The Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale Calls for a Radical Rethinking of the Contemporary City

The Earth can never belong to any one species, says Emanuele Coccia. “And it is only if the city ceases to think of itself as an improbable “naturally human ecosystem” opposed to other ‘naturally nonhuman’ or ‘wild’ ecosystems that it will be able to open up to many other species. All species are tenants on this planet.” The seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale, titled How Heavy is a City?, presents a coalition of architectural investigations that spiral into absurdity, echoing the complexities of the contemporary city. Faced with the perplexity of our current social, political and ecological crises, the triennial proposes a new imaginary for the city: one that is informed by the complexity of all its material fluxes. Contoured through a coalition of questions, the city emerges here as a web of interdependencies, at once everywhere and nowhere, engulfing both “city” and “countryside” in a culmination of the technosphere-driven acceleration of energy and material extraction.

Curated by Territorial Agency (Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino) across eight venues, the triennial features three main exhibitions—“Fluxes,” “Spectres” and “Lighter”—as well as numerous independent projects, the public program “Talk, Talk, Talk” curated by Filipa Ramos and an accompanying almost 300-page publication with contributions by Emanuele Coccia, Bruno Latour, Kate Crawford and many more. Impressive and overwhelming in equal measures, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale nonetheless incites a deep drive for change. Feet firmly planted on the ground and adopting a more scientific approach, it does not shy away from the harm that contemporary cities inflict on our planet, nor does it offer solutions to this predicament. Instead, we find ourselves part and parcel of the ongoing state of disappearance that is the dizzying maze of the contemporary city.

Urban “Fluxes” of the technosphere

The old power station of MAAT—Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology hosts “Fluxes,” the first exhibition of the triennial. After some references to futurist architect Buckminster Fuller, it begins with Katherinne Fiedler’s harrowing video installation Guardians (2024). The video shows dogs walking through grand, empty buildings, questioning the concept of monumentalization. With a knot in my stomach caused by the dogs’ amplified panting, I find myself in a corridor created by large-scale boards placed at an angle inwards above my head. Like hard-to-read hieroglyphs, they contain the white-on-black schema of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires, A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (2023). The work poses the question ‘Who measures?’ by tracing the increasingly authoritarian systems of communication, computation, control and classification; haunting phrases charting how we have come to today’s tech structures of mass surveillance, a planetary crisis countered by promises of techno-solutionism and an accelerating extraction of all the Earth’s life and resources.

“Fluxes” is concerned with the material fluxes and dynamic processes of global cities as well as the accumulation of energy and information that they are built upon: the so-called technosphere. The main display features 5-10 minute videos playing on horizontally hung monitors placed at knee height and suspended from the ceiling on transparent vinyl curtains. When trying to take in the summary of years of investigation and complex analysis, the viewer needs to lean over the screens and into the architectural investigations uncomfortably. The works each contribute a question on the components of the city and its interdependencies. ‘Shall we keep oil in the ground?’ Iwan Baan asks, sharing how our reliance on petroleum fuels both the technosphere and its instability. ‘How heavy is air?’ Trescientosmil asks, exploring how the acceleration of the carbon cycle drives climate change and intensifies the technosphere. ‘How does measuring change the city?’ FAUP pertinently considers, showing how measuring is itself an agent of urban transformation.

The technosphere, defined as equivalent to the contemporary city, plays a significant role in these questions and warrants further explanation. A term first coined by Peter Haff, it is best explained in an independent project on view at Palácio Sinel de Cordes: Brittany Uttering’s The Sixth Sphere. Featuring a multitude of architectural investigations, it introduces the technosphere as follows:

Entangled within the Earth’s five natural spheres—lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and atmosphere—lies a sixth: the technosphere, a planetary infrastructure of extraction and industrial production. Critical to our survival, its exponential growth destabilizes the very spheres upon which it depends.

Uttering divides the technosphere into three parts: (M1) molecular, (M2) machinic and (M3) metabolic. Charting these, we find the technosphere engulfing all Earth as we know it: from carbon dioxide emissions and the plastic pollutants that the oil industry will release with the fossil fuel market’s decline—to the extraction, use, waste and impact of building materials.

Problematically, the theoretical underpinning of the triennial argues that we must accept “the need for increasing technospheric energy consumption [and] … compromise with this new world system in a way that both humanity and the technosphere can, at least in the short run, achieve their most fundamental goal, survival,” even though the technosphere will, in the long run, “lose its internal coherence and, in consequence, the ability to improve and sustain human well-being.”

These fundamental contradictions of the triennial’s investigations lie at the heart of the way the triennial is conceived and, conversely, how it conceives of the contemporary city. By providing an immense amount of diverse data, the triennial takes us to the almost surreal absurdity of the current human condition. So much so that the very idea of measuring, informing and inventing feels almost superfluous, disembodied from a world of human and other-than-human connection and care.

