“Architects today are really stuck in the grip of capital,” says Arnhildur Pálmadóttir. “And I think we should be more.” Her words hang in the air. I blink, surprised, and try to speedily recalibrate my thinking. Architects, in my experience, do not usually say this kind of thing. “I think we need to step in and take more responsibility for buildings,” she continues, “including how they’re made, the materials that are used, and the whole idea of ownership.”
What Arnhildur is saying is bold to the point of being revolutionary. And even wilder? That this concept of mass-produced, publicly owned housing should be constructed from molten lava — that same irrepressible, hyper-destructive natural phenomenon that recently closed the town of Grindavík.
It’s all part of Lavaforming, a speculative design project by s.ap arkitektar — that is Arnhildur, and her son Arnar — that’s Iceland’s first-ever showing at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Set in the year 2150, it imagines a future where Iceland has harnessed geothermal technology in a new way, converting molten lava into a viable resource. The accompanying six-minute film shows molten lava being redirected into a large-scale installation that cools the flow, producing a conveyor belt of new building material.
“What we are proposing is that we could start digging canals in the ground, like in Grindavík,” she says. “We could use the lava flow, or tap into lava pockets just below the surface, and make structural walls as the base for a city. The movie proposes that this initial idea didn’t work that well, so the next step was making robots to work with the lava. They are made of basalt, so they don’t melt. They travel around, scoop up the lava, and make it a structure — a bit like the idea of a 3D printer. It wouldn’t be stuck in the X, Y and Z axis, but moving around, and adding material on top of each other all the time.”
IRL 3DP
It’s a futuristic idea that’s reminiscent of sci-fi works like Wall-E. But the idea was inspired by an episode of real-life history described by anthropologist and author David Graeber in his book The Dawn of Everything. The book charts historical occurrences of non-hierarchical building and communally owned structures. “He wrote about an ancient society in the Mississippi Delta,” says Arnhildur. “The people there built a city by scooping up clay one handful at a time, and adding it, again and again. That’s how they built their city.”
New ideas for sustainably built, environmentally friendly architecture have been on the increase in recent years. The global climate disaster that’s unfolding before our eyes presents all kinds of housing problems, from humanely handling mass migration away from newly uninhabitable regions, to the challenges posed by changing weather patterns, increasingly violent storms, and rising sea levels, to name just a few.
“Architecture is in crisis — because we can’t build, but we have to build,” says Arnhildur. “We have so many people that need shelter. So Lavaforming addresses this too. The ownership of lava is very important here, of course — that was one of the first points we made. Iceland was supposed to have a new constitution in place, and ownership of materials coming from the ground would have been in the hands of the people. So structures made of this material would be owned by the people too.”
Critical towards tech
It’s a beautiful idea. But like many socially minded concepts, it’s hard to imagine such a thing happening without being co-opted by business interests. In the Lavaforming film, it takes a revolution for the people to wrest control from big business into their own hands. “Andri Snær Magnason is part of the team working on Lavaforming,” says Arnhildur. “He’s been giving those people voices, and adding to the layers of the storytelling.”
The Lavaforming project has taken a long road from the inkling of an idea to the world stage. It started as a side project, with Arnhildur and Arnar giving what time they could to it. Things picked up when Arnhildur gave a talk on the idea at DesignMarch. “I did a Design Talk, and we had a small exhibition at Ásmundarsalur,” she says. “Then we got some grants to find some new collaborators and continue the research. Now with Venice, we’ve pushed it forward a lot, and opened up even more possibilities.”
The project was a perfect fit for the theme of the Biennale: “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” It was set by the 2025 curator, renowned urban planning scholar Carlo Ratti. “He’s a tech optimist,” says Arnhildur. “He wants to solve the climate crisis with technology. I partly agree with him, but also not, because I think we also need to kind of reduce, use more of what we have, and to be a little more critical towards technology.”
To have a voice
Hundreds of thousands of visitors will see the work at the Biennale — but Icelanders needn’t fly out to Venice for a look. The show will come to the Reykjavík Art Museum’s Hafnarhúsið in early 2026. And with the Venice wind in its sails, it’s sure to garner even more attention going forward.
“It was of course a huge honour to be the first from Iceland at the Biennale,” says Arnhildur. “It’s something that you dream of when you’re an architect — to have a voice, and participate in the most relevant conversation at that point in time.”
Find out more at saparkitektar.is and labiennale.org.
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