Barcelona has just become the first city in the history of the UIA World Congress of Architects to host the event twice. Thirty years separate the two editions, and the distance between them says as much about architecture's changing self-understanding as anything spoken from a stage. In 1996, the congress placed the city at the center of the debate, consolidating a post-Olympic urban model that would go on to be studied and contested for decades.
In 2026, under the theme "Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition," Barcelona hosted a very different conversation. The congress's curatorial team — Pau Bajet, Mariona Benedito, Maria Giramé, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres — organized the program around six thematic lines: Becoming More-than-human, Becoming Circular, Becoming Embodied, Becoming Interdependent, Becoming Hyper-Conscious, and Becoming Attuned. As they told ArchDaily ahead of the opening, the premise behind this structure was that most architectural decisions are, in practice, very specific — which material is used, what is demolished or preserved, how much water or energy a building consumes — yet those specific decisions carry planetary implications.
