Disquietude. Architecture and Energy in Portugal

“Determining the research focus on the subject of architecture and energy was timely because during 2020 the city of Lisbon would carry the title of European Green Capital. We find ourselves in the midst of a climate emergency and much of the damage done to the planet is already irreversible. The search for non-fossil fuels and energy sources are essential for life on this planet and within a local context comes on the heels of decades of oil boom, which also shaped Portugal, its people and institutional landscape, as well as its architecture.”

-Tobi Maier

“We have come to the realization that it will take more than regulations and standardization resulting from the application of international agreements to solve the current environmental challenges: the commitment to development models that represent the transformation of commodities on a planetary scale, and the use of energy sources with a disregard of their environmental impacts, makes the production and application of successive laws, programs, norms and protocols almost pointless. However, all these official discourses produced during the past years inform the human narrative towards the environment, energy, and natural resources.”

-Lucinda Correia

“It could be argued that landscapes are a palimpsest of human intervention through the ages, and the advent of a hydroelectric dam merely represents another layer in landscape’s history. But it could also be argued that a dam annihilates yhe pre-existing layers.”

-Nuno Pinto & Iain Deas

“Horizontal contaminations. Vertical contaminations. Contaminations that vibrate from century to century; enveloped by muddy matter, and also by the climate of war; enveloped by a start to a century threatened by human neglect. Contaminations that open new paths through folds in the Earth’s matter – once again, from interiority to exteriority.”

-Maria João Soares & João Miguel Duarte

“The struggle for access to a formal electricity supply contract for a precarious/illegal neighbourhood has meant that the provision of an essential service was transferred to a space of wider discussion, as the political space indeed is. Access to power has been transformed into a political object of discourse on urban space, the discourse on who shapes that space and what tensions are revealed in said space.”

-ateliermob & Ana Catarino

“Energy transition should question and replace the existing energy systems, of building and living together, of creating value, of giving meaning, and of governing people and earth. It is about challenging the ways fossil fuels are materializing in and are mediated through culture, which is the root of global heating and the reason for the continuing environmental impact we are witnessing”

-Lars Fischer & Kim Förster