Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was round three years outdated when she noticed a crimson sky from her lounge window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from the place she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Although it posed no quick risk, its ominous presence seeped into her unconscious, populating her desires with streaks of sunshine within the night time sky.
Fifty years later, these “gloomy, unusual desires,” as Pálmadóttir now describes them, have led to a profession as an architect with a unprecedented mission: to harness molten lava and construct cities out of it.
Pálmadóttir immediately lives in Reykjavik, the place she runs her personal structure studio, S.AP Arkitektar, and the Icelandic department of the Danish structure firm Lendager, which makes a speciality of reusing constructing supplies.
The architect believes the lava that flows from a single eruption may yield sufficient constructing materials to put the foundations of a complete metropolis. She has been researching this chance for greater than 5 years as a part of a venture she calls Lavaforming. Collectively together with her son and colleague Arnar Skarphéðinsson, she has recognized three potential methods: drill straight into magma pockets and extract the lava; channel molten lava into pre-dug trenches that would type a metropolis’s foundations; or 3D-print bricks from molten lava in a way much like the way in which objects might be printed out of molten glass.
Pálmadóttir and Skarphéðinsson first offered the idea throughout a chat at Reykjavik’s DesignMarch pageant in 2022. This yr they’re producing a speculative movie set in 2150, in an imaginary metropolis referred to as Eldborg. Their movie, titled Lavaforming, follows the lives of Eldborg’s residents and appears again on how they realized to make use of molten lava as a constructing materials. It will likely be offered on the Venice Biennale, a number one structure pageant, in Might.
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Buildings and development supplies like concrete and metal presently contribute a staggering 37% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. Many architects are advocating for the usage of pure or preexisting supplies, however mixing earth and water right into a mildew is one factor; tinkering with 2,000 °F lava is one other.
Nonetheless, Pálmadóttir is piggybacking on analysis already being accomplished in Iceland, which has 30 lively volcanoes. Since 2021, eruptions have intensified within the Reykjanes Peninsula, which is near the capital and to vacationer scorching spots just like the Blue Lagoon. In 2024 alone, there have been six volcanic eruptions in that space. This frequency has given volcanologists alternatives to review how lava behaves after a volcano erupts. “We attempt to observe this beast,” says Gro Birkefeldt M. Pedersen, a volcanologist on the Icelandic Meteorological Workplace (IMO), who has consulted with Pálmadóttir on a number of events. “There may be a lot occurring, and we’re simply making an attempt to catch up and be ready.”
Pálmadóttir’s idea assumes that a few years from now, volcanologists will be capable of forecast lava circulate precisely sufficient for cities to plan on utilizing it in constructing. They are going to know when and the place to dig trenches in order that when a volcano erupts, the lava will circulate into them and solidify into both partitions or foundations.
At present, forecasting lava flows is a fancy science that requires distant sensing know-how and great quantities of computational energy to run simulations on supercomputers. The IMO usually runs two simulations for each new eruption—one based mostly on knowledge from earlier eruptions, and one other based mostly on extra knowledge acquired shortly after the eruption (from varied sources like specifically outfitted planes). With each occasion, the group accumulates extra knowledge, which makes the simulations of lava circulate extra correct. Pedersen says there’s a lot analysis but to be accomplished, however she expects “a variety of development” within the subsequent 10 years or so.
To design the speculative metropolis of Eldborg for his or her movie, Pálmadóttir and Skarphéðinsson used 3D-modeling software program much like what Pedersen makes use of for her simulations. Town is primarily constructed on a community of trenches that have been full of lava over the course of a number of eruptions, whereas buildings are constructed out of lava bricks. “We’re going to let nature design the buildings that may pop up,” says Pálmadóttir.
The aesthetic of the town they envision shall be much less modernist and extra fantastical—a bit “like [Gaudi’s] Sagrada Familia,” says Pálmadóttir. However the aesthetic output isn’t actually the purpose; the architects’ objective is to provoke architects immediately and spark an pressing dialogue in regards to the influence of local weather change on our cities. She stresses the worth of what can solely be described as moonshot considering. “I feel it’s important for architects to not be solely within the current,” she informed me. “As a result of if we’re solely within the current, working contained in the system, we received’t change something.”
Pálmadóttir was born in 1972 in Húsavik, a city often called the whale-watching capital of Iceland. However she was extra considering area and know-how and spent a variety of time flying together with her father, a development engineer who owned a small airplane. She credit his job for the curiosity she developed about science and “how issues have been put collectively”—an inclination that proved helpful later, when she began researching volcanoes. So was the truth that Icelanders “study to stay with volcanoes from beginning.” At 21, she moved to Norway, the place she spent seven years working in 3D visualization earlier than returning to Reykjavik and enrolling in an structure program on the Iceland College of the Arts. However issues didn’t click on till she moved to Barcelona for a grasp’s diploma on the Institute for Superior Structure of Catalonia. “I bear in mind being there and feeling, lastly, like I used to be within the actual proper place,” she says.
