skull studio says ‘The Floor is lava soft’
At the 2025 UIT Festival in Tartu, Estonia, SKULL studio unveiled ‘The Floor is lava soft!’ — a temporary installation that turns a car park into an unexpected playground. Led by Czech artist Matěj Hájek, creative strategist Pavel Krajčík, and photographer Bet Orten, the collective replaces asphalt and parked cars with straw bales to soften the urban landscape. The result is a curious intervention that invites passersby to touch, jump, play, sit, gather, or simply pause, blurring the boundaries between everyday infrastructure and spaces of play. Sometimes all it takes is to simply create spaces where play is allowed.
‘The Floor is lava soft!’ by SKULL studio intersects the city in the space of a car park | all images courtesy of SKULL studio
skull turns the city into a canvas of play
Founded in 2020 by Matěj Hájek and Bet Orten, SKULL studio positions itself as a laboratory of ideas, concepts, and visions. Sculpture becomes a gaming element, the landscape transforms into a playground, interiors evolve into works of art, and photography transcends into image-making. Multidisciplinarity lies at the heart of the practice, uniting expertise from art, design, and technology into interventions that are both playful and socially engaging.
With ‘The Floor is lava soft!’, the studio demonstrates its ethos in action: challenging the rigidity of the urban environment with an intervention that is ephemeral, humorous, and human. In doing so, SKULL turns the city itself into a canvas, one where softness interrupts hardness, and where play transforms everyday life.
by replacing the typical urban materiality with straw bales, the intervention softens the city landscape
SKULL creates a tactile space that is adapted and changed by those using it
this ‘anomaly of softness’ encourages anyone to touch, jump, play, sit, gather or simply just lay around
‘The Floor is lava soft!’ blurs the boundaries between the spaces of play and the city itself
project info:
name: The Floor is lava soft!
design: SKULL studio | @skull_studio_prague
design team: Matěj Hájek, Ondřej Kobza, Tomáš Beník, Aneta Kůšová, Karim Samy Awwad
photography: Mana Kaasik | @manakaasik
designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.
edited by: eirini ilia | designboom
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