How heavy is a city? Discovering Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2025
October 24, 2025
Lisbon is currently hosting How heavy is a city? – an architecture Triennale in three acts, one of the most sophisticated ‘iennales in a long time. One week after the opening VOLUME’s very own Biennalista sat down with chief-curators Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino (Territorial Agency), to reflect on their ambitions, curatorial choices, design decisions – and the necessity to buy a tour-bus.
Francesco Degl’Innocenti: When you were asking How heavy is a city, did you secretly hope that the answer would be a number?
Territorial Agency: It’s only at the beginning that asking How heavy is a city will give you back an answer in numbers. A very rapid excursion into the question, and what is really at stake is the notion of the city. Not as a space onto which you can project ideas, but as a phenomenon to be understood. We would say, since the turn of the century the inquiry into what a city is and how it operates has largely been abandoned by architecture. It has become the background, the context in which things happen, but there’s very little attempts to think how architecture transforms cities. There’s a lot of attention on how architecture transforms sites, or financial contexts, or sometimes establishes ideas of heritage – but the city has very rarely been inquired over the last two decades.
This question comes from the knowledge event of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which we are. And we find that the thinking behind the concept of the technosphere, developed by geoscientist Peter K. Haff, could be very useful for architecture. That’s why it’s at the center of the whole Triennale. We have also reprinted Haff’s last technosphere text in the book.
We are gathering a coalition of thinkers, practitioners, activists, scientists, etc. with questions on how the technosphere could work in architectural knowledge. And that’s why we have divided the exhibition into Fluxes, Spectres, and Lighter: all three acts refer to how we could start thinking the technosphere in architecture.
FDI: In short, putting together the concepts of technosphere and city, you are talking about a planetary notion of urbanity. Now that everything can be technologically sensed, there is no clear distinction anymore between the ins and outs of the city. It is just a matter of gradients, peaking and diffusing.
TA: Exactly. And architecture acts as if the technosphere was simply the domain of technology. But that’s really missing the point: the technosphere is a component of the Earth system, like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere. It’s self-organizing, follows dynamics that are completely outside of human control.
FDI: About human control, I liked that the image of weight is symbolically linked to an idea of justice. Do you think actually this planetary city can lose weight, or that this scale simply shifts its heaviness somewhere?
TA: Shaul Bassi raised a similar point in one of the first Messy Studios [the meetings of this coalition of experts, leading up to the Triennale program] a couple of years ago in Venice. He was intrigued by the act of balancing with its inherent contradictions, a really important aspect of our question. The contemporary discussion seems to be leaning towards the idea that there cannot be any balancing, because there are as many ways to measure as there are ideas of city. So they can never be on the same balance.
The question of heaviness is also the question of which measure? Do we have a common meter? Do we need to measure everything? How do you escape measurement? That’s why the very first point of Fluxes addresses who measures and what does it mean to measure – and we start the exhibition with the work Calculating Empires of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler on the history of measurement and empire. This creates an entry point into questions of measurement, meters, ratios – and also rationality.
With some of the texts in the book we are also investigating if this balancing between flows has to actually happen, or if we can think of it more in a cybernetic way, a momentary shift, as you described, with gradients, tipping points, feedback loops and intensifications within the system.
For cyberneticians, there is no equilibrium outside the system: the system generates notions of equilibrium. But at the same time, they started describing systems as going through tipping points, moments of disruption, of autopoiesis. Equilibrium and control were at the center of cybernetics – think of Buckminster Fuller, human action through the central tiller. But can we have cybernetics without notions of control, of equilibrium? These are some of the questions we hope we have intercepted with the Triennale.
FDI: It is clear, these dilemmas reverberate through all the components of the Triennale. By the way, you made a rather unconventional choice for an architecture exhibition: the screen as your medium of choice. You want to tell us how that came about?
TA: The choice of the screen comes for two reasons: the first one regards the image of the city. The question is, how do we imagine the city? What is the figure of the city? How do we start understanding the outlines of this entity, this phenomenon?
Nowadays we spend so much time looking at screens, but in the three exhibitions screens are used in slightly different ways: sometimes as a horizontal plane, sometimes in an array that defines the movement of visitors, sometimes mirrored. Perception of the screen is the fundamental aspect, linking back to questions such as how do you perceive, what is the relationship between sensing and the figure of the city. So that’s the first element.
The second is to allow different knowledges to coexist. This design choice allowed us to also have scientists present their work on the screen, which is what we wanted to do – to put all forms of knowledge in the same kind of medium.
