List of participant
This Call for Participants invites contributions to the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 Barcelona, aligning with the Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition, research lines in three different formats: Critical Design, Critical Essay, Critical Image
Becoming explores the transformation of existing reality, understanding time as a design tool and addressing the relationship between the urgency of contemporary challenges and a long-term perspective, through six research lines: More-than-human, Attuned, Embodied, Interdependent, Hyper-Conscious, and Circular.
This call will select a significant number of speakers for the congress, evaluated by a renowned jury of experts. We invite research that critically explores how architecture connects to these six lines. Submissions must address at least one of them.
Becoming More-than-human
Ecologies of Food Production
Courage Kpodo
Ending well
Kpodo’s work explores the transformations in built and cultivated spaces through writing, film, photography, curation, and architecture. His research-driven work has been featured in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial, the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, and the BBC. He was the lead curator for the inaugural biennial edition of LagosPhoto Festival 2025, with the theme Incarceration. He is presently developing an architectural framework for land-stewardship in the first cocoa-producing region in Ghana, a continuation of his 2025 thesis developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Leyuan Li
Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen
Leyuan Li is the director of Office for Roundtable and an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Colorado. His creative work has been supported by the Art Omi and MacDowell Fellowships, and featured on leading design platforms, including ArchDaily, Dezeen, PLOT, and The Architect’s Newspaper. Recent projects have been exhibited at Tulane University, the University of Houston, and Pratt Institute, and presented at the São Paulo International Architecture Biennale, the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Shenzhen), and the History Colorado Center in Denver. Office for Roundtable has received numerous national and international recognitions, including being named a finalist for the 2025 Dezeen Awards and receiving an Honorable Mention in The Architect’s Newspaper’s Best of Practice Awards.
Sebastián Carvajal
Marine Food Architectures for Ecological Regeneration in Chilean Patagonia
Sebastián Carvajal is an architect and filmmaker. He lives and works in southern Chile, where he develops a practice that brings together architecture and audiovisual media as tools for design and critical research. His work understands architecture not only as a built object, but as a form of thinking capable of articulating territory, infrastructure, materiality, and culture across different scales, connecting local contexts from the Global South with contemporary discussions on ecology, production, and transforming ways of inhabiting.
He directs an audiovisual studio dedicated to the documentation of architecture, territory, and creative processes, where moving image and photography do not operate as final records, but as active instruments for thinking, narrating, and producing knowledge.
In parallel, he develops an academic career as a professor at Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile), teaching at undergraduate and master’s levels. His work has been published and recognized in international and national contexts, including the Biennale College Architettura 2024–2025 (Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia), Trama Magazine (Ecuador), the Chilean Wood Corporation Competition (CORMA), and the Chile Diseño Awards 2025, in the Applied Research category.
José Luis de Vicente
The Storm: Architectures of Vernacular Geoengineering
Jose Luis de Vicente is a curator, cultural researcher and artistic director based In Barcelona and working internationally. His work explores the space between social innovation, new ecological practices and the aesthetics and politics of computation.
He is, along with Eva Franch I Gilabert, the cofounder and principal of FAST, a transdisciplinary curatorial platform and design lab dedicated to addressing current and future challenges through the convergence of culture, technology, architecture, and design. Previously De Vicente was director of DHUB, Barcelona’s Design Museum, for Design, and founder and artistic director of Sónar+D, the culture and arts program of the acclaimed Sónar Festival.
He was cofounder and codirector of MODEL, Barcelona’s festival of Architectures, and Tentacular, a festival of Critical Technologies and Digital Adventures in Matadero (Madrid). He has been curator of FutureEverything Festival (Manchester) and LlumBCN, Barcelona’s festival of Light Arts.
He has curated more than 25 exhibitions in institutions across the whole planet including museums and cultural centers like CCCB (Barcelona), ArtsScience Museum (Singapore), Somerset House (London), MIT Museum (Cambridge, US), Museo Reina Sofia and Espacio Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), among many.
Architectures of co-evolution
Manuela Valtchanova
Anarchaeological practices for radical imagination
Arturo Frediani, Larry Barham and R. Adriana Hernandez and Lara Alcaina
Origin and Evolution of Architecture. On Human architectural ethology
Delving into the Evolutionary Aesthetics of Architecture through his PhD research at UPC, architect and URV professor Arturo Frediani collaborates with fellow architect and URV researcher Lara Alcaina, alongside two internationally renowned scientists—archaeologist Larry Barham (PhD, University of Liverpool; Director of the Deep Roots Humanity Project, Zambia) and evolutionary anthropologist R. Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar (PhD, Serra Hunter Professor, University of Barcelona)—in order to combine their expertise to help redefine the very nature of architecture.
Sophie Falkeis
Turning the Ecological Gears
Sophie Falkeis is a multidisciplinary designer based in Vienna and Zurich, working at the intersection of science, art and design. Her work investigates evolutionary mechanisms under anthropogenic influence by envisioning future scenarios of multi-species cohabitation.
Her work is part of the MAK permanent collection and has been exhibited in London, Vienna, Eindhoven, Almere, Beijing, Bern, Berlin, Copenhagen and Gothenburg and was featured in the New York Times. She has previously worked at Iris van Herpen Couture in Amsterdam and was a research fellow at Terreform One in New York City.
Sophie gave a keynote at the 2023 Species on the Move Conference in Florida, spoke at the Centre for Marine Socioecology Tasmania, PRIMER21 Global San Francisco, DDW Talks Eco Pioneers, as well as other international conferences, and most recently at UNESCO HQ in Paris. For her work, she has been awarded a START-Stipendium by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts & Culture and the Planet Love Prize by the Vienna Business Agency.
Alongside her independent practice, Sophie currently acts as Co-Pi of the project ECHOES – funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation – at the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, ETH-Domain, in Zurich.
sophiefalkeis.com
Water as Common Infrastructure
A Gang of Three
Alluvial Decoder (City of Raleigh Storm Memorial)
A Gang of Three is a globally recognized, socially focused multidisciplinary public art and planning practice based in the United States.
By design, our practice operates within an ever-evolving gradient of public art, architecture, landscape architecture, installation, urban planning, ecology, and advocacy. We leverage our unique perspectives and strengths to tackle such critical issues as human rights, climate change, resilience, social justice, data, remembrance, and migration, among others.
At its core, our work is intended to promote positive change and bring disparate people together. Intentionally subtle, our work takes its time to settle in, causing viewers/participants to have to think critically to meaningfully engage with it so as not to elicit immediate reactions – allowing for a true sense of discovery and often framing unexpected and differing perspectives.
Equally nuanced is the makeup of our highly collaborative and multidisciplinary practice, as it’s intentionally like having 10 toes within 10 different disciplines, all however deeply rooted in meaningful storytelling and with a deep focus on doing social good within the built environment.
