Both Amanda Levete's MAAT museum and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale opened in the Portuguese capital earlier this month. Together they prove that architecture is physically shaped by its fiscal situation, says Mimi Zeiger in this week's Opinion.

PR logistics sometimes brings together strange bedfellows. This was the case in Lisbon, where the opening of the nearly complete Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), designed by British architect Amanda Levete, was timed to coincide with the opening of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale.
One opening presented a sparkling new kunsthalle with an interdisciplinary curatorial mission, while the other offered an inward-looking meditation on architecture, representation and authorship. Taken together, they represent an ongoing struggle to define architectural value to practitioners and the public alike. Taken together, they represent an ongoing struggle to define architectural value to practitioners and the public alike
The fourth Lisbon Architecture Triennale is titled The Form of Form, which only by coincidence echoes the doubling of the 2013 edition, Close, Closer. The previous triennale faced criticism for celebrating the more fringe spatial practices. The latest is certainly a swing back towards the discipline of architecture. Conceived by curators André Tavares and Diogo Seixas Lopes ? who sadly passed away earlier this year, but whose influence is pervasive ? it centres primarily on architecture as architecture,...