German-Australian architecture firm Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) has been named the 2016 laureate of the European Prize for Architecture.
The prize is awarded to architects from Europe who are considered to have “changed and challenged the direction of contemporary architecture today,” and “to support new ideas, to encourage and foster more challenge-making and forward-thinking about buildings and the environment, and to prompt the pushing of the envelope to obtain an even greater, more profoud result.”
The prize is presented annually by The European Centre for Architecture, Art, Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athanaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design. Past laureates include Bjarke Ingels (2010), Graft Architects (2011), TYIN Architects (2012), Marco Casagrande (2013), Alessandro Mendini (2014) and Santiago Calatrava (2015).
LAVA was honoured this year for “a body of work that explores and expresses architecture as a risk-taking, visceral experience,” said Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, President and CEO of The Chicago Athanaeum.
LAVA was established in 2007 by Chris Bosse, based in Sydney, and Alexander Rieck and Tobias Wallisser, based in Berlin and Stuttgart in Germany. The studio combines future technologies and digital fabrication to design buildings that are efficient with materials, energy, time and costs. The firm’s work is often informed by patterns and geometries found in nature that are structurally and materially efficient, such as spider webs, snowflakes and soap bubbles.
LAVA’s built Australian work includes Bosse’s own house Tivoli Terrace, the Martian Embassy, and exhibitions including the Emergency Shelter exhibition and Green Void at Customs House. The firm’s proposal to re-skin the UTS Tower in Sydney with a mesh textile embedded with LEDs explored ideas for repurposing inefficient old buildings, and was included in the Australian exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Augmented Australia 1914‐2014.
King Abdulaziz City for Science And Technology (KACST) headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The firm’s current projects include the King Abdulaziz City for Science And Technology (KACST) headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; a youth sports hostel in Bayreuth, Germany; and the Zhejiang Gate Towers in Hangzhou, China.
Narkiewicz-Laine said LAVA “believes that architecture always was and always will be a mirror of society. Every architectural project should rightly contribute to the wider culture of architecture and is a reaction of contemporary technology and, therefore, carries a greater responsibility to the public and to the environment.”
Narkiewicz-Lane continued: “This young German firm teaches us to look at the art of architecture with fresh eyes. [Its] work, in the final result, makes buildings and cities useable, sustainable, and exciting.
“In an artistic climate that too often looks backward rather than toward the future, where copies and retrospectives are more prevalent than risk-taking, it is important to honor the architecture of this young European firm,” said Narkiewicz-Lane.
The prize will be presented to Bosse, Rieck and Wallisser at a ceremony in Athens, Greece on 23 September.
