'How heavy is a city?' is the 7th edition of the Lisbon Triennale. This question is the starting point for a three-year investigation, conducted by an ever-growing coalition, into the complex set of transformations taking place in the city, revealing a new emerging configuration with a planetary magnitude. This edition featured the visual identity of The Royal Studio, directed by lecturer João Castro, and website design and development by lecturer Rafael Gonçalves, in collaboration with Leonor Mendes, alumni of the Undergraduate Degree in Design — Communication.

From October 2 to December 8, 2025, the Lisbon Triennial 2025 includes three exhibitions, three days of conferences, a selection of Independent Projects in various locations in Lisbon, and a publication. The 7th Triennial acts as a gathering point, involving a large team of figures from science, philosophy, and arts.

Based on the theme defined by the curatorship duo Territorial Agency (Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino) — “How heavy is a city?” — the visual identity sought to represent, through the evocation of excess, the relationships of contamination and domination between the city, technology, the individual, the citizen, and matter. According to designer João Castro, “the visual identity stems from this construction that the individual resides in the whole, with a clear tone of provocation, taking advantage of system and open-source fonts so that it is entirely in the public domain, containing resources so that it can be appropriated and distributed both in its networks and through activation sessions and campaigns, and expressing itself with functionalist, archival, and impactful principles, inspired by networked writing and consumption, it expresses itself with a human and pamphleteering tone. Designed to be adapted to its multiple contexts and derivations, rhizomatic, human, and technological in form and behaviour, it crosses the main curatorial lines, always placing the question at the centre of research, architecture, and its multiple voices.

Also addressing the curatorial challenge, designer and developer Rafael Gonçalves states that the website was conceived “as a gesture of reflective design, seeking to question the architecture of contemporary technological infrastructures, the material and visual weight carried by new media, and the technological resilience of the digital products we produce as a society.”

Rafael adds that “based on Perma-computing, the website design and development process followed a practice based on reducing computational sophistication. It therefore proposes reflections on the value of absence, the finitude of material and human resources, and the emulation of composition processes similar to those at the origin of the internet. In line with the visual identity conceived by The Royal Studio, a series of technical approaches were defined, including the use of open-source and system fonts, the composition of the page in predominantly vertical layouts, the reuse of graphic elements, and the spectrum of light as a chromatic resource, which together highlight refinement as an essential part of the creative process."

In parallel with the development of the website, a parametric tool was designed, allowing the entire Architecture Triennial communications team to compress images to less than 5% of their original size. This reduction in weight, in addition to being a practical objective that stems from the curatorial approach, is presented as a graphic and expressive resource present in multiple communication media. The combination of these decisions, extended to the entire team over almost two years, makes this website a critical digital artefact that aims to contrast with the landscape of more technologically sophisticated websites.

João Castro

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