Introduced at the State of the Union speech by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in 2020, the New European Bauhaus initiative started a movement towards implementing the European Green Deal based on sustainability, social inclusion and beauty. This initiative takes inspiration from the Bauhaus school of applied arts, which since its foundation in Weimar in 1919 defined the role of design in the 20th century. By combining art and architecture with industry and construction, but also by presenting an often radical political/economic/social vision of the world. 

Presented as a manifesto in late 2020 by a group of Portuguese researchers, architects and designers – Nuno Jardim Nunes, Frederico Duarte, Heitor Alvelos, Mariana Pestana and Miguel Figueira – the Bauhaus of the Seas was first devised as a situated vision that responded from Portugal to the New European Bauhaus challenge. Playing on the German word Bauhaus (“house of construction”) and the Portuguese word for sea (mar), the Bauhaus of the Seas vision introduced the concepts of “marhaus” (literally “the sea as our home”) and “baumar” (“the sea as a space for creation and entrepreneurship”). Its proponents aimed to foster a renewed, regenerative understanding of development grounded on ethical, economic, cultural, spatial and aesthetic values, as well as on the widely diverse range of dimensions that determine our relationship with the sea and other aquatic ecosystems. 

The manifesto argued that the seas and other European water bodies are the most urgent and generative site for design thinking in the twenty-first century. That a design movement worthy of the moment would have to be ecocentric, rather than anthropocentric – focused not just on human needs but on the health of the ecosystems that make human life possible. And that it would have to be intercultural, intergenerational and rooted in the specific places and communities it sought to serve.

The climate crisis is a global, complex hyperobject emerging from human exceptionalism of generations schooled in the dichotomy of humans vs nature. Only an interdisciplinary, intergenerational and interspecies movement that addresses the sheer complexity and scale of the problem will allow us to enact meaningful change. In response to this challenge, this vision evolved towards a New European Bauhaus mobilisation around the most definitive global natural space and the most critical shared space in the EU and the world: the seas, oceans and other water bodies. 

Created from that mobilisation, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails joined the 5 initial consortiums to be granted EU funding, under the 2022 call for the development of the first New European Bauhaus Lighthouse demonstrators. Coordinated by the Interactive Technologies Institute of the Instituto Superior Técnico (Universidade de Lisboa), this consortium encompasses 18 academic, cultural and territorial partners located in 7 locations across 4 European regions and aquatic ecosystems.

Rooted in the principles of the New European Bauhaus and funded by the European Union’s European Union’s Horizon Europe programme – under Grant Agreement 101079995, call HORIZON-MISS-2021-NEB-01 –, the project ran from January 2023 to December 2025. Rather than grand infrastructures or top-down planning, it was about community, creativity and the conviction that culture is one of the most powerful tools we have for a better life – in Europe and beyond.

Situated at the crossroads between art, culture, inclusion, citizenship, science and technology, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails brings the European Green Deal to our coastal areas by calling for a collective effort to imagine and build a sustainable, inclusive and beautiful future. It does so by promoting the design of complex interactions between human and more-than-human agents, thus reconceptualising the agenda of design and moving its drivers from fixing to caring, growth to nurture, certainty to contingency. It enables designers, architects and engineers to think about assemblages instead of systems and to change the outcome of design from extinction to precarious flourishing. The design of these interactions generates the emergence of a new aesthetics and, most decisively, a critical awareness of design's history, contemporary practice and future possibilities. Ultimately claiming designing beyond humans as a way to sustain our future.  

Its strategic objectives map the New European Bauhaus’s three core values – Beautiful, Sustainable, Together –to which we added a new one: Locally grounded.

Beautiful By responding to our needs beyond the consumerist and material dimensions, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails fosters a grassroots co-design movement that through an intergenerational, intercultural and interspecies approach profoundly enriches our experiences. That is, the way we eat, rest, learn, socialise, cooperate, interact and live with the natural and built environment. By reframing beauty as a quality concerning the wellbeing of ecosystems, it aims to develop a new aesthetics grounded on materials and designs that are both non-extractive and regenerative.  

Sustainable By reinforcing the role of coastal cities and their broader ecosystem in terms of regenerative approaches inspired by natural cycles that replenish resources and protect biodiversity, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails aims to reduce pollution (e.g. plastic/chemicals) and regenerate aquatic ecosystems (including in rivers/estuaries, seas and ocean). Its approach leverages digital (e.g. circular and regenerative) and decentralised technologies (e.g. blockchain and decentralised autonomous organisations - DAOs), while deploying innovative forms of adaptation and behaviour change in relevant domains such as tourism, cultural heritage and food chains. 