Arsomsilp Community and Environmentat Architects and Turenscape
Benjakitti Forest Park
Arsomsilp Community and Environmental Architect is a multidisciplinary practice advancing participatory, community-based design across architecture and landscape. Chatchanin Sung is Studio Director of the Landscape Studio. With over 17 years of international experience, she leads urban and ecological landscape projects that integrate nature and community. She specializes in nature-based design that restores ecosystems and strengthens urban resilience and livability, shaping sustainable futures.
Carles Enrich
Environmental restoration of Rec Comtal in Vallbona
Fins ací (it ends here). Paiporta, Valencia, October 29, 2024
Milena Villalba
Green Corridors as Living Infrastructure
OESST
P.A.R.C. – Previous atmospheres recovery chapters
OESST is run by Adrià Escolano and David Steegmann.
OESST explores landscapes at all scales, operating within a structure without defined size or organization. It forms connections with other disciplines to undertake projects ranging from academic or domestic contexts to urban planning and landscape.
OESST works through narrative, pragmatism, irony, precision, and an amateur spirit, in order to identify those minimal and essential actions upon which the entire project can be built.
OESST combines professional practice with teaching at ESTAV, EINA, and La Salle.
Openact architecture
Tuzla Stream Co-habitat: Urban Regeneration through Waterscapes
Zuhal Kol and Carlos Zarco Sanz are the founding partners of Openact, an architecture and urban design studio based in Istanbul and Madrid. Their work explores the continuity and transformative potential of spatial production through public-space projects at multiple scales, with a strong focus on the relationships between public space, infrastructure, and ecological inputs. Openact approaches design both as a critical tool and as a practice that generates collective imaginaries for more inclusive futures.
Through its built work and research-driven approach, Openact has received national and international recognition, including the Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction, the New European Bauhaus Prize, Türkiye’s National Architecture Awards, an Aga Khan Award for Architecture Committee Nomination, the COAM Award, multiple Europan prizes, and the GEMMS Young Architects Award. These processes have led to projects at different scales, curatorial collaborations, and publications across contexts worldwide.
Alongside practice, Kol and Zarco Sanz remain deeply engaged in academia, leading studios and teaching in Istanbul and Madrid. Their pedagogy encourages interdisciplinary thinking, questions modes of representation, and integrates creative research into architectural education.
TAV
Waycha Mayu Urban Biological Corridor
Carlos Zeballos-Velarde
Becoming More-than-Human: Ecological Coexistence in the Urban Linkages Project
Architect, graduated from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2016) and PhD from the same institution (2025). Researcher at the Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona (UPC), he teaches at ETSAB (UPC) and UdG. In 2017, he co-founded andrea + joan arquitectes with Andrea Capilla, working across architecture, interior design, and urbanism with an approach centred on use, place, and continuity with existing contexts. The practice has received several awards and contributed numerous publications as well as academic and professional lecture series.
Becoming Circular
Rewriting Territorial Metabolisms
Kathy Velikov
Becoming Biomass: a future history of regional biomaterial transition
Kathy Velikov is Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Kathy is a leader in practice-based design research and education, advancing environmentally responsive, technologically enabled, and climate positive built environments through speculation, prototyping, and visualization for responsive architectural material assemblies, resilient multifunctional urban infrastructures, and territorial practices for decarbonization. She is a licensed architect and former president of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). RVTR, her research-based practice co-founded with partner Geoffrey Thün, serves as a lab for exploration and experimentation in the intertwinements between architecture, the environment, technology, and sociopolitics. Kathy’s projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally and have received multiple awards. She has published two books – Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural (Actar, 2022) and Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (Park Books, 2015) – and her work and writing has been published in numerous journals and book chapters.
Fernanda Córdova
Brownfields
Fernanda Córdova Porte is a Chilean architect based in Barcelona, Spain. Her work focuses on urban regeneration, territorial analysis, and circular land use, combining a GIS-based approach with strong visual communication through maps, diagrams, and visualizations.
On her master’s thesis in UPC, “Brownfields: analysis, diagnosis, and guidelines for redevelopment in Santiago de Chile”, she developed a replicable workflow to identify, characterize, and prioritize brownfield sites at metropolitan scale, translations spatial diagnosis into an operational cadaster and actionable redevelopment criteria.
Her experience also includes architectural design and prototyping using mining tailings to develop construction materials, as well as teaching assistance in Santiago de Chile at Universidad Diego Portales.
Joan Martí
Learning from Garcia Faria: Circular Metabolism in the late XIX
Architect, graduated from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (2016), and PhD from the same institution (2025). Researcher at the Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona, he is currently teaching at the Escola Tècnica Superior d’Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB, UPC) and at the University of Girona (UdG).
In 2017, together with Andrea Capilla, he co-founded the practice andrea + joan arquitectes, which operates across multiple scales in the fields of architecture, interior design, and urbanism, with an approach centred on use, place, and continuity with existing contexts. Throughout his professional trajectory, the practice has received several awards for both built work and design competitions, and has contributed to numerous publications as well as academic and professional lecture series.
Housing Futures and the Right to Remain
Rocio Calzado
The Great Together
Beyond demolition, architectures of care. Sociotechnical taxonomy of housing estates
Rocío Calzado is a Spanish architect and political scientist based in Paris. She is the co-founder, together with Jasper Meurer, of Docar, a documentary film practice focused on housing rights and care politics. She is an associate lecturer at ENSA Paris-Est and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. Her academic research is conducted at the STS laboratory LATTS and uses sociotechnical methods to study maintenance practices in architecture, particularly within the field of social housing.
Pere Joan Ravetllat
Open Regeneration of Housing Estates in Barcelona
Pere Joan Ravetllat Mira. Doctor Arquitecte. Master Science of Building Design en la Columbia University de New York. 1985. Catedràtic d’ universitat 2016. Responsable del curs de Projectes “Habitatge i Ciutat”, un curs centrat en la contribució del programa residencial als entorns urbans . Autor de varias monografíes sobre el tema de l’habitatge i artícles d’opinió publicats en revistes d’àmbit nacional e internacional. Ha estat membre de jurats i premis internacionals i ha donat conferencies o ha estat professor visitante en diverses escoles d’arquitectura espanyoles i europees. Director de la línea de Rehabilitació i Restauració del MBArch ETSAB UPC. Coordinador del Grup de Recerca REARQ des del que es desenvolupen diferents línies de treball al voltant de la rehabilitació.
Entre la seva experiència professional a la rehabilitació hi ha que destacar les seguents intervencions en edificis amb un alt reconeixement patrimonial. Casa Golferichs. Barcelona 1985 y 2020, Can Regàs. Girona 2.000, Casa Muley Afid. Barcelona 2001, 2007, Fábrica Marfà. Girona 2007, La Remunta. L’Hospitalet 2013, Mercado de Sant Antoni. Barcelona 2018 Balneari de Can Rius Caldes de Montbui 2024. Can 60 Barcelona 2025.
