Future By Design

Inquire. Imagine. Invent.
At this defining moment in collective history, when technology is reshaping reality and climate crises are demanding radical new ways of living, a new vision for architecture, worldbuilding, and life itself must materialize. As a space committed to Earth’s safekeeping, LAVA’s trajectory evolves alongside these global transformations and offers a looking glass into the world ahead and how we might shape it, physically and philosophically. Honed over nearly two decades through the spirit of inquiry, imagination, and innovation, LAVA has invented a methodology that fuses computation with ecology, digital with natural systems, and form with feedback to build an architectural model attuned to our emerging future. From early parametric high-rise towers in Abu Dhabi to a behavioral city for Expo 2030, LAVA’s oeuvre—and their vision of a progressively symbiotic planetary destiny—rests on a single premise: what if architecture began with a question and never stopped asking?

Early Foundations
LAVA wasn’t destined to be a conventional architecture firm. Originally conceived as a decentralized matrix of actors across the EU, Asia, and the South Pacific, it has followed a pattern that is closer to a mycelial network, or to the internet, than to a single-headquarters enterprise. Since its inception in 2007, just as the smartphone revolution began, LAVA has treated architecture as a medium in motion. “We have always asked: how can architecture progress in harmony with society, with networks, and with climate?” LAVA Partner Tobias Wallisser recalls of their genesis and trajectory. In LAVA’s hands, the idea of buildings as static monuments has continually given way to a vision of adaptive systems in mutual relationship with their living environments. The questions they’ve asked in these overlapping spaces have shaped a core piece of the intelligence of the studio itself, its distributed network of collaborators, and a growing body of work that seeds new ways of conceiving architecture around the world.

Before LAVA’s formal founding, its three partners—Chris Bosse, Alexander Rieck, and Tobias Wallisser—shared a foundational influence: Frei Otto, the German architect known for his work with ultra-lightweight, self-organizing structures. Otto’s approach, which was drawn from nature’s efficiencies—the tensile logic of spider webs, the structural intelligence of bird nests, the aerodynamic coding in feathers—offered an early model of architecture as something emergent and malleable. “His work taught us to look to nature for logic rather than form,” recalls Bosse. That organic, responsive, playful, and provisional logic remains an intelligence nucleus within LAVA’s thinking.

Before they came together to form their collective practice, each founder brought a distinct but complementary DNA to the mix. Bosse explored computational biomimicry in a range of projects, including Beijing’s Olympic Watercube. Rieck was immersed in digital futures at Fraunhofer IAO, researching how urban systems and AI could co-evolve. Wallisser, then at UNStudio, choreographed spatial experiences like the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, where circulation, not stasis, defined the architecture. These early paths helped seed the holistic approach that would come to define LAVA.

The Birth of the Lab
Bosse and Wallisser first crossed paths at the Venice Biennale in 2004. Shortly after, Wallisser, as architect, and Alexander Rieck, as client representative, collaborated on a project for Fraunhofer in Stuttgart that interwove research, fiction, and prototype. Three years later, as Dubai became a global epicenter for architectural speculation, the three joined forces to launch LAVA. Their inaugural commission came from a sports marketing company seeking to create a solar-powered ski slope that would rise from the desert dunes. LAVA envisioned the Jebel Hafeet Glacier structure as a flow of glacial geometries, where technology and terrain interlaced at the meeting place of climate and imagination. “It began with a question,” recalls Rieck. “Could we design a place where solar energy produces snow, and where extremes converge to form a new microclimate?”

From its lightweight inception, LAVA was approached as a platform: a laboratory for experimentation shaped by data, form, and imaginative questioning. In 2007, as Apple launched the iPhone and the internet dissolved into the background of daily life, LAVA was already operating in the cloud. Where most architecture firms relied on central headquarters, LAVA worked as a dispersed mesh of collaborators across time zones and continents. Skype calls, FTP drops, late-night Dropbox updates: their disseminated model mirrored the networked world and was actively designing for it. "We didn’t want hierarchy,” says Rieck. “We wanted horizontality, intelligence that was mobile, emergent, and digitally shareable.” LAVA’s cloud-native, transnational structure was logistical by necessity, but it was also ideologically crucial. Architecture, they believed, should behave like an ecosystem and be nurtured as a layered, living organism.