Together By demonstrating the inclusive potential of a co-design approach that is from the onset intergenerational, intercultural and interspecies, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails brings together young and older communities of locals, visitors and migrants. It is these communities of humans and non-humans that inform and inspire the project’s lighthouse pilots. These pilots and their respective demonstrators have been designed to integrate existing development plans of the consortium’s cities/regions. Acknowledging that digital technologies are capable of generating epochal effects to scale and progress towards sustainable development, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails takes advantage of the increasing role played by interactive applications, or digitally mediated participation via social networks in enhancing quality of life, intercultural dialogue and civic participation.

Locally grounded By considering the needs and desires of both environments and people, the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails created its unique co-design approach, which requires a responsiveness to context that generic sustainability frameworks cannot supply. No idea will find resonance unless it is perceived as relevant to the specific place and community in which it lands. In practice this meant beginning with deep listening before any intervention was designed. Locally grounded is not an adjunct keyword to the project's more-than-human ambitions; without it, it could not have remained meaningful across seven locations and four ecosystems.

The Bauhaus of the Seas Sails introduces an ecocentric narrative that is both cosmopolitan and rooted in nature-based solutions. Its plural and testimonial design approach to complex socio-technical-ecological and other-than-human problems is thus of significant importance for the United Nations's Sustainable Development Goals and the European Union’s strategic priorities. 

As proposed in the manifesto presented to the first New European Bauhaus co-design conference, the journey of the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails is organised in five anchors: 

1. Recognising the environment by mapping the interdependencies and flows of mineral, biological and human (food, transport, communities and migrations) resources by parameterising, optimising and digitising data. This recognition aims to inform and communicate the relevance of sustainable management and decision making processes; 

2. Reconciling with the sea as a territory of trans-geographic continuity through site-specific ecosystems and entanglements of humans and non-humans. This reconciliation opens new possibilities to the strategic needs of the New European Bauhaus; 

3. Reconnecting communities with their habitats and forms of material, ecological, aesthetic and cultural heritage by supporting the generation and co-creation of fresh ideas. This reconnection, which emerges from the interdependence between species, generations and cultures, is oriented towards a mutual admiration and respect that ground the nourishing of a sustainable blue economy; 

4. Renewing practises by engaging citizens in the sustainable management of local resources through the resurgence of fresh modes of co-ownership, caring and stewardship. This renewal contributes to a heightened sense of belonging and sharing responsibility, as well as to innovative artistic, experiential, material and technological interventions that aim to be replicable globally. 

5. Reimagining narratives and storytelling actions that connect the findings developed across the research journey by exposing multiple perspectives and discussing ethical challenges. This reimagination points towards alternative futures to our seas, ocean and water bodies.   

The Bauhaus of the Seas Sails’s 10 ambitious mission-oriented goals positively contribute to the communities living in the partner cities and aquatic ecosystems, as well as to the New European Bauhaus initiative in its promotion of an environmentally sustainable, socially fair and aesthetically appealing transition. These goals are ambitious, impactful, measurable and targeted: 

1. Deliver an intergenerational, interspecies and intercultural co-design process;

2. Develop culture-driven interdisciplinary blueprints, prototypes and design studies addressing present and future challenges of coastal territories and ecosystems; 

3. Make real the co-participation of human citizens and non-human agents in pursuit of a broader green transformation;

4. Shift the thinking irreversibly from human-centric to more-than-human centric interaction with the environment;

5. Deliver 8 role-model “lighthouse demonstrators” addressing different coastal cities ecosystems (lagoon, river, sea, ocean);

6. Deliver tangible results across pilot demonstrators addressing New European Bauhaus challenges of food, adaptation, community, tourism and migrations;

7. Replicate pilot results in credible executive plans that leverage regional and recovery funds of the pilot demonstrator cities;

8. Genuinely prove the value of an organisational model for cooperation between generations, species and cultures;

9. Define a traceable, rigorous and innovative impact evaluation methodology based on blockchain technologies and DAOs capable of addressing the following ethical issues: trust and privacy; secure and controllable data sharing; fair inclusive and equitable benefits for those sharing the data; traceability for economic benefit sharing and liability determination;

10. Contribute to New European Bauhaus outreach and dissemination.