Lisboa Triennale - Alexandra

LISBOA TRIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE '22

This year’s program of Lisboa Triennale is called Terra. Terra explores how new paradigms are changing our ways of place-making on a globalised Planet. Terra addresses how climate challenges, pressure on resources, and socioeconomic and environmental inequities are profoundly intertwined. Understanding these complex situations requires a paradigm shift from a linear growth model (“cities as machines”) to a circular evolutionary model (“cities as organisms”).

For this exhibition we proposed the project called Green Neufert to revise the process of designing residential spaces, considering those living beings and their life processes also inhabit the area. We see a not-only-human perspective in spatial design as the only one that allows community development.

Green Neufert is a new optics of environment design.

Green Neufert is not an alternative; this is the next step. It offers a set of rules for modern housing design, which involves creating conditions for the cohabitation of various living creatures - from fungi and microscopic plants to humans and other large mammals. The set of rules works with the house not only according to the laws of architecture - the house is considered an ecosystem, with its characteristic ratio of biotic and abiotic, zoning depending on lighting conditions, humidity, fertility of the substrate, and temperature. The amount of data describing the ecosystem is endless. And it's ok — the more we know, the better. The inevitable part of Green Neufert's design is precise monitoring of the construction site and the key objects that will live in the building. Monitoring aims to gather data about those expected to live in the building and its plot. The dataset is never complete, as the amount of data generated by even a soil cube tends to infinity. Observation under ideal conditions should last at least a year, covering all seasons. Monitoring takes place at different scales, from micro (e.g., the gut biome of future inhabitants, soil organisms at the site) to macro processes (e.g., the seasonal distribution of air currents over the area under consideration — analyzed with remote sensing).

Green Neufert is a dynamic protocol fuelled by data and applied to any land plot or construction project; it works on every scale — from bathroom renovation to large landscape projects, from private apartments to public buildings.

It is an ongoing project on developing new standards of spatial design for inclusive spaces made together with Elena Uglovskaya and Glafira Parinos.