‘Cloud City: An Urban Ecosystem’ by Chris Bosse for LAVA, photo: Brett Boardman
Chris Bosse, one of 12 Australian designers exhibiting in the Australian Design Centre’s CUSP: Designing into the Next Decade creative program, has created ‘Cloud City: An urban ecosystem’, a sculptural rendition of a future city. Exploring the potential of design in our lives, “CUSP designers generate ideas that could change the way we inhabit the world” says the Australian Design Centre.
“A cusp is a breakthrough, a breaking with the past.” says Bosse, director of LAVA. “Sometimes you have to break with the past to be ready for the future. What is the society we live in today and how should we respond? What is architecture in the 21st century?
Visualisation, ‘Cloud City: An Urban Ecosystem’ by Chris Bosse for LAVA
Cloud City is a soaring, stretched membrane‐cloud anchored to the ‘city’ on the gallery floor by highrise towers that have been re‐skinned and revitalised. “The future is not about what buildings look like, but how they perform, interact and how they connect with each other. Think of a coral reef, where thousands of species thrive in coexistence of each other and the elements, air, water and sun. The reef is like the city of the future.”
‘Cloud City: An Urban Ecosystem’ by Chris Bosse for LAVA, photo: Brett Boardman
“Our installation asks: can cities of the future be organisms that respond and adapt to their environment? The networked city is a connected, inter‐dependent organism where buildings are not singular structural entities (designed, serviced and accessed as isolated units), but part of large networked system. A distributed cloud communicates, shares smart building technology and joint infrastructure, connectivity and data transfer allowing transport, housing and urban infrastructure to adapt in response.”
‘Cloud City: An Urban Ecosystem’ by Chris Bosse for LAVA, photo: Brett Boardman
“Bosse replaces outdated passive building facades of the skyscraper with high performance smart translucent cocoons that create their own microclimate, generate energy, collect rainwater and improve the distribution of natural daylight. By reskinning these inefficient buildings the past is transformed into ‘super‐abled’ buildings.”
‘Cloud City: An Urban Ecosystem’ by Chris Bosse for LAVA, photo: Brett Boardman
Other Australian designers featured in CUSP are George Khut, Anupama Kundoo, Healthabitat, Leah Heiss, MATERIALBYPRODUCT, Greg More, Florian Mueller, Stephen Mushin, Alison Page, Super Critical Mass, and Mari Velonaki. Following the current show at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney (on now until September 1, 2013), the CUSP exhibition will visit Launceston, Adelaide, Dubbo, Port Macquarie, Brisbane and Mornington Peninsula from 2013‐2015.