Earlier than, structure had appeared like a commodity and designers like “slaves to funding firms,” she says. Now, it felt like a path with potential.
COURTESY OF S.AP ARKITEKTAR
COURTESY OF S.AP ARKITEKTAR
COURTESY OF S.AP ARKITEKTAR
COURTESY OF S.AP ARKITEKTAR
Lava has proved to be a robust, sturdy constructing materials, at the very least in its strong state. To discover its potential, Pálmadóttir and Skarphéðinsson envision a metropolis constructed on a community of trenches which have full of lava over the course of a number of eruptions, whereas buildings are constructed with lava bricks.
She returned to Reykjavik in 2009 and labored as an architect till she based S.AP (for “studio Arnhildur Pálmadóttir”) Arkitektar in 2018; her son began working together with her in 2019 and formally joined her as an architect this yr, after graduating from the Southern California Institute of Structure.
In 2021, the pair witnessed their first eruption up shut, close to the Fagradalsfjall volcano on the Reykjanes Peninsula. It was there that Pálmadóttir grew to become conscious of the sheer amount of fabric coursing via the planet’s veins, and the potential to divert it into channels.
Lava has already proved to be a robust, long-lasting constructing materials—at the very least in its strong state. When it cools, it solidifies into volcanic rock like basalt or rhyolite. The kind of rock depends upon the composition of the lava, however basaltic lava—like the type present in Iceland and Hawaii—varieties one of many hardest rocks on Earth, which implies that constructions constructed from the sort of lava could be sturdy and resilient.
For years, architects in Mexico, Iceland, and Hawaii (the place lava is broadly obtainable) have constructed constructions out of volcanic rock. However quarrying that rock is an energy-intensive course of that requires heavy machines to extract, reduce, and haul it, typically throughout lengthy distances, leaving a giant carbon footprint. Harnessing lava in its molten state, nevertheless, may unlock new strategies for sustainable development. Jeffrey Karson, a professor emeritus at Syracuse College who makes a speciality of volcanic exercise and who cofounded the Syracuse College Lava Mission, agrees that lava is ample sufficient to warrant curiosity as a constructing materials. To know the way it behaves, Karson has spent the previous 15 years performing over a thousand managed lava pours from large furnaces. If we determine construct up its power because it cools, he says, “that stuff has a variety of potential.”
In his analysis, Karson discovered that inserting steel rods into the lava circulate helps cut back the type of uneven cooling that might result in thermal cracking—and due to this fact makes the fabric stronger (a bit like rebar in concrete). Like glass and different molten supplies, lava behaves otherwise relying on how briskly it cools. When glass or lava cools slowly, crystals begin forming, strengthening the fabric. Replicating this course of—maybe in a kiln—may decelerate the speed of cooling and let the lava grow to be stronger. This sort of managed cooling is “straightforward to do on small issues like bricks,” says Karson, so “it’s not unattainable to make a wall.”
Pálmadóttir is clear-eyed in regards to the challenges earlier than her. She is aware of the methods she and Skarphéðinsson are exploring could not result in something tangible of their lifetimes, however they nonetheless imagine that the ripple impact the initiatives may create within the structure neighborhood is price pursuing.
Each Karson and Pedersen warning that extra experiments are vital to review this materials’s potential. For Skarphéðinsson, that potential transcends the constructing business. Greater than 12 years in the past, Icelanders voted that the island’s pure assets, like its volcanoes and fishing waters, must be declared nationwide property. Meaning any metropolis constructed from lava flowing out of those volcanoes could be managed not by deep-pocketed people or firms, however by the nation itself. (The referendum was thought of unlawful nearly as quickly because it was permitted by voters and has since stalled.)
For Skarphéðinsson, the Lavaforming venture is much less in regards to the materials than in regards to the “political implications that get delivered to the floor with this materials.” “That’s the change I need to see on this planet,” he says. “It may power us to make radical modifications and be a catalyst for one thing”—maybe a social megalopolis the place residents have extra say in how assets are used and earnings are shared extra evenly.
Cynics would possibly dismiss the concept of harnessing lava as pure folly. However the extra I spoke with Pálmadóttir, the extra satisfied I grew to become. It wouldn’t be the primary time in trendy historical past {that a} seemingly harmful thought (for instance, drilling into scalding pockets of underground scorching springs) proved revolutionary. As soon as completely depending on oil, Iceland immediately obtains 85% of its electrical energy and warmth from renewable sources. “[My friends] in all probability assume I’m fairly loopy, however they assume possibly we may very well be intelligent geniuses,” she informed me with fun. Perhaps she is slightly little bit of each.
Elissaveta M. Brandon is an everyday contributor to Quick Firm and Wired.
