1 . About

How heavy is a city? The question that shapes the Lisbon Triennale 2025 challenges our current understanding of human spaces: to answer it demands to inquire into a new planetary dimension of all networked technological artefacts and the energy, material and information fluxes that shape them, and to rethink notions of citizenship in a transformed world.

Universities are critical centres for the production of knowledge and innovation. The Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Universities Competition is an invitation to schools and post-academic research centres and programmes from all over the world to join in developing the knowledges required to shape the city of the twenty-first century and be a part of the main programme for the upcoming Triennale taking place in the Autumn of 2025.

The competition has two categories of participation: one for Master’s Degree programmes and one for Research programmes.

It is open directly to architecture and its related fields, whether these are project oriented – e.g. urbanism and landscape architecture – technical – e.g. construction or material technologies – or multidisciplinary – e.g. art, geography, urban sociology or environmental studies. We encourage participation from groups with diverse disciplinary trajectories. The aim is to stimulate individual and collective contributions in the innovation of knowledge on the contemporary city and its material characterisation: how to make cities lighter?

2. Theme

How heavy is a city? The contemporary city is evolving incredibly rapidly and disrupting all other structures and cycles of the Earth. Humans move more materials than rivers and oceans; we collectively use more energy than ever before.

What we used to know as, and call the ‘city’ is transforming into a new planetary phenomenon shaping the Earth’s bio-geo-chemical cycles: a vast new figure enmeshing the Earth and demanding more materials to sustain it, repair it, expand it, and powered by more and more energy, shaped by more and more complex information systems.

The Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Universities Competition Award calls for projects that investigate how to make cities lighter. We invite projects that consider a detailed characterisation of the current material, energy and information fluxes shaping a city – in the expanded understanding of spatial structures that sustain human life – and propose innovative modes to think what knowledges, practices, and assemblies constitute a lighter city.

This way of operating in the city demands both a narrower view of what architecture can achieve – abandoning the possibility of a control or complete overview of the city by architectural means – and a much wider understanding of architecture as the relation between the polities and the material spaces they form in their differential durations.

The new intensified dimension of the city includes all structures that humans have built to keep us alive: from buildings to streets, parks, harbours, sewage and transport systems, to farms, fisheries, plantations, from complex small technological artefacts to vast environments of extraction, from institutions and knowledge systems to complex information technologies and artificial intelligence.

This interconnected system is what the late palaeontologist Peter Haff coined as the technosphere. In its new magnitude it has transformed into a new paradigm of the Earth, an offshoot of the biosphere that includes technology, humans, their domesticated animals and plants, the structures and networks that connect and support these components. It has rapidly developed and intensified its processes, leaving behind a vast amount of debris and pollution: its dynamics are largely fuelled by oil, gas and coal that are amplifying its disruptive connections to the cycles of the living Earth.

The Competition focuses on the practical significance that while humans have coalesced a technological system of planetary proportions, we are also caught in it, have to live with the consequences and need to think how to imagine new forms of assembly.

Lighter: the focus of the competition is on projects that envision how cities could be transformed amidst the consequences and long-lasting impacts of the rising magnitude of their new planetary dimension. We are calling for projects that indicate how to become sensible to the weight of the contemporary city – be it the sheer material and energy mass it mobilises or the emotional and cultural weight of the disruptions that form the wake of its rapid intensification – and that indicate clear pathways to assemble in order to become lighter.

This call attends to the many meanings of this notion: lighter in terms of the mass and intensity of the material fluxes shaping cities, and lighter in terms of bringing the materials and energies mobilised by human spaces to close back to the other Earth cycles. A third way to conceive of lighter cities is to imagine new ways to assemble and structure citizenship and agency. Projects can be focussed anywhere on Earth where the impacts of the rise of the technosphere are felt by human populations, and do not need to be thought only through contiguity: we welcome systems thinking, and multi scalar approaches both in space and time.