The typical problem in an exhibition is the structure image-caption, where the explanation carries the truth of the image. That’s misleading on many levels. So the choice of moving images is very much about disrupting that idea that there is a classification of images as if they would relate to a stable condition. We thought of the video as a way to destabilize, and put the viewers in front of a choice of meaning, an inherent ambiguity, a choice of understanding their own selections.
And it’s a time-based exhibition! Not only each screen indicates different stories, but every ten minutes the three exhibitions synchronise, simultaneously – but nobody will ever experience it like that – all screens indicate the same thing: suddenly, at one moment, there’s questions on each screen. And after that, remote sensing images overlay on top of the work of individual participants…or, in Fluxes, Iwan Baan’s aerial photos intrude on each screen…disrupting. It’s all about disruptions!
FDI: Moreover this interference activates the space altogether, content and container…in brackets, I really liked it…and I’m not going to cut my opinion out from the interview. I decide what goes in!
TA: Fernando Brízio is a fantastic curator and designer, he engaged with questions of beauty, materiality, of economics… What was really interesting was our discussions on how to deal with the buildings that we were in. So, although it follows a similar grammar, the design is unconventional, ad hoc, and it really enhances the venues. We spent a lot of time discussing the perception in each place, and Fernando should get a lot of merit for that.
FDI: It’s very interesting what you say. Wandering through one of the three exhibitions, I suddenly had the feeling that the right way to perceive it was not using our typical central view – sharp, clear, detailed – but was instead using our peripheral vision. You know, peripheral vision evolved to make animals act faster in case of emergency, to fire instinctive responses to the surroundings. When you intentionally blur your frontal view you become receptive of what happens at the edges of your field of vision. In our world, the hierarchy between central and peripheral vision crystallized in favour of the first, but I have always been intrigued by the other because that is the way we sense the bigger picture. Was it me imagining it?
TA: Oh, that’s a great outcome! It is by design.
Think about the way we structure truth: presenting evidence, image after image, a sort of procession. Instead the way, we as Territorial Agency address exhibitions moves in meandering ways, like a field: the question is somehow inverted. It’s not us presenting evidence, the participants are building imaginaries through conversations with the space we designed. So visitors are activated, there is a lot of work for these exhibitions, exactly because nothing is presented frontally. There is always a notion of laterality that we like to explore.
An exhibition for us is a knowledge event, a moment to confront the individual perception – and designing this experience with Fernando Brízio was really central in the making of this project. There is never transparency – mainly translucencies, that occasionally overlap, blur, reflect, in spaces that would be disquieting sometimes.
We wanted to convey the Gedankenausstellung, from Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel and pick up on their way of creating thought experiment exhibitions. Our aim is to have the visitor moved.
FDI: Another interesting aspect of using screens is transportation costs; video can travel a lot easier compared to conventional architecture exhibitions. Considering the planetary scope of our message, do you have a tour bus yet? You should!
TA: We love the idea of traveling exhibitions! There are partners in our larger team of advisors that are likely interested in it. We are definitely interested in bringing it on the road. So, if the readers have a wish to host part of it, they should just…
FDI: That’s a wonderful call to put out there: Reach out, folks. It’s worth it!
Personally, I was impressed by the coherent level of sophistication in the design and the curation. With such a planetary ambition it was not easy. To conclude, we talked a lot about questions today. I’m curious: is there a question that you thought you had the perfect answer to, but none asked yet? And what was the answer?
TA: The answer is 30 trillion tons [the estimate weight of the technosphere], that’s the simple answer.
FDI: The narrative arc: we are back to a number!
TA: We’ve been investigating the emergence of the Anthropocene quite in detail over the last decades, and it’s really hard to convey the magnitude of what is happening. So, the 30 trillion tons of the technosphere – or you can call it 654 exajoules, or the 1015 bits per second of the material, energy, and information flows – is staggering, really difficult to apprehend. For us, to comprehend it, we called it a city, and this keeps the notions of city and technosphere together. So that’s why the 30 trillion tons is both the beginning and the end of the conversation.
About The Lisbon Architecture Triennale
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale runs until the 8th of December; the three main exhibitions are Fluxes (at MAAT, 5.10.2025-19.1.2026), Spectres (at MUDE, 4.10.2025-11.1.2026), and Lighter (at MAC/CCB, 3.10.2025-4.1.2026)
Talk, Talk, Talk lecture series
From 29 – 31 October, the Triennale 2025 will host an intense programme of lectures and debates around the three research lines: Fluxes, Spectres, and Lighter. International experts from many fields engage and discuss with the audience their work. During each session, a shared space is assembled to disclose new audacious ideas and foster pioneer research, culminating with a drink&talk, moderated by Archis/VOLUME’s Lilet Breddels, Christele Harrouk, and Federica Zambeletti – an irreverent and informal gathering between audience and speakers.