Bauhaus of the Seas Conference: ITI President presented “The Vision of the Bauhaus of the Seas”
The Bauhaus of the Seas Conference was held on May 20 at MAAT, co-organized by Instituto Superior Técnico, CM Lisboa, Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. The President of ITI/LARSyS, Nuno Jardim Nunes, one of the movement creators, participated in the opening session with the communication “The Vision of the Bauhaus of the Seas.”
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 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 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. In all these themes, ITI/LARSyS has made significant contributions that can now have an even greater impact.”
Nuno 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 the rest managed by EGEAC .” He also said that it was “a pleasure to see the vision of the Bauhaus of the Seas mobilizing other geographies, particularly Venice (which also assumes itself as a lighthouse city), but also Rotterdam, Antwerp, Oeiras and Genova.” For the President of ITI, the confidence remains 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 conference – which marked the start 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.
Bauhaus of the Seas was the first thematic network proposed in NEB and aims to foster ethical and aesthetic regenerative development based on the relationship of populations with the sea. This network will promote a school of interdisciplinary experimentation and entrepreneurship to train a generation of designers, architects, engineers, artists, managers and scientists around sustainable design solutions for coastal and marine regions.