Barcelona is the first city in the history of the UIA World Congress of Architects to host the event twice. The 1996 edition, Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities, arrived at a charged moment, when the post-Olympic city was consolidating an urban model that would become one of the most studied and contested in contemporary urbanism, and when architecture was learning to think through the large metropolis as its primary site of inquiry. Thirty years later, the same city reopens the question under a different condition: one in which the built environment can no longer be understood as a self-contained object, but only through the wider ecological, material, and political systems that sustain it. The theme of the 2026 Congress — Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition — does not abandon the urban concerns of 1996; it reopens them from a planetary scale.
The curatorial team behind this edition, formed by Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Mariona Benedito, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres, approaches architecture as a critical and transformative tool rooted in territory, working across practice, research, and teaching. Their program structures the Congress around six interconnected thematic lines (Becoming More-than-human, Becoming Circular, Becoming Embodied, Becoming Interdependent, Becoming Hyper-Conscious, and Becoming Attuned) and distributes it across three venues of very different characters — Les Tres Xemeneies del Besòs, the Disseny Hub at Glòries, and the CCIB — each chosen for what it represents as much as for what it can hold.