Urbanisms of Reuse: Mapping Material Flows
Tosin Oshinowo
Alternative urbanism: self-organising markets of Lagos
Tosin Oshinowo is a Lagos-based Nigerian architect and the founder and principal of Oshinowo Studio, established in 2013. Her practice spans civic, commercial, and residential projects across Nigeria and is recognised for its socially responsive approach to architecture, design, and urbanism. Key projects include a United Nations Development Programme initiative to build a new community in northern Nigeria for a village displaced by Boko Haram, the Maryland Mall in Lagos, and Adidas’ West African flagship store.
Her curatorial and research practice focuses on culture, identity, and urbanism in the Global South. She co-curated the second Lagos Biennial in 2019, curated the second Sharjah Architecture Triennial in 2023, collaborated with Lexus International for Design Miami 2020, and received a Special Mention at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale.
A registered architect in Nigeria and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, she previously worked at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in London and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam in 2008.
She holds degrees from Kingston University London, University College London, the Architectural Association, and IE University Madrid, and is a 2025 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Daniel Torrego
Scrap Oriented Urbanism – Speculative cartography for socio-material urbanism
Daniel Torrego is a Spanish architect-researcher whose PhD work framed Material Ecology as a practical design methodology. He approaches every project as an experiment “in the making,” testing how matter, climate dynamics and social use can inform one another.
Operating across architectural practice, academic research and cultural programming, he pursues an open yet hands-on approach to architecture—one that understands design as something constructed over time, in close relationship with place, material and use.
Groundwork: Soil Ecologies in Urban Transformation
Edgar Mazo
Park in the Prado Neighborhood – Life in a Garden
Edgar Mazo is an architect graduated from the National University of Colombia and holds a Master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Processes from EAFIT University. He was a co-founder of Paisajes Emergentes in 2008 and Laboratorio de Arquitectura y Paisaje in 2013. He currently directs the studio Connatural Architecture in the Landscape, focusing his efforts on addressing socio-environmental conflicts through landscape architecture. His professional practice has been centered on the development of projects at different scales, combined with teaching activities in universities in Colombia and Latin America, at Escola da Cidade in São Paulo, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina, among other. He has been invited to serve as a jury member in various architecture and landscape biennials and has received recognition in numerous national and international competitions, including the Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize, the Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize, the Latin American Landscape Architecture Biennial, and the Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (BIAU)
Jorge Vidal
Renaturalization of Liconsa Parking
Jorge Vidal is an architect who graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in 2005. In 2004 he studied at the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio in the atelier of Peter Zumthor and Valerio Olgiati. In 2003 he studied in Greece with Elia Zenghelis thanks to a scholarship awarded to him by the Mies Van der Rohe Foundation. After completing a Master’s Degree in Projects, he is currently preparing his PhD at the ETSAB.
From 2021 to date he has been directing the SUUN Unit at ETSALS. From 2008 to 2019 he was a professor in the Projects workshop at ETSAB. At the same time, he was director of the series of conferences known as ESARQ Forums at the International University of Catalonia from 2010 to 2016. He gives lectures at different architecture schools and institutions as well as being a jury member for different awards. At the same time, he regularly writes articles on architecture.
From 2008 to 2015, Jorge Vidal and Víctor Rahola worked together as Rahola Vidal Arquitectes. In 2015 Jorge Vidal founded his current architecture studio.
The studio’s work has been recognized with various national awards such as the FAD Award and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism
Practices of Care: Cycles of Inhabitation
Anne Gross
House-04: Reviving through Careful Inhabitation
Anne Gross is the co-founder of Studio GROSS, an experimental spatial practice based in Tokyo that views architecture as a discipline of euphoria. Through curation and filmmaking, they broaden their planning scope and aim to share insights into the building industry. In addition to collaborations with institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Swiss Architectural Museum in Basel, film also serves as a means of project documentation.
Originally from Berlin, Anne and her partner trained as generalists through a traveling European master’s program in architecture. After several years of work, they felt the profession needed to step out of its comfort zone to achieve greater self-efficacy. Consequently, they left Berlin and, a few years later, established Studio GROSS as an experimental exhibition space, which evolved into an office focused on neighborhood projects in Tokyo. Their work concentrates on renovation work in response to the rising vacancy rate in the Japanese capital and advocates for existing buildings as valuable resources.
Anne’s research at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, grounds her practice within a theoretical framework that explores the socioeconomic principles of urban systems through walking.
Adrià Goula
Palimpest: Overwriting architecture
Caroline Stokholm
The Invisible Hands
Danish architect working at the intersection of spatial research, architectural analysis, and storytelling. Her practice explores film and narrative as analytical and communicative tools to examine the relationship between architecture, landscape, and everyday life.
She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Royal Danish Academy and completed part of her studies at Università IUAV di Venezia, focusing on climate adaptation and water-based urban strategies. Her work is driven by a holistic understanding of architecture, where social structures, cultural heritage, and ecological systems are read as interconnected spatial conditions.
She recently presented the triptych film project ‘Punktbyen’, developed in interdisciplinary collaboration with photographer Jenny Amdi Sørensen. Through three short films, the project investigates modernist housing typologies, addressing questions of landscape, daily life, and social transformation through a poetic, research-based approach to architectural communication.
Becoming Embodied
Becoming Interdependent
Everyday Practices of Interdependence
CO53 (Sharona Cramer & Yotam Oron)
Now That the Neighborhood Is Nice, Why Do I Have to Move?
CO53 is a NYC–based practice working across architectural scales alongside research on housing affordability, collective land ownership, and alternative development models. Founded by Sharona Cramer and Yotam Oron following their joint thesis at the Yale School of Architecture, which received the Independent Design Research Award.
Sharona Cramer is an architect and designer based in NYC. She holds a post-professional M.Arch from Yale and a B.Arch with honors from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where she graduated first in her class and received the Azrieli Foundation Prize. She has previously practiced in TLV, leading residential and public projects, and has held teaching roles at Yale and Bezalel, as well as serving as a founding team member and studio tutor at the Negev School of Architecture.
Yotam Oron is an architect and urbanist based in NYC and currently a Princeton | CAC Fellow. He holds a post-professional M.Arch from Yale and a B.Arch with honors from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where he received the Azrieli Foundation Prize and the Joseph Vaada Bolafio Prize for excellence in architectural theory. He has previously practiced in TLV leading housing and educational projects, and held research collaborations (UNESCO) and teaching roles at Yale and Bezalel.
Sadichchha Shrestha
Reviving local games, Reclaiming Public Spaces: Let’s Play Initiative Nepal.
