Over four days, Barcelona has turned the profession’s gaze on itself. The UIA World Congress of Architects brought together 10,000 professionals from 130 countries and drew 30,000 attendees across dozens of debates, lectures and workshops held between the Fòrum Convention Centre, the Three Chimneys and the DHub. Thirty years after hosting the first edition, the city returns as host — a first in the congress’s history — coinciding with the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death.
The chosen theme, Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition, set the tone for the five days: a present participle that invites the discipline to be observed in motion, attentive to the climatic, demographic and social shifts already shaping every design decision. A six-member curatorial team — Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Maria Beneditto, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella and Carmen Torres —, together with honorary president Fuensanta Nieto, built a programme that treats architecture as a collective laboratory, capable of offering concrete answers to the great challenges shared by cities everywhere.
Heat is redefining architecture
The opening day placed climate change at the centre of the debate. Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, who works in France, captured the shift in a phrase that travelled across the congress: “We are no longer in a European climate, but in that of southern Spain or North Africa: we no longer design for Switzerland, but for Tunisia.” His approach calls for designing with climatic parameters from the outset of a project, drawing on the awnings and shutters of Seville or the Tunisian mashrabiya, capable of shielding against sun and wind without giving up ventilation.
Mireia Luzárraga, of the studio Takk, argued for treating thermal inequality as part of the design brief and presented a house conceived in layers, with a blind façade and materials such as cork, where cold and heat filter in gradually. Matthias Schuler, of Transsolar, warned about the thermal inertia of buildings faced with increasingly warm nights, while Javier García Germán, of Totem Arquitectos, pointed to the beach chiringuito as a model of ordinary architecture — shade, airflow and views, resolved with restraint — and called to “move architectural problems beyond the economic or technical, and integrate them with ambition into policy.”
The reflection extended into urban planning too. Japanese architects from the studio Bow-Wow presented their research into a possible night-time urbanism for Tokyo, drawing inspiration from the nocturnal life of Cairo, Rio de Janeiro and Bangkok, and pointed to European cities — walkable, safe, human in scale — as fertile ground to test it.
Housing, a “non-negotiable” right
The congress’s second major axis turned on housing and materials. Eva Franch and Takk presented the installation Monusediment, on the barriers — mostly dams — that block sediment from reaching the Ebro Delta, paired with eight stories of possible repair. Barcelona City Council showcased its commitment to reusing the rubble from each construction site in the next one, with bricks recycled from concrete and algae. And the studio H Arquitectes demonstrated, with a simple wooden volume placed vertically and then horizontally, how orientation alone can transform a piece’s relationship to space.
The closing ceremony, held on Thursday, 2 July at the Palau de Congressos, brought the gathering to an end with the reading of the Barcelona Declaration, delivered by the president of the CSCAE, Marta Vall-llossera. The text sets out six commitments — time, matter, life, justice, scale and meaning — that the profession adopts as a roadmap. On housing, the declaration is explicit: housing is a right, not the return on an investment, and “the right to housing is non-negotiable.” On construction, it adds that every intervention carries a global cost, and that quality and beauty belong to everyone, not to a few.
A legacy bound for Beijing
Architect and urban planner Joan Busquets, honorary president of the congress, placed this edition in perspective: thirty years on from 1996, the discipline’s challenges are now shared ground for the media and the public alike, and solutions already exist — the task lies in applying them with attention to local tradition and to each territory’s forms of governance. UIA president Regina Gonthier described the congress as an experience that leaves behind a renewed planetary awareness: the certainty of inhabiting the planet alongside other species and other forms of leadership that deserve respect.
The ceremony closed with a symbolic gesture: Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, handed the UIA flag to the deputy mayor of Beijing, host of the 2029 congress. The central exhibition, Architectures for a Planet in Transition, spanning 4,000 square metres of installations and unpublished prototypes at Les Tres Xemeneies, remains open and free to the public until 19 July, giving Barcelona a few more weeks to keep inhabiting the questions the congress has placed on the table.
