Dr Marco Iuliano keynote speaker at MAAT Museum Conference

On the Surface, 31 May 2019, Lisbon

The program of On The Surface comprises three roundtables on which photography is explored as a significant research instrument for building critical and innovative views on architecture as an extended field of knowledge that operates within larger systems, with cultural, artistic, technical, and historical dimensions. The focus of this 5th edition on the publicness of urban space, aims to question how different dimensions of the public sphere may be meaningfully understood or reframed through different lenses and perspectives. At the heart of this debate is the contemporary discussion that the image of the city is in itself modified within the very process of change according to specific sensorial and cognitive conditions, for example, to understand better how other dimensions or diverse data as geographic information of urban environments at very fine scales or resolutions (for example, trajectories data about human activities) combine with architectural formal and spatial aspects of legibility as Kevin Lynch's five elements or others alike and influence the legibility or imageability of contemporary cities. All these interconnections and combinations can be explored in order to infer how they may originate the possibility of establishing new spatial connections in an expanded territory of cosmopolitan interaction. Within this broader discussion, each roundtable will address the following issues, among other questions posed by the invited authors.

Opening Keynote speaker 
Marco Iuliano

Panel #1
Invited guest speaker - Beate Gütschow
Moderator - Pedro Leão Neto

Panel #2
Invited guest speaker - Bas Princen
Moderator - Iñaki Bergera

Panel #3
Invited guest speaker - Gloria Moure
Moderator - Sérgio Fazenda

Closing Keynote speaker
Paolo Rosselli