LAVA’s Chris Bosse is bringing festive cheer to Milan’s Piazza Dumo with his digital origami installation for department store La Rinascente.

A global cohort of designers has worked to put together La Rinascente’s first-ever Christmas window display. Along with Bosse, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Gyngy Laky, Andrea Mastrovito, Satsuki Oishi, Richard Sweeney, Margherita Marchioni and Tjep have contributed to the installation.

Bosse took ecosystems as his inspiration, creating an origami coral reef made of 1500 recycled cardboard molecules. The sculpture gives the impression of a living, breathing organism through the use of lighting and sound.

Bosse also plays with the viewer’s sense of space, as the reef sculpture climbs up walls and arches over to form cave-like shapes.

More than just a window adornment, the sculpture explores the interaction between symbiotic elements in an organisational system. Bosse looks at how architectural space is created through the interplay between a construction’s separate units. The coral reef as an ecosystem represents an architecture where symbiotic elements interact to form an environment.

“In urban terms, the smallest homes, the spaces they create, the energy they use, the heat and moisture they absorb, multiply into a bigger organisational system, whose sustainability depends on their intelligence,” explains Bosse. The intelligence of each tiny unit comes to impact the intelligence of the whole system.

Bosse’s display for La Rinascente is reminiscent of his work for the Myer Spring Summer 2011 collection, in which he and Amanda Henderson of Gloss Creative designed a runway set of plywood shaped like a giant seashell.   

LAVA
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