Close, Closer ı 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial : Reinventing architecture's agency

My apology for being very unproductive these last weeks since I am particularly busy with projects in which I'm directly or indirectly involved including the interview with Neeraj Bhatia (here and here) which, as I wrote in a previous post, may go to another platform. Again, when official, I will let you know where and when to read the interview. However, I may post not-selected questions/responses in this blog.
Another project on which I am working is my first guest-posting but again I may content merely with posting abstracts as I'm thinking of publishing them. If so, this will be by 2014.

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Last week-end I was in Lisbon for the triennial whose theme is Close, Closer. This was my first-ever trip to Lisbon, a very beautiful European city with its port, its very lively streets, and colored buildings, and its famous tramway.

The Lisbon Architecture Triennial has been founded in 2007. For this third edition, the committee has elected as Artistic Director a young and notable British curator Beatrice Galilee who has co-curated the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011 with Helen Hejung Choi. For this Triennial, she teamed up with three curators Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow Thoughts Today, Unknown Fields Division and Under Tomorrow Sky, Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy, and co-curator Dani Admiss. The curatorial team's aim was to draw on a political manifesto that claims that a new form, (rather new forms), of architecture practice is emerging out. Of what? The 21st century? Multifaceted crises? As the curatorial team states, Close, Closer tackles "the political, technological, emotional, institutional, and critical forms of global spatial practice." At issue is new forms of practice. New forms of practice, still stammering but seething, still fragile but resolute (see here and here).

Close, Closer is presented as "an intense and multiple debate network on 'what architecture can be,'" says José Mateus, Chairman, also founding Director of José Mateus Arquitecto at a moment when Portugal, but many European countries a well, is struggling against a profound economic and identity crisis. Seven months or so ago, I interviewed the curatorial team for a first look at the curatorial content, strategies — even at a primary stage — and goals behind Close, Closer. Remember the website. The curatorial team regularly posted new questions about what architecture could be: What else can architecture do? When does produce architecture? What answers should architecture be giving today?, and so forth. This website, particularly dynamic since based on a participative mode, invited us to reply to these questions, be you architect or not. Beatrice Galilee said