The 7th edition of the Lisbon Triennale addresses these issues along three lines of work, each comprising different multi-disciplinary processes and leading to three exhibitions to be held in Lisbon in the autumn of 2025.

‘Fluxes’ concentrates on the intersections of artificial spaces – the vast material, energy and information flows that sustain humanity – with the fragile and complex cycles of the living Earth.

‘Spectres’ focuses on the imaging technologies necessary to understand the impact of human spaces on the planet, and how these echo imperial and colonial structures of extraction and power.

‘Lighter’ indicates a pathway through the experiments in new assemblages of polities and material processes as they interact with ecosystems in rapid change.

Together, the project ‘How heavy is a city?’ indicates a new way of understanding how the technological present intersects the fragile dynamics of our living planet.

For a more details of these research lines, see here.

3. Prize

The prize for this competition consists of the participation in the three main exhibitions of a shortlist of up to 9 (nine) proposals, from which 2 (two) winning projects will be selected, one from each category: Masters and Research. 

3.1. Shortlisted Proposals

• Each exhibition will include up to 3 (three) projects, regardless of the category;
  
• A digital publication dedicated to the Universities competition will feature the selected proposal’s Master courses and Research programmes in dedicated chapters committed to paper by the applicant;
  
• There will be a reimbursement of up to €1.000,00 € (one thousand euro) for the travel costs of the author(s) – students or researchers – attending the Opening Days in Lisbon for each shortlisted proposal.
  

3.2. Winning Proposals

• Winning Universities will receive the Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp trophy award;
  
• Author(s) — students or researchers — will be reimbursed for travelling to Lisbon for the Talk Talk Talk lectures at the end of October 2025, in the amount of up to 1.000,00 € (one thousand euro).
  

The Award ceremony will be part of the opening days of Triennale 2025.

4. Elegibility

4.1. Applicants must be teachers of course subjects in the Master's Degree category or PhD thesis supervisors or Group coordinators in the Research category. The applicants are responsible for the orientation, evaluation and prior selection of proposals, as well as for the entire process of submission and monitoring of the development and delivery of materials.

4.2. Author(s) of the proposals are students enrolled in Master's programmes, in the second cycle degree programme (4th and 5th year of integrated master programmes) in the signatory countries of the Bologna Process or its equivalent, and researchers affiliated with a research centre, postgraduate students and PhD candidates.

4.3. Persons interested in applying outside the scope of a course subject or research group can do so, provided they are under the guidance of an applicant.

4.4. Projects must be developed within the 2024 academic year in the Southern hemisphere, or 2024 – 2025 academic year in the Northern hemisphere.

4.5. Restriction to participation applies to:

• Persons under the guidance or academic coordination of jury members;
• Spouses or persons who are up to second-degree relatives, in direct or collateral line, of the jury members;
• Members of the organising institutions or co-producers of the Triennale’s 7th edition;
• Employees of the Lisbon Triennale association, its executive team, governing bodies, partners and current sponsors;
• Projects developed in previous academic years of Master programmes, or completed research projects.

We suggest that completed research or proposals developed in previous academic years, consider applying as Independent Projects. The call for these projects will be available for consultation on the Lisbon Triennale website under the Open Calls tab.

5. Jury

The proposals will be evaluated considering the relevance of their response to the 7th edition of the Triennale. The main criteria are consistency, intelligibility, innovative dimension and relevance within the scope of the reflection proposed in each exhibition.

The jury is composed of:

• Carla Leitão
• Cruz Garcia
• Dubravka Sekulić
• Nick Axel
• Territorial Agency 

6. Dates

Open call launch: 22 May 2024

Presentation webinar: 10 September, 2024. 15h GMT+1

FAQs: 16 September, 2024

Deadline for applications: 3 February 2025, 11:59 pm (Lisbon time)

Shortlist announcement: Until 31 March 2025

Deadline for proposals update: 7 July 2025, 11:59 pm (Lisbon time)

Winner’s announcement: Opening days, 2 — 4 October. Exact date, time and venue to be announced.