Parametricism as Environmental Logic
LAVA emerged at a technological tipping point, as computational design began to revolutionize the architectural medium. Parametric modeling allowed architects to generate geometry that responded in real time to environmental conditions. “For us, these new tools were never about smooth curves,” says Bosse. “They were about allowing us to encode intelligence into geometry.” As the pace of this technological change quickened, LAVA, already born into and avidly adopting this flux, embraced the dawning sci-fi-esque shifts to help lead architecture into a new era, one where buildings begin to think, adapt, and engage with the world around them.

In Abu Dhabi, the lab designed a high-rise shaped by the crystalline logic of a snowflake to maximize views and passive cooling. In Sydney, the Green Void installation, a tensile membrane formed from digital patterns, rendered in fabric, appeared to levitate. The installation was ephemeral, but the question LAVA began to ask in earnest still lingered: what if we could build more with less mass, less waste, and more meaning? An idea that has remained key in LAVA’s thinking.

Their Future Hotel prototype, developed in collaboration with Fraunhofer in 2008, took this query further by asking whether architecture could read the preferences of a visitor and shift its ambiance accordingly, in real-time. Through this lens, the room could become a sensor, an interface, and an interactive habitat.

Climate as Design Partner
From their inspired beginnings in Frei Otto’s bubbles, LAVA extended the application of organic principles from individual buildings to entire urban systems. In Masdar City, LAVA confronted a different question: could architecture condition the desert into a space for public life? Their design reimagined a plaza as a field of climate-receptive shade canopies. These flower-like structures opened and closed with the sun to continuously adjust temperature and light. “We saw the plaza as a vital central urban crossing point,” says Wallisser, “a space where social connection and interaction could unfold within its own microclimate”. That moment seeded yet another question—how to build with, not around, extreme climates.

As LAVA’s footprint in the Middle East expanded, so did the scale of its architectural investigations. In Riyadh, the KACST Innovation Tower explored how modular architecture could foster scientific innovation. The façade wrapped like a breathable skin around a flexible center to foster daylight, movement, and collaboration. “We kept asking: how can space create new ways to work together?” says Rieck, whose special focus on the workspace found a pragmatic execution. LAVA’s K.A.CARE master plan pushed this idea further: what if a city operated like a cloud, as a physical twin to the light interconnectedness of the information it contains, and in this way be perfectly, thoughtfully suited to its landscape? Instead of zoning, the master plan proposed flows and feedback that imagined tensile structures that channeled wind and sunlight into livable form. Architecture became weather; ever shifting, anticipatory, sensorial, and plural.

Narrative as Infrastructure
As the practice matured, LAVA’s systems designs became story architectures, and the questions at the heart of their methodology grew into exploring how architecture could script experience. In Frankfurt Airport’s Terminal 3 Marketplace, they introduced a parametric “cloud” ceiling that directs daylight onto sculptural islands below—spaces that invite travelers to pause, reset, and absorb a choreography of light and stillness. These luminous bubbles, another little wink to Frei Otto, act as focal points within the flow of hectic human traffic that proffer moments of calm amid the intensity of movement. Of the inspiration for this ‘airport story’, Rieck remarks, “Transit isn’t passive anymore, it’s immersive.”

In Sydney, LAVA’s design for the Martian Embassy turned a literacy center into an immersive fictional space where plywood ribs and video projections conjure sensations of being inside a whale, or a time tunnel. “We asked: can imagination become infrastructure?” Bosse reflects on the whimsical design aimed at inspiring youth creativity, “It was the stuff great stories are made of.” By turning architecture into a narrative device, LAVA demonstrated how architecture can serve as a platform for social impact, creativity, feelings, and collective belief in the power of ideas.

Speculation as Method
If the architect’s role has always been one of projection, LAVA was now ready to push that premise into even more speculative territory, propelled by the perpetuity of questioning. Their Tien Bo City proposal of 2016 reimagined Hanoi as a layered topography of ecology, density, and heritage. This project marked the formation of a new LAVA studio among the Lab’s geographic mesh. That same year, LAVA received the European Prize for Architecture, an accolade that recognized both their built work and their capacity to imagine what comes next; however this might transfigure traditional concepts of architectural logic.

By 2019, the Asia-Pacific node had expanded rapidly, and among new commissions across China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Australia, Central Park in Ho Chi Minh City stood out—adapting what was learned from Masdar Plaza to a tropical context through solar canopies, climate-caring surfaces, and layered circulation. “Our standpoint here was the notion: what if a park could be more than leisure, an interface between past, present, and possible?” reflects Bosse. Blending ecology with civic life, the project reflected LAVA’s ongoing interest in public space as a platform for mobility, culture, and environmental awareness.