Huinan Zhang
Spatial Interdependence: Hollowed Villages Becoming Sustainable Communities.
Huinan Zhang is a doctoral candidate in the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, where she also earned her PhD under the supervision of Professor Jun Shan. Her research focuses on the spatial evolution and contemporary reconstruction of traditional villages, specifically developing quantitative analysis paths for social spaces through the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Network Analysis (SNA).
With a prolific academic record, she has published 10 papers, including high-impact articles in Frontiers of Architectural Research and Land.An active participant in international exchange, Huinan has conducted field research in Nairobi and presented findings across Asia and Europe. She combines her strong background in architectural design with advanced skills in Python-based data modeling and machine learning.
Unfinished Territories: Reassembling Interdependence
María Isabel Paz Suaréz
Quito Fragmented
María Isabel Paz Suárez (Marisa Paz) is an Ecuadorian architect and professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ). She holds a Master of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Virginia (2008). Her research focuses on the intersection of design, biodiversity, and cultural heritage preservation in Ecuador, with a particular emphasis on endangered craft traditions. At USFQ, she has strengthened architectural education by integrating creative methods of representation, from cyanotypes and textile weaving patterns to speculative drawings that envision Quito’s future growth. Her work combines academic research with community engagement, documenting oral histories and developing inclusive strategies for the safeguarding of intangible heritage. She has collaborated internationally with Yale, UT Austin, and RISD, bringing sustainable design perspectives to the Galápagos Islands and the Andean cloud forest. Marisa is also founder of Materia Arquitectura, a boutique practice dedicated to innovative, context-driven design.
Kathrin Golda-Pongratz
City Unfinished – Voices of El Ermitaño
Kathrin Golda-Pongratz is a Professor at the Urbanism Department at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and Vice-Dean of the School of Architecture of El Vallès (ETSAV). She holds a PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT. As member of the Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona (LUB), she publishes and lectures internationally. Her research focuses on urban memory, urban culture and public space, pre-Hispanic heritage, non-formal housing, urbanism and place-making strategies. Her book (with J.L. Oyón and V. Zimmermann) “John F C Turner. Autoconstrucción. Por una autonomía del habitar” was distinguished with the “FAD Award on Thought and Criticism” in 2019. In 2018, she presented her documentary “City Unfinished – Voices of El Ermitaño” which was shown at the Lima Film Festival (2019), the Urban October Habitat Norway (2019), the Arquitectura Film Festival in Santiago de Chile (2020) and the World Urban Forum (WUF12) in Cairo (2024). Her experience expands into curating and cultural transmission. She is a board member of the FAD, of the sounding board of the Research Center for New Social Housing at TU Vienna, the German Association of Latin American Research (ADLAF), and elected member of the German Academy of Urban and Regional Planning (DASL) and Academia Europaea (AE).
Solam Mkhabela
The Twilight Zone
Solam Mkhabela is an urban designer based at the School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) in Johannesburg. He holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies (BAS) and a Master of City Planning and Urban Design (MCPUD) from UCT, Cape Town, and a Ph.D. from WITS. He is currently an International Fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation (USF) at Edinburgh University to transform his doctoral thesis, Urban Scripting: Audio-visual Forms of Storytelling in Urban Design and Planning: The Case of Two Activity Streets in Johannesburg (2023), into a manuscript for publication titled The Urban Scripting Ways: Shifting the Frame to the ‘Other.
Solam’s work promotes transdisciplinary methods using audio-visual storytelling to read complex urban situations. It positions the urban designer in African cities as a producer of physical space in conjunction with social content from, for, and with society’s margins, thereby restructuring spatial practice for more equitable life.
Solam authored the graphic novel, Alexandra: A Backstory (Jacana Media, 2024). This hybrid work, which merges academic writing with the graphic novel format, garnered considerable attention in South African media, underscoring the importance of the discourse it engages with.
Isabella De Bonis
Floating Manaus: Riverine Legacies and the Urban Utopia
I am an Amazonian woman dedicated to research and creative practice in architecture, territory, and urban history. I hold a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from Escola da Cidade and a Master’s degree in Habitat from the University of São Paulo. I am currently a PhD candidate in History and Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, with funding from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), developing the research Deconstructing the Myth of the Amazonian Void: The Floating City in Historical and Territorial Perspective.
My work focuses on riverine forms of urbanization, informal and non-institutional urbanisms, and Amazonian and Brazilian agencies in city-making processes. I run Iapó Estúdio and co-create Lab Igarité, a research laboratory dedicated to architecture, territory, and Amazonian imaginaries. I have teaching experience at the Federal University of Amazonas and Faculdade Martha Falcão Wyden, and I am a member of the research groups Culture, Architecture and City in Latin America (CACAL) and Modern Architecture in the Amazon Research Group (NAMA).
Territorial Politics
Chiara Oggioni and Yi Sun
One Floor / One-Woman : Spatial Implications of Women’s Labour. “Wo-Men Work”
Wo-Men Work is a critical spatial practice co-founded by Chiara Oggioni and Sun Yi. Through filmmaking, they
investigate how socio-political issues—particularly those surrounding women’s labour—are spatially produced and
experienced. Their work has been exhibited internationally at INDA and Bangkok Design Week (2026), the UABB
Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (2025), MIT Keller Gallery (2024), Escola da Cidade, São Paulo
(2024), and PMQ, Hong Kong (2022)
Víctor Cano-Ciborro
Counter-Cartographies of Migrants to the Canary Islands
Víctor Cano-Ciborro is an architect currently teaching at Universidad Europea de Canarias (Spain) and Universidad de las Américas (Ecuador). He holds a Ph.D. in Architecture (“summa cum laude” and Extraordinary Doctoral Thesis Award 2020–2021) from ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. He was a predoctoral visiting researcher at UC Berkeley, a postdoctoral researcher at The New School (New York) and UPM, and a Marie Curie Fellow at Brown University. He has also taught at ETSAM, the Architectural Association, and CEPT University (India). His research develops counter-cartographies that reveal architectures of resistance in contested territories through the subaltern bodies that inhabit and build them. His work has been published in Cities, Environment and Planning B, INVI, EGA, and ARQ, and exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2016, 2018) and the 20th Chilean Architecture and Urbanism Biennale (2017). He is co-author of “Rebel Bodies Rebel Cities” (CEPT Press, 2022) and Principal Investigator of “Counter-Cartographies of Migrants to the Canary Islands,” funded by La Caixa Social Research.
Ilaria Iacconi Iambrenghi
Intersectional Urbanism: building cities of justice and climate resilience
Ilaria Iacconi Iambrenghi (b. 1994) works at the intersection of architecture, communication, and urban sociological studies, examining how space produces power relations, inequalities, and forms of belonging.
