In 2016, Cartha magazine participated in the Lisbon Architecture Triennale as an Associated Project. During that year the magazine developed a cycle dedicated to the topic The Form of Form in three instalments, from which the issue Lisboa Paralela was the closing chapter. The meaning and value of form in architecture and urbanism and the role that pedagogy, history, and cultural speculation can play in its production constitute the core questions raised by this cycle. Issues I, II, and III of the cycle were presented in Lisbon in two exhibitions held at Mae d’Agua das Amoreiras during October and December 2016 as part of the official program of the Triennale.

The issue Lisboa Paralela expanded on the topic of the urban form by questioning the status quo of natural and social laws that inform our urban reality, and by speculating on how urban form could be shaped in parallel realities. The historic exercise Roma Interrotta, curated by Italian architect Piero Sartogo in 1973, served as a precedent for Lisboa Paralela. On this occasion, an international group of ten architects was invited to redesign a sector of the city of Lisbon free from any social, political or natural restrains. Unlike with the case of Nolli’s pap in Roma Interrota, in Lisboa Paralela, the current map of Lisbon was used as a base. A section of this map of Lisbon running along the north-south axis of the city was subdivided into ten equal parts, and those assigned to each architect to be problematized and reimagined. This cartographic portion was intended to dissect the chronologic and geographic layers of the city, from its genesis at the lowest point to the twenty-first-century political borders and most elevated part of Lisbon.