“Spectres” of an ongoing state of disappearance

At MUDE—Design Museum, we encounter “Spectres,” which extends the concept of the city beyond its traditional borders into the “ghost acreages” that supply it with the material and energy it needs. The exhibition opens with Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s large-scale installation Correspondences, whose harrowing narration tells stories of ravaging forest fires, repeated extinction of species, rapidly melting glaciers and catastrophic weather events. Sitting on the museum’s cold floor and watching the imagery intensify, I can almost touch the desire to act against the machine of extractive capitalism washing over the room, giving texture and face to the numbers—a counterpoint to the scientific calculations of “Fluxes.”

This emotive starting point is followed by a grid of horizontally hung monitors: each row displaying an architectural inquiry just as in “Fluxes.” The collective imagining and mutual reflective criticism present in their succession is nothing short of brilliant. An example is Daniel Miller and Marina Otero Verzier’s pieces, which ask ‘How heavy is a digital twin?’ and ‘Can a nation be without land?’ by featuring Tuvalu, a small island nation that is expected to disappear due to rising sea levels. Seeking to address the issue of a nation losing its land, the project presents a visionary proposal for the world’s first digital nation, run on blockchain. This is instantly followed by its counterpoint, with FAUP questioning the very idea of a nation with What is the weight of a border?

Walking through the architectural investigations of “Spectres” to the soundscape of Correspondences, I find myself stuck with a feeling of a haunting reality that I encountered in the opening of “Fluxes.” This haunting quality of the triennial may perhaps be best understood through the lens of Ackbar Abbas’ theory on the culture and politics of disappearance, initially formulated as a continuous state to describe Hong Kong’s cultural response after 1997. Watching stories of lands that are soon to be engulfed by rising sea levels, species driven to extinction and muograph images tracing hidden voids, we find ourselves in the midst of architectural responses to a permanent state of disappearance on a planetary scale.

Seen from this perspective, the Seventh Lisbon Triennial of Architecture reveals a reimagining of the contemporary city as a continuous state of disappearance, with humans inevitably grappling for solutions that slip through their fingers as the technospheric acceleration increases. No longer able to act with security and permanence in a state of flux, humans find themselves instead haunted by the past—as the ghosts of unfinished nuclear power plants with Paul Cetnarski’s Roadside Picnic—and by the present—as the corporate and state interests targeting lithium extraction with Tiago Patata’s independent project and talk on the grassroots resistance in Barroso, Portugal, against this next step of global extractivism.

“Lighter” by making space for action

MAC/CCB—Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre features the final major exhibition of the triennial: “Lighter.” In contrast to the horizontal grids of monitors found in “Fluxes” and “Spectres,” the main monitors in “Lighter” are vertical, placed within a maze of curtains that requires the viewer to seek out the videos documenting projects that explore alternative possibilities for the future. This curatorial shift, with the audience upright and in motion, places us in a position from which we can react to the works and, perhaps, even take action.

The alternatives for the future that “Lighter” offers have a tendency toward the techno-solutionism that the triennial at once criticizes and harbors an inclination. Two works, however, stand out as an exception: Lynn Margulis’ The Tissue of Gaia from the Symbiotic Earth Collection (1993) and WORKOVERTIME’s A Metabolic Commons—Many Hands Make Light Work (2025). The first delightfully refuses the myth of the Anthropocene by showing microorganisms as the true stewards of the Earth. The latter focuses instead on the human relationship, emphasizing the need to develop an infrastructure of care rather than exploitation.

“Lighter” successfully drives action, and I soon find myself walking out of the triennial’s furious. First, I naively direct this fury at the show itself for being a techno-driven exhibition that questions the technosphere. A fury for the triennial—inevitably and surely purposefully—mirroring the technosphere being built on worlds that its very existence destroys. Where, beyond glimpses of more sensitive works and collective resistances, do we find nature in all of this? How do we escape the loop of the technosphere?

With time, I find the fury to be, instead, in opposition to the structures of individualism, extractivism and exploitation that fuel our crises; against our inability to transcend the technosphere. Ultimately, the seventh Lisbon Triennale of Architecture not only questions how heavy a city is, but inspires an upturning of the status quo—not from a place of emotion but from a place of science. Through this, it shows all the more starkly the permanent state of disappearance we have found ourselves in. By introducing a dizzying array of questions, data and measures, the triennial prompts us to reject solution after solution until we reject solutionism in its entirety while refusing to give up, give in, or provide any answers.

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale, How Heavy is a City?, is on view at MAAT—Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, MUDE—Design Museum and MAC/CCB—Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre, as well as Palácio Sinel de Cordes, MNAC—National Museum of Contemporary Art, Estufa Fria and Atelier Amadeo through December 8, 2025.

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