Barcelona is going to be the first city in the world to host for the second time the World Architecture Congress promoted by the UIA, the International Union of Architects. It will take place between June 28 to July 2, 2026, but it will be much more than five days. Because until its opening, for two years, the Catalan capital is going to become a great research laboratory for the architecture and urban planning of the future so that the meeting can yield conclusions with a real impact on people’s daily lives and the future. of the planet. Thanks to Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition, the project that has won the congress curatorship, which will investigate topics ranging from circularity to interdependence and how to channel changes in our ways of living.
Last December, an international jury selected Becoming as the winning proposal of the competition to curate the congress and today the authors of the project – the architects Mariona Benedito, Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, Carmen Torres and José Zabala – have presented pointing out that its thematic axis will be time -Becoming can be translated as becoming, becoming, becoming- as a vector of change and transition.
There will be six lines of research deployed by the commissioners and a large group of international collaborators that will address everything from how to stimulate greater awareness and action to care for human and non-human coexistence on the planet to what tools and actions we must promote to have a hyper-awareness of our territory or what the form of territorial production and reproduction will be like in a world that leaves extractivism behind and embraces circularity.
Exhibitions and a catalog with the results of the lines of research will be derived from its conclusions, which will precede the Congress to generate a productive debate. A meeting in which the Barcelona coastline will be the venue not only because of the character of the city and the geopolitical framework that the Mediterranean represents, but because the coastal strip, where the essential infrastructure for the metropolis is located, must take on current global challenges such as vulnerability to climate change, mass tourism or migratory fluctuations.
The Becoming project has been presented to a plethora of authorities, from the Minister of Housing and Urban Agenda Isabel Rodríguez to the Minister of Territory, Ester Capella, the mayor of Barcelona, ??Jaume Collboni, the president of the Superior Council of Colleges of Architects of Spain, Marta Vall-llosera, the dean of the Col legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, Guillem Costa, or the vice president of the UIA, Teresa Táboas, who stressed that “together we can achieve a more balanced and sustainable future for the planet and humanity” and that the Congress will undoubtedly be “a global milestone for debate, collective reflection and the search for solutions”.
