LAVA: The Latest Architecture and News

September marks a shift in seasonality worldwide, bringing with it a renewed focus on cultural and architectural events that encourage reflection on contemporary global challenges. This week's major news highlighted international exhibitions and design initiatives addressing questions of resilience, urban transformation, and collective futures, alongside new projects dedicated to preserving both cultural and natural heritage. Across continents, biennales, urban developments, and restoration efforts are shaping a broader conversation on how architecture and design can foster adaptation, memory, and coexistence in rapidly changing environments.

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Since its inauguration this spring, Expo 2025 Osaka has captured global attention from multiple perspectives, demonstrating how architecture can function as a laboratory for exploring solutions to pressing challenges. After 55 years, Osaka is once again hosting the World Expo, with each installation organized around the sub-themes Saving Lives, Empowering Lives, and Connecting Lives. These pavilions take forms that express the identity and values of their region through distinctive architectural languages, forming the central axis of their design. Building on this foundation, some installations serve as laboratories for the future society, utilizing technology to enhance experiences both inside and outside the spaces, transforming the visit through light, sound, visuals, and movement as part of the technological innovation showcased at the event.

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The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) General Assembly in Paris has officially approved the Registration Dossier for Expo 2030 Riyadh, formally confirming Saudi Arabia as the host of the upcoming World Expo. With this milestone, the next phase of preparations will begin, including the official invitation of participating countries through diplomatic channels. Coinciding with the approval, the initial masterplan for the Expo site designed by LAVA, the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, has been unveiled. Scheduled to take place from October 1, 2030, to March 31, 2031, the event will be held on a site in Riyadh, designed to accommodate more than 40 million visits and host over 195 participating nations.

The State of Kuwait has revealed the design of the upcoming Kuwait Pavilion to take shape at World Expo 2025 in Osaka. Designed by architectural firm LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture), the temporary structure is envisioned as a “Visionary Lighthouse” representing Kuwait’s embrace of Arab cultures, arts, and social works. The pavilion, developed with main partner and contractor NUSSLI, also offers a response to the exhibition’s overarching theme, "Designing Future Society for our Lives", striving to strengthen the relationship between Kuwait and Japan and foster conversations about visions of a sustainable future.

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Chris Bosse started LAVA, Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, with his partners Tobias Wallisser and Alexander Rieck the year Watercube, the Aquatics Centre for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was completed. Bosse was one of the leading designers of Watercube when he worked at PTW Architects in Sydney. Now LAVA employs about 100 people in four offices in Ho Chi Minh City, Sydney, Stuttgart, and Berlin. There are also two satellite offices in Honduras and Parma, Italy, led by former associates. Projects range from furniture to houses and hotels to master plans, urban centers, and airports in the Middle East, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Vietnam.

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In partnership with ASPECT Studio, LAVA won the international competition to design Central Park in HCMC, Vietnam. Commissioned by the committee of the Ho Chi Minh City, the contest’s winning entry will be built in 2020. LAVA’s proposal for the 16 hectares Park, commemorates the old infrastructural value of the plot, once home to the 19th-century French railway tracks, and celebrates the implementation of a future mobility system.

The Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) has been selected to design the German Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai. Designed as a vertical campus that blends nature and technology, the pavilion takes cues from local architecture and Germany’s history of outstanding lightweight pavilion design. Formally, the design features a freeform roof that encloses interlinked floating cubes that house exhibition and event spaces.

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Construction has started on the redesign of an energy storage tower by LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architects) for Stadtwerke Heidelberg (SWH) in Heidelberg, Germany. The updated facade of the 56-meter cylindrical tower and design of an adjacent park are part of an initiative to create a sculptural landmark and symbol of sustainable energy for the city.

LAVA introduces a multi-layered facade that features 11,000 diamond shaped stainless-steel plates attached to a steel cable network that can rotate 45 degrees in the wind. According to the architects, a number of plates correlate to the number of households that will be beneficiaries of the energy. The geometries of the facade are inspired by forms found in nature.

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LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) has revealed their runner-up proposal in an international competition to design Forest City, a new development located on reclaimed land just off the coast of Singapore in Malaysia.

Initiated by Chinese developer Country Garden, the competition sought urban design schemes that would improve the efficiency of the land use while enhancing the quality of space and environment through the landmark of a “forest city.” The competition was won by Sasaki Associates last year.

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LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) has won the competition to redesign an energy park and energy storage building in Heidelberg, Germany, for the Stadtwerke Heidelberg. Currently a cylindrically shaped storage center, the space will be transformed into a dynamic sculpture, city icon, and knowledge hub for sustainable energy, fully accessible to the public with city views.

In order to display the concepts of energy transition, decentralization, networking, flexibility and adaptability, the project will feature a multi-layered façade structure inspired by geometries in nature like leaves, spider webs, and reptile skins. “The result is a dynamic, ever-changing surface of light and shadow, animated by wind, turning the building into a beacon of a dynamic new energy regime.”

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The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and the European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies have named LAVA (Laboratory for Visionary Architecture) as the recipients of their 2016 European Prize for Architecture.

One of Europe’s most prestigious architecture awards, The European Prize for Architecture is given annually to architects who have ‘blazoned a new path and direction for an architecture that is deeply humane and committed to forward the principles of European humanism’.

Australia’s creative team for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, felix._Giles_Anderson+Goad, has announced 11 unrealized projects that will be showcased as part of the Augmented Australia 1914-2014 exhibition. Ranging from an inner-city cathedral to a treetop activist shelter, the country-wide selection of projects will be brought to life using three-dimensional augmented models, images, voice overs and animations.