Barcelona will be the first city in the world to host for the second time the World Congress of Architecture promoted by the UIA, the International Union of Architects. The meeting will take place between June 28 and July 2, 2026, but the idea of ??the Catalan capital is that it will be much more than a few days. Because until it opens, during the next two years, Barcelona will become a great research laboratory for architecture and urban planning so that the congress can launch conclusions with a real impact on people’s day-to-day lives and the future of the planet It will be thanks to Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition, the project that has won the curatorship of the congress, which will investigate topics ranging from circularity to interdependence and how we can channel changes in the way we live.
In December, an international jury selected Becoming -translatable as ‘to become, to become, to become’- as the winning proposal in the competition to curate the congress, an innovative procedure, because each seat used to directly choose a personality from the city to direct it And yesterday the authors of the winning project – the architects Mariona Benedito, Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, Carmen Torres and José Zabala – presented it noting that its thematic axis will be time as a vector of change and transition . “We set up a project around the idea of ??becoming, seen as a long and careful process in which reality is transformed through architecture”, Benedito points out.
A project in which, he says, there are six relevant themes, six declinations, six lines of research deployed by the curators and a wide group of international collaborators who will address from how to stimulate a greater awareness to care for human coexistence and not human life on the planet, to which tools and actions we must promote to have a hyper-awareness of our territory or what will be the form of territorial production and reproduction in a world that leaves extractivism behind and embraces circularity.
Each line of work will address local problems that can be extrapolated to a global scale and will be headed by two renowned researchers chosen from multiple generations and origins. In each investigation, there will also be two teaching professionals who will work on the topic in workshops with students. And before the World Congress, a central exhibition and a catalog available to the public with the results of the research lines will be derived from its conclusions, which will have to generate a productive debate in the plenary sessions of the Congress. In these sessions, each topic will be debated by the main researchers, the teachers and two critics who may be philosophers or economists, and not only architects, but experts in the subject. Benedito emphasizes that they must ensure that “the story changes, that they appropriate it” and believes that a “paradigm change can come if we align ourselves, which is why we want research that is useful, that helps us convince politicians and the citizens who must be aware of these issues”.
A congress in which they want the headquarters of the meetings to be located on Barcelona’s coastline, not only because of the character of the city and the geopolitical framework that represents the Mediterranean, but because the coastal strip, where there are the essential infrastructures for the metropolis, today has to take on global challenges such as vulnerability to climate change, mass tourism and migrations.
