How Heavy Is a City? Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2025 Questions the Weight of Our Urban Future
By Musotrees Newsroom.
From 2 October to 8 December 2025, Lisbon will once again transform into a living laboratory of ideas. The 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale, titled How Heavy Is a City?, invites architects, artists, and thinkers to explore the physical and philosophical weight of our built world.
Curated by Territorial Agency — the acclaimed duo of Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino — this edition reimagines architecture’s role in an era defined by planetary change. The curators ask a profound question: What is the true weight of a city today?
Scientists estimate that the “technosphere” — all human-made materials, systems, and infrastructures — now weighs around 30 trillion tonnes. The Triennale turns this data into a lens for reflection: how much of that weight belongs to us, and how can architecture begin to live lighter?
“The Triennale 2025 dares us to start questioning: What is today’s city? What are its boundaries? How do we measure it? How do we live in it?”
— Territorial Agency
Three Thought Exhibitions
At the heart of the Triennale are three interconnected “thought exhibitions”, a term inspired by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour’s concept of the Gedankenausstellung — exhibitions as spaces for ideas rather than simple displays.
Each venue becomes a node in a wider conversation, linking art, science, and urban practice through critical inquiry and visual imagination.
(i) FLUXES — MAAT: Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Explores the material and energy flows that sustain human civilisation, questioning how architecture mediates these global systems.
Photo below: FLUXES – Matilde Fieschi for Lisbon Architecture Triennale
(ii) SPECTRES — MUDE: Design Museum
Examines the imaging technologies that document and shape human impact — from satellites to sonar — and the colonial structures they continue to reflect.
Photo below: SPECTRES – Fiat Lux Experience for Lisbon Architecture Triennale
(iii) LIGHTER — MAC/CCB: Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre
Looks ahead to regenerative and adaptive modes of design, asking how cities can become “lighter” in their material, ethical, and ecological footprints.
Photo below: LIGHTER _ Joana Linda for Lisbon Architecture Triennale Triennale
The exhibitions are designed by Fernando Brízio, who uses minimal, reusable materials to create a unified architectural language — translating the curatorial idea of “lightness” into spatial form.
Beyond the Exhibition: Independent Projects
The Triennale expands across Lisbon through a series of Independent Projects — installations, performances, and research initiatives selected through an open call. These projects engage local and global audiences alike, testing the boundaries of architecture as both discipline and dialogue.
Photo above: Bandeira de Kitembo_Hugo David for Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Photo above: Featherweight_Joana Linda for Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Photo above: DANCE + CITY STILLS - Gravitas Scientific and Technical Library of the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute
Highlights include works that weigh the invisible — from dust particles to data streams — revealing how urban life is entangled with planetary systems. Together, they turn Lisbon itself into a dynamic stage for inquiry, imagination, and debate.
Recognition and Awards
The Triennale also continues its tradition of celebrating architectural innovation through the Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Awards.
In 2025, the Achievement Award honours Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, for her six-decade career dedicated to humanitarian and sustainable design. Her “four zeros” philosophy — zero carbon, zero waste, zero donors, and zero poverty — embodies the same ethos of lightness that anchors this Triennale.
A Coalition for a Lighter Future
How Heavy Is a City? positions architecture as a coalition of sciences, art, and activism — a field capable of rethinking coexistence between humans and the living Earth.
By challenging the idea of the city as purely human, the Triennale opens space for architecture that listens to its environment rather than dominating it.
“It is a call to rethink the city of humans as a coalition with other form-making entities, with a living Earth.”
— Ann-Sofi Rönnskog & John Palmesino, Territorial Agency
Event Information
Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2025 — “How Heavy Is a City?”
Lisbon, Portugal
2 October – 8 December 2025
2025.trienaldelisboa.com
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