower animation

2010-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00