Vision

Building a “culture of the Bauhaus of the seas” will involve fostering a school of interdisciplinary experimentation and entrepreneurship, bound to shape a generation of designers, architects, engineers, artists, managers, and scientists around sustainable design solutions for coastal regions and the sea. Support for networked projects should promote the articulation of entities from academic, scientific and cultural systems, incubators, and technological centers, and guide the involvement of the communities in which they operate, with the ultimate goal of creating and recalibrating the capacity to replicate sustainable or regenerative solutions.

Operationalization should address the sea as a source and destination for design, brought to life through the following guidelines:

Designing and disseminating sustainability models, applicable to local and global scales, that establish continuity between marine and terrestrial ecosystems, including human and more-than-human agents (e.g., animals and protected areas, but also beaches, dunes, and waves);

Acknowledging and disseminating cross-border paradigms of thought and action, emancipated from a strictly geopolitical mapping, thus contributing to intercultural and radically cosmopolitan visions between contemporary and ancestral, European and trans-European communities and cultures;

Promoting innovative forms of reconstruction and representation in architecture and planning, from coastal protection structures to environmentally responsible infrastructures for sustainable management of renewable energies and offshore platforms for aquaculture, including new bio- and geo-materials;

Promoting and enabling experimentation and food innovation through ecological production and consumption, alternative and/or local practices, implemented through cultural dissemination activities;

Collecting, structuring, and disseminating testimonies, narratives, knowledge, and objects intimately rooted in past and present experience with the sea – involving historians, anthropologists, sociologists, designers, artists, digital and audiovisual media specialists, collections, and museums in this process of building critical mass;

Establishing transdisciplinary teams in order to anticipate and resolve the impact of rising seas and oceans in cities and coastal territories, as well as responses to increasing extreme weather phenomena;

Developing transdisciplinary missions towards the reversal of the historical trend of using carbon-intensive terrestrial materials (e.g., cement), combining the promotion of natural materials (e.g., wood or hemp used in rigging and candles) and aquatic tools in terrestrial environments (e.g., algae, jellyfish, marine collagen);

Replacing natural sedimentary cycles, implementing new transfer systems and innovative interventions that promote the development of habitats and the regeneration of marine ecosystems, in order to prevent flooding, erosion, and intrusion of saltwater;

Encouraging trans-European exchanges and circulation of coastal-inland knowledge through artistic and ethnographic residencies, using museum networks while promoting their respective deactivated and/or outdoor spaces;

Fostering interdisciplinary learning, pedagogy, and entrepreneurship actions with:

• — the academic and scientific community;
• — entrepreneurial and technological communities;
• — the various segments of the population, for increased responsibility in the preservation and enhancement of coastal and maritime ecosystems;
• — agents of urban cartography, towards a reunion of coastal cities with their natural space.