2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale ponders the (literal and figurative) weight of humanity

The 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale has opened, themed around the question: ‘How Heavy is the City?’ Curators John Palmesino and Ann-Sofia Rönnskog of Territorial Agency say the question ‘addresses issues of magnitude, spatial organisation, form, technology, materiality, and the multiple relations that human spaces have with other entities’. In short, the triennale’s ambition covers the whole ’technosphere’ that humanity has created – our impact on the planet – which, the triennale organisers calculated, weighs a mind-blowing 30 trillion tonnes.

Explore the themes of the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale

As part of the city-wide festival, as well as independent projects across the city (including in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s own headquarters in the atmospherically restored Palace of Sinel de Cordes), there are three major shows.

Lisbon’s old riverside power station, now part of MAAT, hosts ‘Fluxes’. We enter it through a black passage lined with enormous flowcharts mapping technological evolution from 1500 to today, conveying the sheer complexity of the technosphere. The show’s main part is presented on horizontal screens at knee height, suspended ingeniously by clear plastic bands from the cathedral-sized heights of the industrial space.

Subjects range from the cosmic dust constantly falling into our world, to the planetary cost of random numbers, essential to computing; Iwan Baan’s stunning photographic exploration of the vast oil shale extraction activities in Alberta, Canada; and Katherinne Fielder’s film Guardians, which takes us into a remote Peruvian desert facility, empty but for two healthy, wandering dogs (Chico and Uber). The last is a serene, charming and enigmatic work – and the monumental contemporary structure makes architecture as much its star as those dogs.

In the Belem district, famed for launching Portugal’s navigator-explorers and pastéis de nata, the CCB hosts ‘Lighter’. Palmesino and Rönnskog summarise its message as ‘more light, less mass’. The theme threads through this show, from photosynthesis to the technosphere’s albedo (reflective brightness). White, silky, ethereal drapes channel you through the exhibits, and ambient music fills the space. Green light filters through a beautiful screen by Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg.

In the adjacent Museum of Contemporary Art is a row of independent projects, including the film City + Dance, a dialogue between choreography and extraordinary Lithuanian and Estonian modernist architecture.

At MUDE, Lisbon’s design museum, the third major show, ‘Spectres’, offers 16 projects, mainly shown on another array of horizontal screens. They range from the plight of Tuvalu, the Pacific nation set to disappear under the waves, to Airbus’ global elevation investigation, which measures precisely those rising sea levels. Other subjects range far and wide, including digital twins, borders and barriers, and muons (sub-atomic particles) as a tool to see through buildings and rock.

MUDE’s highlight is Correspondences by Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith, a film projected across two wide walls. Without explanatory text, it takes us across and under the oceans, into rocks, over ice flows, and circles over the tragic body of a beached whale. We see wildfires, and Smith’s voice lists their recent exponential spread with dates and numbers. As the imagery switches to purple trees, Smith delivers a haunting, delicate song that somehow bridges sadness and hope for the Earth.

Nowadays, environmental and social sustainability are embedded in architecture’s discourse, but with technology and more, the triennale goes further than ever. Architectural graphics and imagery remain woven into its offerings. And yes, there is even an actual building – and it may be the best independent project of all.

The Anthropocene Apartment by Lisbon-based Czech practice Atelier Holcnerová is a small duplex you can explore. Every element embodies sustainable principles, from a re-used ancient stone wall to lamps of tangled seaweed fibre and an animal trough adapted as a washbasin. The result is organic, contemporary, calm, and it looks refreshingly cool. To get a grip on the Anthropocene, we need to understand it. This Triennale is a tsunami of brilliantly presented insights. But we also need to be spiritually moved. Lisbon has projects that do that, from the sheer emotional intensity of Correspondences at MUDE to glimpses of a greener world we could make.

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