The lecture, organized by the Lexus brand as part of the Lexus Hybrid Art cycle, had different names in Russian and English. The original version was “Digital cathedral and the city of the future”, that is, literally “Digital cathedral and the city of the future”, but in the Russian version the cathedral disappeared somewhere and it turned out: “How to build a city of the future”. However, this is not the main thing.
Bureau LAVA - The Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, which can be translated as a laboratory of visionary (fantastic, unreal, etc.) architecture - was founded in 2007. Over the past four years and more, it has become famous for several high-profile projects. In 2008, the bureau won the competition for the design of a hotel and exhibition complex in the center of the miraculous city of the Emirates of Masdar, the master plan of which was made by Norman Foster. Foster managed to build a terracotta wavy there
the campus, and the architects from the young, newly founded bureau, pushed the buildings along the edges of the site, creating a square in the center where they proposed to arrange miraculous mechanical flowers, sun umbrellas, which should open during the day and gather in buds, opening the sky at night.
Another well-known LAVA project is the "snowflake tower" in honor of the racer Mikhail Schumacher, it was designed in the same 2008 for Dubai, and it was planned to build seven such towers around the world. It is easy to see that both projects appeared before the crisis; they have not yet been implemented.
However, architects do not despair. They actively design, research, and create installations. One of them: the glowing "digital origami tigers" became a symbol became the symbol of WWF in the defense of tigers.
Chris Bosse is LAVA's Australia Pacific Director. Two of his colleagues and study friends at the University of Stuttgart: Tobias Walisser and Alexander Rick run a second, peer-to-peer office in Stuttgart. The architects also opened branches in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi; their website is in English and Chinese. In short, a young international company on three continents.
In his lecture on the architecture of the future, Chris Boss paid a lot of attention to the past, namely, the experience that the founders of the bureau received while working in large workshops before founding their own bureau. So, after moving to Sydney, Boss himself worked in the PTW bureau on the project for the Beijing Olympic Water Sports Center WaterCube. This project uses lightweight membrane structures, known to the world from the Munich Olympic Stadium by Fry Otto (Chris Boss studied at the "Institute for Light Structures" at the University of Stuttgart, founded by Fry Otto).
Tobias Walisser worked for Ben van Berkel's UNStudio for 10 years before founding LAVA in 2007 and was involved in the design of the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, one of the first examples of digital technology in real-world design. Alexander Rick, the third partner of the young bureau, in parallel with his work in the studio, is a professor at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart. His research, according to Chris Boss, became the basis for introducing intelligent technologies into real LAVA projects. In addition, LAVA is the official partner of this institute, so that many studies that form the basis for real projects of the bureau are carried out within the framework of the institute's programs. In partnership with the institute, a residential element of the Hotel of the Future in Duisburg (2008) or a flexible office module for the Educational City of Doha (SIPCHEM PADC, in collaboration with RMJM et al.) Were developed.
The Pavilion of the House of the Future in Beijing (2011), which was also designed in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, although it uses the traditional shape of glass geodesic domes, completely transforms the idea of an ideal eco-friendly home. If in the 80s an eco-friendly house could be located only in a natural landscape, then the Beijing pavilion is built into the existing landscape of the city - it is located on the roof of a furniture shopping center, as a kind of parasitic formation on the body of a building. The structure of the volume of three recessed domes, their shells and plan uses the possibilities for transformation of the hexagonal modular grid, creating a flexible space. Inside the pavilion there are 15 different residential elements, each of which contains a part of a tropical garden - kitchens are combined with vegetable gardens, bedrooms are hidden from view by greenery. Close interaction with nature, the ability to grow food on site, combined with intelligent management and control systems for the state of the environment, energy production and waste disposal creates a closed life cycle inside the house that interacts with the environment through a smart ETFE dome shell that allows more light to pass through, but provides isolation from the external environment. The autonomous character of the house creates a livable environment in any climate and under any external conditions, which gives it a character of mobility and versatility.
