Letters to the Mayor: Lisbon

October 6th – November 25th, 2016

Lisbon Architecture Triennale 

Galeria dos Paços do Concelho

 

#letterstothemayor     #letterstothemayorlisbon     @storefrontnyc

 

In collaboration with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (4e) and Galeria dos Paços do Concelho, Storefront presents Letters to the Mayor: Lisbon as part of the global Letters to the Mayor project. Each iteration presents a collection of letters by more than 100 architects, addressing the most pressing issues facing their city. 

 

Letters to the Mayor: Lisbon invited the following architects to write to Lisbon’s newly elected Mayor Fernando Medina:

 

Participants

Tim Abrahams, Julia Albani and Nuno Cera, Pedro Alonso, Fernandez and Serres, Ido Avissar (LIST), Baukuh, Neeraj Bhatia, Teresa Calix, Susana Caló, Cartha, Carlos Carvalho, Christ & Gattenbein, Claire Lyster (CLUUA), Plán Comum, Nicholas de Monchaux, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Jorge Figueira, Guillermo Lopez, Paolo Marcolin, José Mateus, Emma McNally, Manon Mollard, Tiago Mota Saraiva, Marc Nagtzaam, Victor Neves, Sara Orsi, Piovenefabi, Pedro Pitarch, Anna Puigjaner, Davidson Rafaelidis, Marina Rainho, Pedro Ressano Garcia, Patrícia Robalo Ribeiro, Bernardo Rodrigues, Eike Roswag-Klinge, Luis Santiago Baptista, Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel, Eliana Sousa Santos, André Tavares, Danny Wills, Mimi Zeiger

 

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Local Curators

Ivo Poças Martins.

 

Wallpaper Design

R2

 

Production Assistance

EGEAC (Empresa de Gestão de Equipamentos e Animação Cultural de Lisboa)

 

 

ABOUT THE LOCAL CURATOR

 

Ivo Poças Martins was born in Porto in 1980 and graduated from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Architecture (FAUP) in 2005 (having also attended the École National Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Val de Seine 2002/03 under the Erasmus programme). He is currently working on his PhD thesis at FAUP.

Parallel to his academic work, Ivo is also a partner in the Ivo Poças Martins e Matilde Seabra Arquitectos firm. He is founder and co-editor of the fanzine Friendly Fire dedicated to architecture and urban culture.

From 2012 to 2015 Ivo was a member of the editorial board of Jornal Arquitectos. In 2016 he joined the team for the 4th edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale as a curatorial assistant.

 

 

ABOUT LETTERS TO THE MAYOR

 

Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays real letters written by architects to their city mayors. Initiated by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2014, the project has traveled to more than 15 cities across the globe, including Bogota, Mexico City, Athens, Panama City, Taipei, Mariupol, Madrid, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires, among others. See here for a list of iterations.  

 

Letters to the Mayor invites 100 architects in each city to write a letter to their mayor as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to the decision-makers, and vice versa.

 

Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. 

 

Letters to the Mayor questions this dynamic, and invites local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials, and simultaneously into the public consciousness.

 

 

SUPPORT

 

Letters to the Mayor is part of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s initiative Architecture Conflicts, a project with the purpose of identifying pressing issues, ongoing conflicts, and design solutions in relation to the most important urban problems today. Architecture Conflicts is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

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