7. Applications

• Applications are exclusively submitted through the linked online form. Applications sent by email, regular post or any other means will not be considered nor returned. There is no application fee.
  

7.1. The first part of the form consists of the identification of the applicant and institution, an introductory text to the course or research programme (100 words) and a declaration of the applicant's affiliation with the academic institution in PDF format.

7.2. The second part of the form consists of the entry of the proposals – defined in item 8. of these guidelines – and each author identification, including proof of enrollment at the teaching institution in a single PDF format file.

7.3. Applications may include a maximum of 3 (three) proposals.

7.4. Each applicant may only enter 1 (one) submission per category – Master’s Degree and Research. If more than one form per category is submitted by the same applicant, only the last one will be considered.

All information entered, as well as documents to be submitted in the form and file names must be written in English.

8. Proposals

Proposals can be of a practical nature or a theoretical reflection. The projects may be developed individually or in groups.

8.1. The form entry for each proposal consists of: title and synopsis (100 words), an evocative image in JPG format, a description of the proposal (1000 words), a chosen format for the participation in the exhibition (drawing, photography, mockup, video or other) and project posters.

8.2. The posters are 3 (three) A2 in landscape orientation (594 x 420mm), combined in a single document in PDF format optimised for display on a computer screen. The file name must have the prefix T2025 UNIV, indicate the category ‘Master’ or ‘Research’ followed by a hyphen and the proposal title (e.g. T2025 UNIV Master – Title or T2025 Research – Title).

• The posters shall contain all the elements that the author(s) and applicants find necessary to characterise and convey the proposal – drawings, diagrams, images, three-dimensional simulations, photographs of 3D models or mock-ups, etc.
• Images generated with AI technology must be acknowledged in caption;
• It must not contain hyperlinks;
• Text elements must be written in English and should be kept to a necessary minimum;
• The posters must be numbered, and not contain elements that identify the author(s), applicant, or academic institution;
• The first poster must include the title of the proposal.

9. Shortlisted Proposals

9.1. For participation in the exhibitions, the format of the projects shall be confirmed and developed with the curators. In the case of physical formats, it is up to the institution to ensure any transport needed.

9.2. For the digital publication, the elements that comprise each chapter will be defined with the curators and publisher.

9.3. The final submission for jury evaluation consists of updating of the submitted posters, synopsis and description submitted in the form, and a 3 minute video introducing the proposal and the author(s).

10. Rights and Authorship

10.1. The intellectual property rights of third parties, individual or collective, public or private, including, but not limited to, copyright, trademark or design rights are the sole responsibility of the authors of the projects and applicants.

10.2. Without prejudice to the previous provisions, the selected projects and their respective texts, images, sound or related rights may be used by the Lisbon Triennale within the scope of the event, with no time limit and free of charge. The Lisbon Triennale will credit the authorship of any materials used (text or image), considering the information provided by the authors of the selected projects.

10.3. When submitting the proposal, the applicant and author(s) agree that the work is used in promotional materials related to the Lisbon Triennale, except when indicated, without prejudice to the respective copyright and intellectual property rights.

11. Confidentiality

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale will treat all information, references and identification documents submitted by the applicants as confidential and will not disclose them to third parties without prior consent.

12. Clarifications

This competition is part of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale’s 7th edition.

Clarifications about the present guidelines must be submitted to the organisation by e-mail message to univ@trienaldelisboa.com

The Lisbon Triennale will publish a list of FAQ's in the Open Call space of its website, according to the competition calendar.

All documentation is available in a bilingual format [PT/EN] through the website of the Lisbon Triennale, here. 

13. Final Provisions

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale reserves the right to amend these guidelines, hereby committing to communicating those alterations through the same means used in the promotion of the original guidelines.