Aga Kuś
Spaces of Knowing: Co-creating Embedded Architectural Research Through Everyday Encounters
Architecture as a Practice of Interdependence
Cristiane Muniz and Fernando Viegas, Bárbara Francelin and Thiago Augusto Zati. Escola da Cidade
Diadema Educational Block
Escola da Cidade, an Architecture and Urbanism Association [1996], a non-profit civil organization with democratic governance and financial autonomy. It occupies old modern buildings [São Paulo], abandoned in the late 1990’s, an affirmative action to transform the area.
Fernando Viegas and Cristiane Muniz are the coordinators of Diadema Educational Block, arch., professors, founding partners of UNA MUNIZVIEGAS and UNA arquitetos, with the collaboration of Thiago Zati and Bárbara Francelin, arch., researchers and assistant professors.
Diego Ricalde
The City of Indigenous Arts
Diego Ricalde Recchia (Mexico) studied Architecture at UNAM and earned an M.Arch & Urbanism AA DRL in London. He has received awards including Young Creators, FONCA, and the Marcelo Zambrano Scholarship (CEMEX). Since 2010, he has taught at UNAM and Universidad Iberoamericana. In 2010 he co-founded Estudio MMX in Mexico City with Jorge Arvizu, Ignacio del Río, and Emmanuel Ramírez. The practice has received the Young Architects Award (NY), Design Vanguard, BAL Prize, Cemex Awards, and Emerging Voices by The Architectural League of New York, and has been widely published internationally.
César Vivas
Shelter for Homeless Women: Architecture Serving Social Reintegration
César Vivas Millaruelo (Barcelona, 1975) se licenció en la ETSAB, Escuela Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona, en 2002. También estudió en la Universität Hannover, Architektur & Landschaftarchitektur, en Alemania. Ha colaborado en diversos despachos de arquitectura y paisajismo en Berlín y Barcelona antes de desarrollar su propio trabajo como Vivas Arquitectos.
El estudio Vivas Arquitectos, fundado por César Vivas y Cristian Vivas en Barcelona en 2006, abarca desde la conceptualización hasta la ejecución de proyectos en colaboración con técnicos y consultores especializados. En los últimos años ha desarrollado diversas líneas de especialización mediante una aproximación basada en la investigación, con el objetivo de dar respuesta a cada situación garantizando la sostenibilidad económica, social y medioambiental. El uso de sistemas industrializados y proyectos modulares y ordenados caracteriza sus trabajos más recientes.
Del mismo modo, su obra destaca por un cuidado trabajo del vacío a través de espacios comunitarios entendidos como áreas intermedias entre lo público y lo privado. Esto permite proyectar lugares de socialización flexibles que superan lo estrictamente requerido por los programas y se adaptan a las necesidades y momentos vitales de sus habitantes.
Léa Namer
The inmortal, a reflexion on the Sexto Panteon legacy
Léa Namer (b. 1989) is a French architect and researcher. In 2019, she initiated Chacarita Moderna, a research project on the Sexto Panteón of Buenos Aires’ Chacarita Cemetery. The study of this unique necropolis marked the beginning of a multidisciplinary artistic practice (photo, video, installation) and a broader reflection on how contemporary societies relate to death and cemeteries. Her book Chacarita Moderna: The Brutalist Necropolis of Buenos Aires was published in 2024 by Building Books, with the support of the Graham Foundation.
Becoming Hyper-conscious
Becoming Attuned
Delight and Choreography
Pol Esteve Castelló
Discoteca de playa: mobilizing desire to reimagine the coast
Natalia Figueredo
Tuned Territories: Water, Resistance and Decolonial Architecture
I am a Latino-Amazonian woman from Belém (northern Brazil), currently based in Barcelona (Spain).
As an architect, urbanist, and cultural theorist, I have chosen not to build, but to engage deeply in research and communication — through artistic practice, sound experimentation, writing, lecturing, and contributing to critical urban thought. I work at the intersection of urbanism, cultural studies, and urban anthropology, connecting my Amazonian roots with global dialogues. My work focuses on critical ecologies, decolonial thought, and feminisms to challenge dominant ideas of territory, knowledge, and power.
Through my PhD, I research the materialization of the built environment in urban Amazonia and its interaction with unique sociabilities. Moreover, as a fellow researcher at Sonic Street Technology, I examine how cultural expressions—particularly music—shape and reflect social dynamics in the Global South.
Sometimes I perform as DJ, using sound as a way to connect and celebrate.
Unremarked Landscapes
Francisco Felipo Muñoz
(A)esthetics of the Everyday: Environmental Poetics in Social Architecture
Architect (Madrid, 1968), graduated from ETSAM (1995) and PhD from UPM-ETSAM (2016). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Architectural Composition, supervising Bachelor’s and Master’s Final Projects (TFG–TFM) and teaching in the MUPAAC programme at the School of Architecture of the University of Alcalá (UAH), where he also serves as Secretary of the Department of Architecture. He is a member of the ARHCIPAI and Eco-Futuring research groups at UAH, the latter a design laboratory for the green city, and was a member of the GIGAC research group at ETSAM-UPM until 2017. He is currently an active member of the PHS-MARCO Project (2024/PH-HUM-290 MARCO-CM). Professionally, he is a founding partner of the studio-workshop TRAZA ARQUITECTURA AMBIENTAL and the author of numerous social and subsidized housing projects (over 1,000 dwellings built) as well as public facilities, some resulting from competition wins. His research focuses on an Aesthetics of the Common (ECO), understood as an environmental poetics of dwelling grounded in everyday experience, material frugality, and collective processes, developed through scientific articles and conference papers.
Jose Lorenzo Belandres
Obscure Niches: Mapping Urban Becoming in Metro Manila’s Interstices
Ar. Enzo P. Belandres is an architect, educator, and researcher based in the Philippines. He is a full-time faculty member at De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde, where he teaches architectural design studios and research methodology, with a focus on systems-driven thinking, operative mapping, and design as an instrument for spatial and social transition.
He is the managing partner of Pluszerotwo Architecture, a practice that approaches architecture as an adaptive system rather than a static object, emphasizing interstitial spaces, design from scarcity, and research-led spatial strategies grounded in the Global South context. His work spans residential projects, speculative research, and academic–practice hybrids, and has been recognized in international platforms, including the World Architecture Festival.
Belandres completed his Master’s degree in Integrated Architectural Design in Barcelona, where his research explored mapping methodologies as tools for architectural inquiry and intervention. His current work investigates how architectural systems can act as agents of transition amid environmental, social, and territorial change.
Ella Fleri
Documenting Difference
Ella Fleri Soler is a Maltese architect and educator engaged in architecture practice and design education. She is co-founder of Text Catalogue with Andrew Darmanin, a collective that works across architecture, design, education and art installation through interdisciplinary approaches and collaboration.
