From June 29 to July 2, with the exhibition extended until July 19, Barcelona will host the UIA World Congress of Architects for the second time in its history, under the theme Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition. Chosen through an international competition, the theme was developed by a curatorial team of six Barcelona-based architects: Pau Bajet, Mariona Benedito, Maria Giramé, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres. Together, they bring multiple generations of practice and teaching, framing the Congress around six interlocking research lines, Becoming: More-than-human, Circular, Embodied, Interdependent, Hyper-conscious, and Attuned.

Each of these lines speaks to questions we grapple with daily: how to work with living systems, with time and change, with the agency of non-human actors, and with the social and political dimensions of inhabited ground. The Congress sits within UNESCO’s designation of Barcelona as World Capital of Architecture 2026, and runs a parallel public programme for all citizens — prompting public space as inherently civic and political.

Along with an immensely rich programme, field visits run in parallel: Urban infrastructures and renaturalisation traces former infrastructures, landfills, riverbeds, transport corridors, reclaimed as parks and ecosystemic refuges; A constant rethinking of public space follows the city’s ongoing reformulation of streets and squares as shared ground; and The Conflict with El Prat confronts the unresolved tension between airport expansion and the delta’s wetland ecology. The Congress opens with the International Emerging Workshop, running from 18 to 27 June, bringing together 180 students in the lead-up to the official programme, which includes panellists such as Kate Orff, Beatriz Colomina, Dirk Sijmons, and Catherine Mosbach, to name only a few.

We asked the curatorial team to unpack the underlying currents in architecture discourse that shaped the Congress’s stance.

This year’s Congress brings voices that go well beyond the usual architecture conversation — landscape architects, artists, students, theorists from other fields. What was the ambition from the very beginning, and what makes Becoming different from previous editions?

From the beginning, we wanted the Congress to move beyond the image of a sequence of lectures by architects presenting finished work. A world congress can also be a place where architecture is tested while it is still being formed: through research, prototypes, drawings, workshops, discussions and public encounters.
That is why Becoming includes very different kinds of contributors. Some work through buildings, others through landscapes, legislation, archives, films or material experiments. This is not about expanding the programme for the sake of diversity, but about recognising that architecture today is produced through many forms of intelligence.

Perhaps the main difference is that the Congress is not only presenting existing practices. It has also commissioned new work: year-long research projects, emerging workshops, open-call contributions and a central exhibition. In that sense, the Congress is less a showcase than a temporary infrastructure for producing architectural knowledge.

Barcelona is not a backdrop to the Congress but an “open-ended laboratory”. The city carries its own history of radical transitions: the Cerdà grid, the Olympic transformation, the Superblocks. What does it mean to host the UIA, here and now? How does the city, its contradictions, its people, shape and participate in the programme you built?

Barcelona is often described through its successful urban episodes, but today it is also a city under pressure. Housing, tourism, heat, drought, ageing, mobility and the future of the metropolitan coastline are not abstract topics here. They are part of everyday life.

So the city is not presented as a model to be exported. That would be too simple. It is more interesting to understand Barcelona as a place where many of the contradictions of contemporary cities become very explicit.

This has shaped the programme in several ways. Some research projects and workshops work directly with Barcelona as a site of inquiry, from material circularity and public space to urban agriculture, climate adaptation or housing. The Congress also expands towards the metropolitan seafront and Les Tres Xemeneies del Besòs, a post-industrial landscape that is itself in transition. In that sense, Barcelona is not just hosting the Congress. It becomes part of the discussion.

Each of the six panel themes opens with a voice that sets the tone — Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Donna Haraway, Walter Stahel, Silvia Federici — activists and theorists whose thinking has been reshaping architectural practice from the outside in. What shifts are you observing in how young professionals understand their role, and how did those observations guide your curatorial role?

Many professionals no longer understand architecture only through the isolated production of buildings. They are still interested in construction, but also in climate, reuse, care, research, legislation, representation, activism, technology and public policy. There is a clear desire to understand where architectural knowledge can be useful beyond the limits of conventional practice. This is not a rejection of building. On the contrary, it often comes from a very precise concern for how things are made, maintained, reused and inhabited. But it also recognises that a building is never isolated. It is connected to laws, energy systems, labour, extraction, maintenance, care and finance.

The references you mention helped us frame architecture from those edges. They are not there as decorative intellectual citations, but because they allow us to ask different questions. What does it mean to design when humans are not the only agents? What happens if we take maintenance, care or reproduction seriously? How do materials circulate? How do buildings participate in planetary systems?

Our curatorial role has been to create a structure where these questions could enter the Congress without becoming a closed doctrine. The six Becomings are not categories to be filled, but fields of tension. They allow different generations and forms of practice to meet around questions that are already transforming the profession.

Living systems and planetarity, socially and materially, run as an undercurrent through the whole Congress. You resist the clean resolution deliberately. In an unstable world in transition, operating across multiple simultaneous scales — from the world as hyperobject to the miniature life of bacteria — what is the world becoming?

Maybe the world is becoming harder to separate. The old divisions between nature and culture, building and territory, local action and planetary consequence, human and non-human agency, are no longer convincing. Architecture has often worked by drawing boundaries — between inside and outside, private and public, natural and artificial, permanent and temporary — but today those boundaries are increasingly porous.

This becomes very concrete in practice. A wall is not only a wall: it may involve soil, carbon, labour, demolition waste, regulation, thermal comfort and future maintenance. A tree in the city is not only landscape: it is shade, water, biodiversity, public health and urban politics. A coastline is not only an edge: it is infrastructure, memory, habitat, risk and desire.

So Becoming is not about finding one final image of the future. It is about learning to work within entanglement. This can be uncomfortable, because it means giving up some fantasies of control. But it also opens other possibilities: more attentive, more situated and more responsible ways of acting.

Becoming holds space for ecological, social and material transformation, yet transformation at the scale the planet needs runs into the hard wall of politics. If there was one voice, theme, or presence missing from the table, what would it be?

Politics is never entirely outside the table. It appears in housing, land, public procurement, regulation and in the basic question of who has access to the city. But architecture often speaks about transformation as if it were only a matter of design culture or technical innovation, when in fact many changes depend on institutions, resources, legal frameworks and long-term commitments.

If something is always missing, it is probably not one single voice, but the full presence of those most affected by spatial decisions and least able to influence them: residents displaced by speculation, communities living with environmental damage, informal workers, migrants, non-human lives, future generations. These are not easy voices to include meaningfully in a congress format, and we should be honest about that limitation.

The challenge is to avoid turning politics into just another topic. As the planet changes, architecture also has to transform: not only in the way it builds, but in the way it listens, collaborates, regulates, repairs and helps make certain futures possible.