Chris Bosse is one of twelve Australian designers exhibiting in CUSP: Designing into the Next Decade at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney, 6 July 1 September 2013
Exploring the potential of design in our lives, the ‘CUSP designers generate ideas that could change the way we inhabit the world’.
Bosse, director of LAVA, says: ‘a cusp is a breakthrough, a breaking with the past. 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?’
Cloud City: An urban ecosystem is a sculptural rendition of Bosse’s vision of a future city ‐ 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.’
‘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.
Bosse replaces outdated passive building facades of the skyscraper with highperformance smart translucent cocoons that create their own microclimate, generate energy, collect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.
