Pálmadóttir at present 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 focuses on 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 risk 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 strategies: drill straight into magma pockets and extract the lava; channel molten lava into pre-dug trenches that might kind a metropolis’s foundations; or 3D-print bricks from molten lava in a way just like the way in which objects could be printed out of molten glass.
Pálmadóttir and Skarphéðinsson first offered the idea throughout a chat at Reykjavik’s DesignMarch competition in 2022. This 12 months 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 discovered to make use of molten lava as a constructing materials. It is going to be offered on the Venice Biennale, a number one structure competition, in Could.
COURTESY OF S.AP ARKITEKTAR
Buildings and building supplies like concrete and metal at present 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 achieved 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 check 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’s a lot happening, 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 have the ability to forecast lava circulate precisely sufficient for cities to plan on utilizing it in constructing. They’ll 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.
In the present day, forecasting lava flows is a fancy science that requires distant sensing expertise 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 crew accumulates extra knowledge, which makes the simulations of lava circulate extra correct. Pedersen says there’s a lot analysis but to be achieved, however she expects “a whole lot 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 just like what Pedersen makes use of for her simulations. The town is primarily constructed on a community of trenches that have been stuffed with 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.