The TAC! Urban Architecture Festival is held annually in Spain with the aim of bringing contemporary architecture closer to the public through installations in various cities, including Granada, San Sebastián, Valencia, Vigo, and San Fernando. Organized by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda in collaboration with Fundación Arquia, the festival seeks to promote experimentation in architecture by constructing temporary pavilions for cultural events and gatherings. The 2025 edition of the festival will take place in two locations: Casa Mediterráneo in Alicante and Plaza Stagno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The pavilions are selected each year through an open call for young architects up to 45 years old. This year's winners have already been announced: the ESPARTAL project by ELE Arkitektura, GA Estudio, Florencia Galecio, and Juan Gubbins; and DE ROCA MADRE by Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo, Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán, Alberto Martínez García, and Andrea Molina Cuadro.
The organization of TAC! 2025 aims to explore the cultural richness "that defines the intersection of territories united by the sea" and to reaffirm "public space as a place of encounter and boundary; a threshold where histories, identities, and ways of inhabiting converge." The call for projects encouraged architecture rooted in the territory, connected to local history, and constructed with traditional materials. In response, material reuse or the reappraisal of local and traditional materials was a common theme among the 106 proposals received. Regarding the winning entries, the jury highlighted them as "contextualized interventions, attentive to the physical and social characteristics of the site, emphasizing their role as spaces of interaction within the urban fabric." As first-prize winners, both projects receive €15,000 and a base budget of approximately €90,000 for the pavilion construction.
The ESPARTAL pavilion, to be installed at Casa Mediterráneo in Alicante from October 16 to November 14, is inspired by esparto grass, a native material now virtually unused in the architecture field. The design, proposed by ELE Arkitektura, GA Estudio, and architects Florencia Galecio and Juan Gubbins, envisions a suspended esparto canopy that filters light, creating dense shade that provides thermal comfort and alters the microclimate of Plaza Arquitecto Miguel López. In today's context of extreme climate conditions, the proposal resonates with its Mediterranean setting, statistically the European city with the most hours of sunlight per year. The project seeks to reverse the obsolescence of esparto and revalue its use by linking the agricultural landscape to the city, "promoting a broader ecological cycle in the use of materials and valuing local material culture from an environmental, functional, and symbolic perspective."
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Architecture Now: Urban Updates from Madrid to L.A. on Climate, Policy, and RecoveryThe DE ROCA MADRE pavilion, to be installed from October 30 to November 28 in Plaza de Stagno in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, showcases different types of native stones from the local coastline alongside plastic waste collected from the island's beaches by the collective Precious Plastic. Designed by Alejandro Carrasco Hidalgo, Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán, Alberto Martínez García, and Andrea Molina Cuadro, the pavilion invites reflection on the contrast between geological time, as reflected in the island's strata, and the accelerated human impact on its ecology in recent decades. The pavilion "looks to the past, evoking traditional Canarian construction in stone and wood using geological and natural materials native to the island; while at the same time, it opens a critical conversation around a contemporary issue": the accumulation of waste and microplastics along Gran Canaria's coasts, most of which are carried there by transoceanic currents from other parts of the world.
In addition to the winners, the jury awarded two second and two third prizes, with monetary awards of €3,000 and €2,000 respectively. In Gran Canaria, the second prize went to the project "Gota a Gota" by Nuria Blanco Cantalozella, Iván Iglesias Palomares, and Marcos Romero Gerechter, an initiative to recover the traditional destiladera canaria and transform it into a device for capturing and reusing water from the Panza de Burro. The third prize was shared by two projects: "¡Vaya tela!", a modular scaffold structure wrapped in a curtain made of recycled cane sacks, by Marcos García Hurtado and Pablo Ruz Sampalo; and "Vidas encontradas", an installation made with remnants of boats, by Álvaro López Rodríguez and Alejandro Escamilla Hadia, which aims to highlight the reality of migrants arriving on the island.
In Alicante, the second prize was awarded to the project "Lava", in which Juan Manuel López Carreño, Álvaro del Río, Andrea Moreno, and Carlos Pastor propose exploring soap as a construction material. The third prize for this location went to "La Siesta", by Víctor Ballesteros Mateo, which refers to the image of the urban nomadic farmer through the idea of finding a place (topos), marking it, and cultivating an activity within it. The TAC! jury also gave special mentions to the projects "fetd'aigua", by Pedro Escoriza Torralbo, Renato Righi, and Jonathan Leyva Benítez; and Fondeado[ero], by Carmen Povedano Olleros and Pablo Navas Díaz.
The jury for this edition was composed of Iñaqui Carnicero, Secretary General for Urban Agenda, Housing and Architecture and President of the Jury; Elena Calama Martín, Deputy Director General of Architecture and Building at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda; Begoña de Abajo, architect and founder of the studio DABG / deAbajoGarcia; Fuensanta Nieto, architect and founding partner of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos; Sol Candela, Director of the Fundación Arquia; Javier Peña, Artistic Director of the TAC! Urban Architecture Festival; Carmen Nieves Martín, General Coordinator of Urban Development for the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; and Ignacio de Julián, Deputy Director of Casa Mediterráneo in Alicante.
In other related news, the first edition of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial has also revealed the two winning designs from its call for "Slow Pavilions", in search of architecture that embodies the slowing down of the practice. Meanwhile, a citizen initiative is advocating for the preservation of Tadao Ando's design for the tenth MPavilion structure in Australia, which is currently slated for demolition. A showcase of national pavilions is now on display at Expo Osaka 2025 in Japan, open to the public from April 13 to October 13, and at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, open to the public from May 10 to November 23, 2025.
