Water Lines and Urban Design- Lisbon’s ‘Liquid Framework’ as a Conceptual Tool to Shape a New Sustainable Balance

Abstract

From Vitruvius’s foundational architectural writings to Roman monumental infrastructure to Haussmann’s renewed Paris, the human drive to manipulate water flow has determined cities’ formal evolution. How can architecture today give shape to water sustainability? Departing from Moore’s idea of spatial “liquid framework”, this paper explores the interpretation of urban water and urban form as two intertwined city layers with an ever-tightening geometry and capillarity, continuously linked and synthetizing new urban and housing typologies. A conceptual matrix is proposed, unfolding water and urban design dualities. Lisbon’s case study, like many related cities, can be described through this analytical model, in a two-direction temporal regard: looking back, a palimpsest of urban water’s material and immaterial concepts overlapping in a downstream topography; and looking forward, a Mediterranean urban context facing future drought and flood risks, demanding opportunities for a new sustainable balance reconnecting natural flows with public space and built circularity.