A Journey of Scale and Timezones

Chris Bosse of LAVA will take us on a journey from the award-winning Beijing Olympics Watercube to a small no-budget writing centre for young people in Redfern named the Martian Embassy, to the sustainable city of the future in Abu Dhabi via a series of adventures such as an artificial island in South China, a tower for Michael Schumacher, an interactive bookshelf for an art gallery in Paddington and the joy of running an office in 3 time zones.

About LAVA.

Chris Bosse, Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck founded LAVA in 2007. It was established as a network of creative minds with a research and design focus and has offices in Sydney, Shanghai, Stuttgart and Abu Dhabi.

LAVA explores frontiers that merge future technologies with the patterns of organisation found in nature and believes this will result in a smarter, friendlier, more socially and environmentally responsible future.

The potential for naturally evolving systems such as snowflakes, spider webs and soap bubbles for new building typologies and structures has continued to fascinate LAVA – the geometries in nature create both efficiency and beauty. But above all the human is the centre of their investigations.

LAVA combines digital workflow, nature’s structural principles and the latest digital fabrication technologies with the aim of achieving MORE WITH LESS: more (architecture) with less (material/ energy/time/cost).

Structure, material and building skin are three areas LAVA believes that architecture can learn so much from nature. Projects incorporate intelligent systems and skins that can react to external influences such as air pressure, temperature, humidity, solar-radiation and pollution.

LAVA designs everything from pop up installations to master-plans and urban centres, from homes made out of PET bottles to ‘reskinning’ aging 60s icons, from furniture to hotels, houses and airports of the future.

About Chris;

Chris Bosse is director of LAVA Asia Pacific based in Sydney and also Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. Educated in Germany and Switzerland, he worked with several high-profile European architects before moving to Sydney. Whilst Associate Architect at PTW Architects in Sydney he completed many projects in Asia and the Middle East. His work on the Watercube Olympic swimming centre in Beijing received the Atmosphere Award at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale; and he won an Emerging Architect Award from RIBA in 2008 London and a 40 Under 40 Award in 2012.