The Bauhaus of the Seas Conference was held on May 20 at MAAT, co-organized by Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon City Hall, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology.
In the event, held in a hybrid format, more than 50 speakers participated during more than 9 hours of live broadcast on the initiative’s YouTube channel, with more than 600 registered participants.
The conference counted with the participation of Ministers Graça Fonseca and Manuel Heitor, Lisbon City Councilors Catarina Vaz Pinto and Miguel Gaspar, the intervention of European Commissioner Elisa Ferreira, mayors from cities in several EU Member States, and academic, cultural and business experts from the different areas involved.
The organizers take a very positive view. Nuno Nunes, professor at Técnico, president of ITI / LARSyS and co-director of the CMU Portugal Program, said that “it was a huge success in national and international adhesion. It made it possible to debate many of the themes to move forward with the specific proposal, from issues related to the digitization of coastal areas and their phenomena (mobility, pollution, ecosystems, etc.) to ideas for integrating these concerns into a new aesthetic of regeneration, resilience and inclusion”.
Nuno Jardim Nunes also highlighted “the great institutional support of the consortium we are forming”, constituted by IST and CM Lisboa as anchors, “but also others like Fundação Oceano, Ciência Viva, Fundação Gulbenkian, and many museums like MAAT, MUDE and EGEAC museums”. He also said that it was “a pleasure to see the vision of the Bauhaus of the Seas mobilizing other geographies, in particular Venice (which also assumes itself as a lighthouse city), but also Rotterdam, Antwerp, Oeiras and Genoa”.
The conference – which is the take-off event of the thematic network Bauhaus of the Seas, led by Portugal in partnership with Italian, Swedish, Dutch and Belgian institutions – was part of the co-creation phase of the New European Bauhaus (NEB), an initiative launched by the European Commission at the beginning of the year 2021, which will award five networks. The organizers are confident that “this consortium can be one of the five winning networks that the European Commission intends to finance, and we will continue to work for that”.
The Bauhaus of the Seas was the first thematic network proposed in the context of the IST partnership with NEB and aims to promote an ethical and aesthetic regenerative development based on the relationship of populations with the sea. Led by Nuno Jardim Nunes, this network will promote a school of interdisciplinary experimentation and entrepreneurship, designed to train a generation of designers, architects, engineers, artists, managers and scientists around sustainable design solutions for coastal regions and marine.
