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.
Bosse was born in 1971 in Stuttgart where he grew up in a family of an architect father and an elementary school teacher mother. Before moving to Australia from his native Germany in 2002, the architect apprenticed for a couple of years at SMO, a small practice in Cologne, and spent most of the 1990s studying in Belin, Cologne, and Stuttgart in Germany and at EPFL University in Lausanne and at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio in Switzerland. I spoke to the architect about his childhood, education in Germany and Switzerland, starting his new life in Sydney, joining PTW, where he designed the Watercube and the idea that a building “has the potential to become more than a mere abstract object.”
Vladimir Belogolovsky: What was your upbringing like and how early did you realize that architecture was for you?
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"We Have Abdicated as a Profession Our Responsibility Towards the Planet:" In Conversation with Yasmeen LariChris Bosse: I actually never wanted to become an architect because when you are a child of an architecture professor, I think it is natural to have skepticism about the subject. Imagine, I had been dragged around Europe all my childhood and adolescence; there was not one trip when we wouldn’t look at buildings. [Laughs.] We always followed an itinerary visiting cathedrals and castles. We also often had architects at the house, staying or coming for dinner. My father invited visiting professors and architects. My mother was very good at organizing and hosting these dinners and theme parties and always dressed better than anyone. She is big on culture, theater, and art. The house had many artworks; art and artists were a part of our lives. I absorbed these things but it was much later that I thought of architecture as a profession. It was when I realized that architecture opens so many possibilities besides being a practitioner. I like that there are so many subjects that architects need to know about—construction, materials, history, climate, psychology, and so on.
VB: You studied architecture in Germany and Switzerland. Were there any mentors who influenced you during that time?
CB: I studied at several universities, chasing new experiences, new mentors, and even idols. I always recommend to students to look for those who are interesting to them and find ways to study or work with them. First, I went to Berlin for my Bachelor’s. it was a very technical school that gave me a solid foundation in architecture. I then transferred to Cologne, a more artistic place. We traveled to Italy to study Palladio and then to Switzerland where we visited buildings by such Ticino masters as Aurelio Galfetti, Luigi Snozzi, Mario Botta, and Rino Tami. That kind of work by Swiss-Italian architects completely set me on fire. I love their incredible interventions in beautifully sculpted raw landscapes. Sometimes they are resolved as objects, or they may be integrated into the terrain or even infrastructure such as tunnel portals. That experience was so positive that I decided to continue my studies in Switzerland.
After graduating from Cologne, I went to Stuttgart where I succeeded in setting up an exchange program with Switzerland, which did not exist before. I initiated it and I was the first student to take advantage of it. I won a scholarship and went to EPFL University in Lausanne where Luigi Snozzi was teaching. When I first arrived, I went to check out the school and in the first lecture hall I entered there was Luigi Snozzi discussing his interventions in the Monte Corasso convent, his most famous project in Ticino. It was amazing to see the master speaking to his students. I stayed there for one year during which we had such visitors as Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, Norman Foster, David Chipperfield, and many others.
Then I went to the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, which was founded by Mario Botta. They didn’t have an exchange program at that time but again, I managed to set it up and to this day students from Stuttgart go there. I definitely learned these skills of connecting with people from my dad. There was Botta himself, as well as Kenneth Frampton teaching modern architecture to us. Everyone has his book at home but we had Kenneth Frampton! [Laughs.] We studied photography with a famous photographer from Milan, Oliviero Toscani who was an Art Director for the Benetton Group, and furniture design with Antonio Citterio There were always a lot of visitors but for us, it was home, which was very special.
Then there was Peter Zumthor who always had a mystical aura around him. Every meeting with him was very much anticipated. He would come one or two hours late with everyone patiently waiting. He would get out of his car and come to class with his cigar. Peter would blow the smoke into the air, close his eyes, and say to one of us, “Tell me about your project.” He didn’t want to see it, he wanted to hear you describe it, which forced us to be very articulate. He is very atmospheric, not only in his work which is incredibly precise and immersive, but also in the way he communicates.
VB: When did you graduate?
CB: I did my final thesis back in Stuttgart in 1999, at a time when computation technology was still emerging in Germany. Just three years before, everything I ever did and all my fellow students did was drawn by hand, giving careful attention to every line. Suddenly, this new technology arrived and 90 percent of all projects in my thesis year were digital. The digital revolution happened fast. I really embraced it by learning 3D rendering programs, parametric design, animation, and so on. Those new skills gave me almost a superpower. The computer became a new design partner for me.
VB: When and why did you move to Sydney?