Ella graduated with a B.Sc. in Built Environment Studies (2015) and an M.Arch. in Architectural Design (2017) from the University of Malta. In 2018 she was awarded the Galizia Award for Best Architectural Design Thesis by the Maltese Chamber of Architects. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the University’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design where she co-tutors design studios and leads workshops.
As a warranted architect she has extensive experience working independently and formerly within a leading local architecture firm. She leads projects from concept to completion with a strong focus on site-specific design and architectural detailing.
Through Text Catalogue, she has designed, produced and exhibited large-scale artistic installations in prominent art spaces across Malta. In summer 2025, Ella was an artist in residence at Berlin’s Spreepark Art Space and will exhibit there between March and June 2026 with the collective Memoria.
Nipun Prabhakar
Kutch’s Living Birdhouses: Community Sanctuaries for Coexistence
Nipun Prabhakar is an architect and photographer based in India, whose work explores the poetics and politics of the quotidian. He works at the intersection of folklore, material culture, and the built environment. His background in architecture grounds his visual practice, allowing him to document spaces with a sensitivity to both culture and geography.
In 2023, he was invited to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) to present his work at their inaugural Architecture Photography Festival. Nipun’s work has been featured by the Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wallpaper*. He has collaborated on research with MIT, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and the Institute of Development Studies. He is a former Cornell South Asian Fellow (2019-20) and a recipient of the Berkeley Essay Prize (2014).
Nipun is also the founder of Dhammada Collective, an interdisciplinary practice focused on community architecture, participatory design, and vernacular construction. The collective was recently awarded the 2025 Ammodo Architecture Award for Local Scale and the ID Honours in Vernacular Design.
Economy of Means
Atienza Maure
Nave. Rehabilitation of an old industrial warehouse
Atienza Maure is an architecture studio based in Madrid and Barcelona, founded in 2018 by Alonso Atienza and Miguel Ángel Maure, following theis studies at ETSAM and EPFL. Their work examines space and construction through a pragmatic yet hedonistic approach grounded in local context. From this perspective, they understand the vernacular as a contemporary interpretation of the available, shaped by materials, techniques, and means at hand.
Connor Gravelle
Land, Labor and Civic Ecology
Connor Gravelle is an architect and researcher whose work examines the material, social, and ecological entanglements of architecture with its contexts. His design work focuses on the building as a site of profound contingency, where disciplinary abstraction meets physical reality. In their construction and afterlives, Connor argues, buildings bind architecture to questions of climate and equity at a moment of both historic challenge and opportunity.
Trung Mai
The Grid
Trung Mai, founder of Hanoi ad hoc / Ad hoc Practice, is a Vietnamese-born French architect, urban planner, and architectural curator whose works have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale , the 19th International Exhibition — Intelli(gens), curated by Carlo Ratti, and in the French Pavilion Living With. He is also a three-time winner of the Europan competition (15, 16, 17) in Spain, Italy, and France.
Trung’s work explores urban renewal in post-industrial contexts, integrating ecological systems, urban agriculture, and the presence of non-human actors into the city, while examining critical regionalism, resilience, reversibility, and architectural rearrangement in the context of the Anthropocene. His research and design interests focus on the adaptive and ad hoc nature of urban environments, which he identifies as the core DNA of Vietnamese spatial practice and a mode of decolonizing through lived spatial interventions, as well as a model for the future of spatial practice.
Trung has been a guest lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Chulalongkorn University,École Spéciale d’Architecture, ENSA Paris-Belleville, and currently at ENSA Versailles and Invited External Advisor, Master of Architecture Thesis, Yale University.
Critical Design Jury
Design projects, industrial design concepts, design prototypes or explorations of design methodologies. These could range from conceptual designs to practica
Carlos Facio
In 2015, he founded TO, a collaborative and interdisciplinary workshop established in Mexico City, along with José Amozurrutia. His practice sees architecture as a vehicle for human knowledge capable of promoting a social and artistic stance, sensitive to natural processes. He is a co-founder of the C733 Collective, composed of four architecture offices to develop public projects in Mexico. He is currently a member of the National System of Art Creators.
Among their recognitions are the Obel Award 2024, the AR Emerging Awards in London 2023, the League Prize from The Architectural League of New York 2022, and the Grand Prize of the Pan American Architecture Biennial of Quito BAQ 2023. Their work has been exhibited and awarded at various national and international biennials and published in media outlets such as Domus, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, Arquitectura Viva, Casabella, among others. They have given various lectures and classes at national and international universities, such as Columbia GSAPP in New York, Master Class at Crowhall IIT in Chicago, at the WAVE 2019 program in Venice, and at Beijing Design Week 2019. They are currently a professor at the Max Cetto Workshop at the FA of UNAM.
Catherine Mosbach
Catherine Mosbach is a landscape architect and the founder of Paris-based design firm mosbach paysagistes & the magazine Pages Paysages. Catherine’s key projects include the Solutre Archaeological Park in Saone-et-Loire, Walk Sluice of Saint-Denis, the Botanical Garden of Bordeaux, the other side in Quebec City, Shan Shui in Xian & Lost in Transition in Ulsan. She was the recipient of the Equerre D’argent award with Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa for the Louvre Lens Museum Park FF & was honoured in the Iconic Concept Award category by the German Design Council DE, Platine Award by INT. design 15th Montreal for Phase Shifts Park in Taichung and the BLT Build Design Award Landscape of the Year for Phase Shifts Park, Taichung Luzern. The team is honoured Firm of the Year 2021 in Landscape and Urban Design by Architecture Master Prize Los Angeles, USA. Catherine is named knight of the Legion of Honour proposed by the President of the Republic Francois Hollande in 2016. In the net of desires explores the infinitesimal of the living by XXI Triennale de Milano. IT_ 2017. Some of her latest essay are ‘emersion’, dialog Jerome Boutterin with Catherine Mosbach. Jerome Boutterin Reboot 1999-2022. (eds.) snoeck MMBOOKS Bruxelles, BE and ‘de passage’ la couleur en questions, directed by Michel Menu, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Romain Thomas; Collection la Nature de l’oeuvre, (ed.) Hermann, FF_ 2023. ‘Cultivating Water, From the Dew to the Sky Vault’ directed by Laura Cipriani, ed Routledge, UK_2024. Eindrücke. Spuren des Gartens in zeitgenössischer französischer und deutscher Landschaftsarchitektur. Jürgen Weidinger ed français allemand. Berlin, DE_2024. Catherine Mosbach is visiting professor at GSD Harvard Boston 2017, 2019 & 2023.
Kersten Geers
Kersten Geers is an architect. Together with David Van Severen he is the founding partner of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen based in Brussels. OFFICE has received numerous honours and awards, including the Belgian Prize for Architecture, the Silver Lion at the 12th Venice Biennial of Architecture, and Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Apart from practicing architecture, Geers has been teaching at various institutions, such as Harvard GSD, Columbia GSAPP, Yale School of Architecture, and EPF Lausanne. He currently holds a professorship at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio.