The Technological Dreamcoat
Next, the LAVA imaginaire found new scale in NEOM, Saudi Arabia’s mega-project of post-oil futurism. This commission offered a chance to expand ideas developed in earlier projects—parametric systems, embedded intelligence, and environmental adaptation—within a more ambitious context. Commissions like The Vault, Trojena, and Aquellum stretched architectural language into science fiction. Here, subterranean oases, high-altitude resorts, and hybrid leisure ecologies embedded in mountainous terrain abounded. “We were invited to inquire into what architecture might become,” recalls Rieck, “thinking not just ten years ahead, but a hundred.” Like Masdar Plaza and K.A.CARE, these proposals articulate a possible future shaped by terrain, weather, and evolving modes of living that seamlessly intermingle with their environs and with proliferating technologies.

For Bosse, Rieck, and Wallisser, architecture has become an act closer to creative expression than to drafting. It is a holistic practice where text prompts, data models, and dialogue with machines and with the organic circumstances of each site shape new forms of authorship. With neural-based generative AI, language becomes both a tool and a terrain that provides a design interface capable of projecting narrative, spatial, and environmental scenarios, all at once. “While tools like Midjourney, Runway, and Sora have expanded our capacity for visual speculation, our focus is on more advanced systems, such as multi-agent models capable of working with complex layers dealing in climate conditions, resource flows, and energy performance,” says Wallisser. “They allow us to generate sensitive urban planning scenarios—like a live blueprint strategy that progresses in real-time—and to test ideas through continuous, iterative dialogue. Architecture in this realm is much less about rendering the future; it’s about reasoning with it.”

Living System, Planetary Practice
Looking forward, LAVA’s master plan for Expo 2030 in Riyadh synthesizes years of work across climates and cultures. It asks, “What if a temporary world expo could seed a lasting, liveable city? What if the spectacle of the existing Expo stereotype could give way to an ongoing sustainable one that outlasts the event?” Built on Expo experience from the German pavilions in 2020 and 2025, which were designed for disassembly and reuse, the Expo 2030 master plan envisions a behavioral city—one that assimilates, reshapes, and regenerates. “We’re moving from permanence to process,” concludes Bosse. “From matter to metabolism.”

As the planet enters an age of total ecological and technological upheaval, LAVA will continue to chart a model for architectural relevance and cultural discourse that interacts with philosophies, societies, and computations in ways that offer communal bridges from past to future. This architectural approach will perpetually morph alongside the shifting needs of the climate crisis, and the social, cultural, and technological reordering of life. LAVA’s goal is to build differently—like nature does: in cycles, through iteration, and in deep reciprocity with demise and renewal.

The Future
“Our next step is to support decisions before design begins,” says Rieck. “To help shape the questions that shape the brief.” This shift extends beyond design. For Wallisser, it requires methods that adapt across geographies while remaining linked through shared architectural intelligence. “We’re strengthening collaborations with global think tanks and expanding LAVAi, our in-house intelligence unit,” he explains, “to integrate AI-informed materials, sensing systems, and post-carbon strategies into the design process that we will be able to share as knowledge, and transfer it to other projects to implement our expertise on a broader scale.”

What once seemed a distant ambition—architecture that listens, learns, and heals—is now entering the realm of the possible in many pragmatic ways. With time, LAVA’s distributed structure has become a reflection of its own philosophy. “It’s like a forest, a coral reef or an unfolding biomimetic landscape,” says Bosse. “Each part sustains the whole.” Looking ahead, he envisions environments that behave like mangroves or reefs—spaces that support biodiversity, adapt to shifting conditions, and improve over time. This is not a metaphor. It is a new form of authorship. A planetary practice rooted in attention, reciprocity, and the responsibility to imagine futures that demand nothing less.

For LAVA, architecture will always remain a living question—asked again, in ever new light, with every climate, client, and context. Each project becomes a hypothesis for how to live, work, and dream in a changing world. “Rather than becoming experts for particular types, regions, styles, or clients,” concludes Wallisser, “we envision LAVA and LAVAi becoming an open-sourced laboratory dedicated to providing knowledge and resources for complex projects worldwide that supports interdisciplinary decision-making for the better of people and the planet.”