Territorial Agency to curate seventh edition

Territorial Agency—Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino—have been appointed Chief Curators of the seventh edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale taking place in the autumn of 2025.

How heavy is a city? opens up a space where new notions of architecture start to emerge. A space where ideas of collaboration with material structures and intensified dynamic environments, different life forms, information, energy and material fluxes are formed anew. A space where architecture guides the material characterisations of the millenary shifts marking life on our planet. 

This simple question hides a complex set of transformations of both the city and its backdrop, revealing a new figure in the making with a magnitude of planetary dimensions. To sort out these transformations, a re-assembly of architecture and what it means to build a collective environment is required. The Triennale becomes a public space of learning, experience, curiosity, inquiry, debate, delight, outrage, speculation, transgression, imagination and action about the possible futures of cohabitation.

The curatorial programme investigates the spatial dimensions of the transformations marking the Anthropocene. It asks questions of design, governance, agency and proposition. Establishing a new unit to evaluate architecture, How heavy is a city? explores forms of cooperation and mutuality, recasting its role as a driver of debate.

Territorial Agency combines contemporary architecture, science, art, advocacy and action to promote comprehensive territorial transformations in the Anthropocene epoch. Recent projects include Oceans in Transformation commissioned by TBA21–Academy at Ocean Space, ZKM Critical Zones, Taipei Biennial 20, Ars Electronica, Bozar; Sensible Zone at the Venice Biennale, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Barbican London, Warsaw Biennale, Waag; Museum of Oil with Greenpeace, ZKM Reset Modernity and Chicago Architecture Biennial; Anthropocene Observatory at HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, BAK Utrecht and in the collection of Centraal Museum Utrecht. Territorial Agency is the recipient of the STARTS Prize 2021—Grand prize of the European Commission honouring innovation in technology, industry and society stimulated by the arts for Oceans in Transformation.

The Lisbon Triennale is devoted to promote research, encourage debate and inspire transformation through architecture. Since 2007, its major forum takes the pulse of acclaimed, emerging as well as informal practices across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Over the decades, this outward-looking approach has built up an atlas of agents from thinkers to makers and spanning from governance to activism. Reinventing itself in each edition, its only constant is to serve as a mutable collective platform to inquire about contemporary architectural challenges.