Xu Tian Tian
Xu Tiantian is the founder and principal architect of DnA_Design and Architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor in Architecture from Tsinghua University. Since founding DnA in the early 2000s, Xu has focused on projects that engage with local communities, cultural heritage, and landscape, integrating architecture into existing social and ecological systems. Her Architectural Acupuncture approach—introduced in Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, in 2014—has been recognized by UN-Habitat as a model for strengthening urban-rural linkages. This method applies precise, small-scale interventions to underutilized spaces, aiming to revitalize local economies, preserve heritage, and reinforce community identity.
Beyond her practice, Xu Tiantian is active in academia, serving as a Visiting Professor at institutions including Yale University, Tsinghua University, the University of Hong Kong, and the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Mendrisio. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as MoMA (New York), the Venice Biennale, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).
Xu Tiantian has received numerous awards, including the 2022 Swiss Architectural Award, the 2023 Berlin Art Prize (Architecture), the Marcus Prize, the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the Holcim Gold Award for Asia-Pacific and the 2025 Wolf Prize for Architecture. In 2024, she was elected a Member of the Akademie der Künste (ADK) in Berlin.
Carmen Torres and Mariona Benedito
Mariona:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2000, with an Advanced Studies Diploma in Housing from the 40’s-60’s in Barcelona. She is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia since 2003, and her research studio has been recognized as a finalist among the best pedagogies of the XIII BIAU. She is Associate Professor and Coordinator at IE Architecture&Design school. Mariona has previously taught and directed workshops at institutions such as ETSALS URL, ETH-Zurich, Fundació UPC, BAU School of Design, Sam Fox School of Design at Washington University in Saint Louis, ESARQ-UIC, and ETSAB-UPC.
Co-founder of the Architecture Studio MIM-A in 2000, she has been working on her own solo practice since 2020. Her work has been awarded with relevant Prizes such as the ARQUIN-FAD Award 2020, New European Bauhaus Mention, Catalunya Construcció Prize, ARQUIN-FAD Award 2015, finalist for the XV BEAU and EU Mies van der Rohe Award and selected for the 7th European Landscape Biennal. Mariona has curated and designed exhibitions such as Arquitectura, Universitat i Territori at COAC (2000), Emergencias at COAC (2000), Maquina Climàtica (2025) and the EPISODE lecture series (2020-2024) at ETSAV-UPC.
Carmen:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2011. She is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at ETSAV UPC (2019 – to date), where her research studio was recognized as a finalist among the best pedagogies of the XIII BIAU. After three years working for various architectural practices in Paris, Carmen moved to Bangkok, Thailand, to teach as a studio professor at INDA Chulalongkorn University (2015-2018).
In 2019 she founded Sarquella Torres Architects in Banyoles with Pau Sarquella. The practice has been awarded in the ARQUIN-FAD International Award 2019, with a jury mention and the opinion prize for the Bang Nong Saeng Kindergarten (Thailand, 2018). Other recognitions include the International Bauwelt Prize: First Works 2015 (Germany), Arquia Próxima (2014, 2018, 2022), AJAC Awards (IX, XI, XII) and Europan17. They have also curated exhibitions, including Premis d’Arquitectura de les Comarques de Girona, INDA Parade (2018 Thailand), El Millor Disseny de l’Any (2019-2021), Arquitectura i Ciutat a Banyoles, and A través de les Pesqueres – L’exposició que no es va dur a terme (2023).
Critical Design Evaluators
NUNO MELO SOUSA, Architect, Principal at Nuno Melo Sousa; ANADIS GONZALEZ + FERNANDO MARTIRENA, Architects, Principals at Infraestudio; JORGE SOBEJANO, Architect, Principal at Burr Studio.
Critical Image Jury
Visual works such as films, photography, multimedia pieces, or visual conversations. This format also includes creative and experimental work.
Giovanna Borasi
Architect, editor, and curator, Giovanna Borasi joined the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in 2005 as Associate Director of Programs and has held subsequent positions as Curator of Contemporary Architecture (2011-13) and Chief Curator (2014-20) before becoming Director and Chief Curator in 2020. In this role she oversees the CCA’s curatorial trajectories and processes of institutional revaluation. Borasi’s work explores ways of doing architecture that challenge the conventional definition of the architect and that lie at the heart of the dialectic between societal and architectural change. She studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano (1996), worked as an editor of Lotus International (1998-2005) and Lotus Navigator (2000-04), and was Deputy Editor in Chief of Abitare (2011-13). Among Borasi’s recent major curatorial projects are the CCA exhibition and book A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention (2021), and a three-part documentary film series, What It Takes to Make a Home (2019), When We Live Alone (2021), and Where We Grow Older (2023), observing contemporary architecture’s reckoning with salient demographic changes. She regularly contributes to international architectural publications, workshops, university courses, committees, and symposia.
Louise Lemoine
Artist and filmmaker working at the crossroads of visual arts, non fiction cinema and architecture. For the past twenty years she has been collaborating with Ila Bêka as part of the duo Bêka & Lemoine. Together they experiment with new narrative and cinematic forms to explore how people experience, perceive, and relate to space from an emotional, social, and cultural standpoint. Together they made over 40 films among which Koolhaas Houselife, (2008), The Infinite Happiness (2015), Moriyama-San (2017), Rehab From Rehab (2023), Homo Urbanus (2017 – 2025). Their films are widely shown at renowned international film festivals and prominent art and architecture museums. In 2016, the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art in NY acquired the entire work of Bêka & Lemoine produced until that date for its permanent collection. Their films are also part of other important public and private art collections, such as MAXXI, The National Museum of 21st Century of Arts (Rome, Italy), CNAP, Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris, France), Fondazione Prada (Milan, Italy) among others.
Bêka & Lemoine are regularly invited to lecture in some important universities: GSD / Harvard University (USA), GSAPP / Columbia University (New-York, USA), AAP / Cornell University (USA), Bartlett School of Architecture / UCL (London, UK). In 2018 they have been laureate of Villa Kujoyama, French residency program for artists in Japan, and Ila Bêka has been laureate Italian Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. The have been invited as guest professors at GSAPP / Columbia University (New York) for the New York / Paris Program, at Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio (Switzerland) and at HEAD in Geneva (Switzerland). From 2019 to 2021, they have been teaching the design Studio Diploma 16 (M.Arch.) at AA Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. In 2023, they published the book « The Emotional Power of Space » (B&P ed.).
Maxime Delvaux
Maxime Delvaux is a Belgian architecture photographer based in Brussels. He works with different agencies in Europe. He also uses the image as a research and project tool, to deal with topics ranging from urbanism to architectural heritage in the context of exhibitions or publications. At the same time he teaches photography in Brussels and is often invited to architecture schools in Europe to give lectures and work on the relationship between photography and architecture during workshops.
