This project was Iceland’s contribution to the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2025. The exhibition tells the story of a future society that has learned to tame lava flows, utilize them, and thus turn a local threat into an opportunity for creativity. Here I join SAP architects in world building and imagining a future in the year 2150 – when Lavaforming as a technique is almost as old as modern concrete is now as a building material.
Lavaforming is a proposal on how the brutal force of lava can be turned into a valuable resource, capable of lowering atmospheric emissions through its future use as a sustainable building material.
In our story, placed in 2150, we have harnessed the lava flow, just as we did with geothermal energy 200 years earlier in Iceland. The main goal of Lavaforming is to show that architecture can be the force that rethinks and shapes a new future with sustainability, innovation, and creative thinking. A lava flow can contain enough building material for the foundations of an entire city to rise in a matter of weeks without harmful mining and non-renewable energy generation. Lavaforming is exploring a building material that has never been used before. The theme is both a proposal and a metaphor – architecture is in a paradigm shift, many of our current methods have been deemed obsolete or harmful in the long term. In our current predicament – we need to be bold, think in new ways, look at challenges and find the right resources.
Architect Arnhildur Pálmadóttir is the founder and owner of s.ap architects, which specializes in sustainability and circularity in construction, and the curator and the creative director of Lavaforming. She is renowned for her entrepreneurial attitude and interdisciplinary interest that she uses to tackle projects from various perspectives.
Lavaforming is open 23.01.2026-26.04.2026