CB: That was already in late 2002 after working in a small practice in Cologne called SMO. I learned a lot about competitions, art, and architecture and about being a great human as well as an architect thanks to my late mentor Seyed Mohammed Oreyzi. Then I came to Australia on a six-month visa and immediately joined PTW, a large commercial firm here in Sydney. It opened up a whole new cosmos for me. When I started working there, I was just a new guy from Germany but I had skills that other people didn’t have. I knew computation—I could model and I could render. I could conceptualize things in three dimensions and visualize ideas very quickly, much faster than other people could do on paper. Very quickly I became the competition guy. We worked on a number of competitions; some we won. In early 2003 the Aquatic Center, better known as the Watercube, for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics arrived. The firm had strong experience in designing aquatic centers. They were the architects of the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. The firm was shortlisted with Arup and Chinese partner, CCDI Group, and I was asked to join the design team.
Early on, I was quite skeptical about working at a large commercial office. Seeing most buildings around the world, I always wondered, “Who designs these buildings? This is not what we learned at school.” [Laughs.] Then I discovered these business-driven commercial firms and started working for one of them. But I enjoyed my experience there. You learn about what clients actually think about architecture and how to relate to them. It is a very old firm and they have done many public cultural buildings. The quality of their work always depends on who is there at a given time.
VB: What was your role in the firm and in the Watercube competition?
CB: When we started working on the competition I was brought in like a wild card. People were curious about what I could do. It was also an exciting time for China. And then Herzog & de Meuron just released their design of the Bird’s Nest, which is right across the plaza from our competition site. I was very excited. I even printed their design and put it all over the design studio. People were coming to me asking, “Who are Herzog & de Meuron?” [Laughs.] They would say, “Who are these clowns? It doesn’t look like a building.” And I would try to explain that they are the most amazing architects from Basel, Switzerland. I showed my colleagues their other buildings such as the Allianz Arena which was under construction then. I would look at its ETFE-foil air panels and the stadium’s ability to change colors. I was also looking at Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project with large ETFE pillows. These long-span structures really excited me. I also talked about Ito’s Serpentine Pavilion, Frei Otto’s lightweight structures, and how architecture can be inspired by nature. All of those ideas were discussed before developing our own solution. Then different designers worked on different schemes.
VB: What were the principal ideas for the final solution?
CB: Our Chinese partners from CCDI Group, a Chinese multinational architecture and engineering consulting firm, had a strong idea about a square box based on the Chinese philosophy of such dualities as yin and yang, round and square, heaven and earth, and fire and water. It played well next to the elliptical and expressive Bird’s Nest. Together they would frame a symbolic entrance to the Olympic Boulevard. I had very strong beliefs in lightweight construction, membrane structures, and soap bubble ideas. We studied the microscopic structures of various materials blown up. Together with Tristram Carfrae, the lead engineer at ARUP, we were looking for the kinds of structures that would serve well both as space organizing and façade cladding.
VB: Were there different options?
CB: There were several parallel ideas developed, including a Mondrian-like composition; another one took the shape of a wave. Then about six weeks before the submission we all set down and two directions emerged—the square and the bubbles. Only one direction was to be developed, so we combined the square and the bubbles. Then we competed against other teams from around the world and all of them had very strong sculptural forms. In the end, our square box won because the idea was to complement the Olympic Stadium rather than compete with it. Together they made sense. Then the deeper you look the more layers you discover, like a good book with a story that unfolds. You zoom in and discover the structure of a flat web of rectangular boxed sections clad with ETFE panels. It is all based on the same idea of the soap bubbles that bring together structure, envelop, façade, and space into one coherent form. The structure became an organizing principle for everything that goes inside. Even branding and souvenirs in the gift shop are all based on the same pattern, which made this project incredibly coherent and absolutely unique. There is nothing to add and nothing to take away.
Even when people tried to value engineer the project, they couldn’t do that because it would break the logic of the building and any change would only make it more expensive to build. Throughout the day the building looks different. It is constantly being animated by the sun. Sometimes it looks like solid aluminum panels. Other times it is transparent. It catches the sun in many different ways due to the multiple layers of the ETFE pillows. So, one moment the pillows look flat, and another they look voluptuous. The building may look strong, but if you step aside it may turn into something soft. It surprises you all the time.
VB: What did the experience of designing this building teach you?
CB: My lesson from this experience was to continue looking for inspiration in nature by exploring the shapes of various organisms and the tension between them. As a result, a building can become this organic, soft, beautiful thing that you want to touch and hug. A building has the potential to become more than a mere abstract object.