This is how interaction with research institutes changes the role of the architect in design, which is especially important for young designers, says Chris Boss. If earlier, having come to the workshop, they had to work for a long time under the supervision of more experienced specialists, before starting to embody their own ideas, now they have the opportunity to immediately take an active part in the development process itself, combining their creativity with the knowledge and experience of colleagues. By the way, Chris Boss is also no stranger to teaching practice: in 2010 he worked at the Sydney University of Technology.
Presenting at Artplay both the latest large projects of the bureau and early small experiments, Chris Boss emphasized the futuristic and innovative nature of the objects and the belonging of his bureau to a new generation in architecture. Synthesizing various historical, research and design experience, architects are guided, first of all, by the principles of organization and structure formation inherent in nature.
For LAVA, the meaning of preserving unity with nature is not only in the use of technology, the creation of an ecological environment and energy efficient buildings. Architects strive to create structures similar in nature to natural formations, this is the basis of the bureau's creative credo. Nature becomes a source of inspiration for both designs and images - Chris Boss showed this with the examples of the projects Green Void and Tower Skin.
Green Void, or Green Void, is a 20-meter installation in the atrium of Sydney Customs, a 19th century building that has been turned into a cultural center. The architect considers this installation to be one of the best illustrations of the main principle of the bureau - more with less, creating much with little money. In this case, they received 300 square meters of surface, using 40 kilograms of green Lycra for this. Indeed, looking at how an object that looks like a gigantic microalgae hovers over the heads of visitors to the cultural center, one can be glad that it weighs so little.
Tower Skin (2009) - A project to re-dress the UTS tower in Sydney by stretching a flexible skin over it instead of a massive and expensive renovation. "Skin" is translucent, includes solar panels, rainwater collection devices, LEDs that allow it to work as a media screen, provides ventilation, circulation, access to everything useful and protection from everything harmful (for example, from the sun's rays). This project probably looks the most interesting and impressive, it really successfully illustrates the principle of saving energy and materials.
Despite associations with Fry Otto's experiments, both projects demonstrate a slightly different understanding of fabric. Having “dressed” the tower in a cocoon, the architects drew a direct analogy between architecture and fashion, likening the volume of the tower to a human figure. The use of fabric as a media façade allows not only to change the exterior of a building at night, but also creates the feeling of a living, light surface. Green Void tunnels are even closer to human scale - they can be touched, you can look into them, they are also perceived as a kind of "clothing".
In the works of LAVA, the role of the enclosing surface also changes - from a static shell that has once and for all specified functions, it becomes an operational and intellectual element of a building, such as, for example, the skin of the Tower Skin project, interacting both with people and with natural factors - light, temperature … The principle of shaping flexible structures is also changing. If in the 80s the geometry of the volume was relatively independent of the frame, now the shape of the shell is clearly defined by its linear elements - the ribs of the Tower Skin facade or the Green Void fastening rings.
LAVA's architecture gravitates towards constructive clarity of form as opposed to their teachers' baroque approach to visual effectiveness. The light expressive form formed by the membrane ceases to be an end in itself, but is presented as a result of modeling and organizing complex processes. And digital technologies, according to the architect, are no longer only a tool for achieving the goal - they express the very logic of thinking. “For example, when creating a wrapper for Green Void, we only specified the attachment points - the constraint conditions of the structure, and the form was generated by the program based on this data,” says Chris Boss. At the same time, both Green Void and Tower Skin are designed so that their weight turns out to be much less than the weight of conventional structures - the modules of which they consist can easily be carried by two people. With the use of such structures, architecture, and behind it the city, become lighter, more variable, acquire the ability to respond more flexibly than before to changes in external conditions.
It can even be said that, relying on natural prototypes, LAVA architects form a kind of "second nature", with an artificial, isolated and independent environment, as in the city of Masdar or in the pavilion of the House of the Future in Beijing. This space brings together cutting-edge technology and the laws of nature, allowing the bureau to create unique projects that develop versatile methods that can be applied in a variety of situations and conditions, synthesizing and combining different everyday and cultural experiences.
