UIA Barcelona 2026

Architecture is changing. Not because buildings are suddenly becoming more complex, but because the world around them is demanding a different kind of intelligence. Climate instability, material scarcity, housing crises, social inequality, geopolitical violence and digital acceleration are no longer external contexts. They are part of architecture’s own matter. They shape how we build, what we preserve, what we demolish, who we design for, and what kind of futures we are willing to imagine.

In this sense, the most urgent question facing architecture today may not be what it should look like, but what it should become.

This was the driving force behind UIA World Congress of Architects Barcelona 2026, held under the theme “Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition.” Across three days, the congress brought together architects, theorists, researchers and emerging practices to explore architecture not as a finished object, but as an evolving process, ecological, material, political and collective.

The opening plenary, Becoming More-Than-Human, immediately expanded the scale of the conversation. Moderated through an unusual “inverted boxing match” format by Mark Wigley and Bas Smets, the session questioned architecture’s human-centred traditions and asked how design could move from control to coexistence. With contributions from Design Earth, Eva Franch, Dirk Sijmons and others, the discussion shifted towards soil, water, repair, regrowth and multispecies life. Architecture, here, was no longer simply about shelter or form. It became atmosphere, biology, territory and responsibility.

On the second day, Becoming Embodied brought the conversation back to matter. The session explored materials not as neutral resources, but as carriers of political, ecological and poetic values. BC Architects presented research into urban mineral waste streams, combining construction debris and algae-based components into low-carbon building systems. TEN investigated sand as a fragile and temporal material connected to Barcelona’s changing beaches. Bruther, in turn, proposed light as an architectural material, invisible, precise and deeply spatial.

The final day’s Becoming Hyper-conscious pushed the conversation into architecture’s most invisible — and urgent — systems. Marina Otero opened by questioning whether the ambition to become “hyper” risks becoming yet another disciplinary excess, especially in an age when AI increasingly mediates writing, thinking and perception. Common Accounts explored the “invisible 99%” of design through bodies, rituals and climate fitness, while Ibiye Camp’s Revised Cartographies reread Barcelona through colonial trade, extraction, migration and diasporic networks. HouseEurope! shifted the scale from buildings to legislation, arguing for law and policy as tools architects can actively design with in the fight for housing and reuse. The session culminated with Forensic Architecture, where Eyal Weizman showed how architectural drawings, satellite images and spatial evidence can become instruments of public accountability, reminding us that architecture is not only what shelters life, but also what reveals when the conditions for life are deliberately dismantled.

UIA Barcelona 2026 made one thing clear: architecture’s role is shifting. In a planet already in transition, building is only one part of the work. The discipline must now learn to listen, repair, collaborate and act with greater awareness of the living, material and political systems it is part of.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_image 1, 2 & 3: Arnau Pascual Monells
_image 4: Anna Mas