Urtzi Grau
Urtzi Grau is an architect, an academic in the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, and the founder of the office Urtzi Grau / Fake Industries. He uses replicas —both as literal reproductions of pre-existing works and, in a sense, denoted in Romance languages, responses to previous statements—to produce architecture. His recent projects include the Biblioteca de Lorenteggio in Milan, the Murrin Bridge Preschool and the Bass Hill Community Centre, both in NSW, Australia, and the OE House in Tarragona. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Lisbon Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the Seoul Biennale, and it is part of the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Grau is the author the books Analogue Images (Perimeter, 2024) Folk Costumes Indo Pacific Air (APE, 2022), Better Together, Stories of Contemporary Documents (URO, 2022), and Learning to Live Together: Humans, Cars, and Kerbs in Solidarity (Bartlebooth, 2021) and holds a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Portland State University’s School of Architecture and a Cullinan Visiting Professorship at the Rice University School of Architecture.
Maria Giramé and Pau Sarquella
Maria Giramé:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2013. She is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at ETSALS-URL since 2020.
After working at David Chipperfield Architects in London, Maria co-founded Bajet Giramé in 2017 with Pau Bajet. The practice has been awarded the ARQUIN-FAD Award 2024 for the category of “City and Landscape” for the project Camping Alfacs and has been finalist for the AR Emerging Awards (UK) 2024 that recognises the 15 most relevant young architectural practices of the year. Other recognitions include the XI, XII, and XIII AJAC Awards as well as the Gold Award Best Architects 2018. Bajet Giramé has been acknowledged in international competitions, including the Lisbon Triennale, Eme3, and Europan, and has been awarded 1st prize in multiple national public competitions. Maria co-directed Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme No. 274 (Spring 2024) and co-curated the exhibition Unveiled Affinities: Quaderns in Europe at COAC Barcelona in 2019.
Pau Sarquella:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2011. He is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at EPS ARQ Girona University, since 2020, and at ETSALS-URL, since 2020. In 2015, he moved to Bangkok, Thailand, to teach as a studio professor at INDA Chulalongkorn University (2015-2018).
In 2019 he founded Sarquella Torres Architects in Banyoles with Carmen Torres. The practice has been awarded in the ARQUIN-FAD International Award 2019, with a jury mention and the opinion prize for the Bang Nong Saeng Kindergarten (Thailand, 2018). Other recognitions include the International Bauwelt Prize: First Works 2015 (Germany), Arquia Próxima (2014, 2018, 2022), AJAC Awards (IX, XI, XII) and Europan17. Pau was also nominated for the International Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2016. He co-founded Persiana Barcelona in 2014, a company that redesigned the traditional roller blind, which won the Silver Delta (ADI FAD) and the Arquia Próxima award in 2016. Pau and Carmen have curated and designed exhibitions such as Premis d’Arquitectura de les Comarques de Girona, INDA Parade (2018 Thailand), El Millor Disseny de l’Any (2019-2021), Arquitectura i Ciutat a Banyoles, and A través de les Pesqueres – L’exposició que no es va dur a terme (2023).
Critical Image Evaluators
Sonia Levy, associate lecturer in media studies, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art; Romea Muryn, co-founder and researcher at LOCUMENT; Zaickz Moz, visual artist and photographer, founder and creative director at MOS.
Critical Essay Jury
Original written works such as essays, academic articles, or research papers. Proposals should focus on critical analyses, theoretical discussions, written interviews, or research findings related to the field of design and spatial practice, maintaining a connection to the themes of the congress.
Keller Easterling
Keller Easterling is a designer, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is currently working on a book about land activism in the US after the Civil Rights Movement. Other books include, Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960.Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally. Her research and writing was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.
Lydia Kallipolity
Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics. She is the Director of the MS in Advanced Architectural Design and an Associate Professor at Columbia University [GSAPP] in New York. Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia (Actar, 2024) and the editor of EcoRedux, an issue of Architectural Design in 2010. Her work has been awarded, published and exhibited widely including the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Trienalle, the Onassis Cultural Center, the Lisbon Triennale, the Royal Academy of British Architects, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the London Design Museum. She is the principal of ANAcycle research thinktank, which has been named a leading innovator in sustainable design in Build’s awards, Design Educates Awards and the Architect’s Newspaper among others. Kallipoliti was Head Co-Curator (with Areti Markopoulou) of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale with the theme “Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism.” She holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from AUTh in Greece, a Master of Science (SMArchS) from MIT and a PhD from Princeton University.
Marina Otero
Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. She is a professor at GSAPP, Columbia University in New York, where she leads ‘Data Mourning’, an initiative focused on the intersection of digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. In 2022, Otero received the Wheelwright Prize from Harvard. Previously, Otero was the Director of the MA in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and the Research Director at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Otero has curated exhibitions such as Wet Dreams at Mayrit / CentroCentro (2024), Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains at the Municipal Gallery of Porto (2023), Work, Body, Leisure at the Netherlands Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2018), and After Belonging at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016). Otero is the author of In the Depths of the Cloud (2024). she has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others. Otero is a member of the Advisory Committee on Architecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Philip Ursprung
Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zürich where he served as Dean 2017- 2019. He studied art history in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin and taught at UdK Berlin, Columbia University, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, the Singapore ETH Center in Singapore and Cornell University. He curated Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the Mind at the CCA in Montreal (2002) and represented Switzerland with Karin Sander with the exhibition Neighbors at the 18th Architecture Biennale (2023). His most recent books are Joseph Beuys: Kunst Kapital Revolution (2021) and Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook (co-edited 2022).
Samia Henni
Samia Henni is an architect, a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty and War Zones, and the maker of various exhibitions, such as Psychocolonial Spaces (2025–), Performing Colonial Toxicity (2023–), Discreet Violence (2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (2021), and Housing Pharmacology (2020–2021). She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at several universities, including ETH Zurich, Princeton and Cornell University. She is currently teaching at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.
Raquel Rolnik
Architect and urban planner with more than 35 years of academic life, activism, and practical experience in planning, urban policies, and the housing issue. She is a Professor of Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo and the coordinator of the Research/Action Laboratory LabCidade and the Evictions Observatory.
Throughout her career, she has held various government positions, including Director of Planning at the Municipal Planning Secretariat of São Paulo (1989–1992) and National Secretary for Urban Programs at Brazil’s Ministry of Cities (2003–2007). She has also served as Urban Planning Coordinator at the Pólis Institute (1997–2002) and as a consultant for Brazilian and Latin American cities.
From 2008 to 2014, she was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, a role that provided her with a global perspective on housing issues. Some of the insights from this mandate are documented in her book Urban Warfare: Housing under the Empire of Finance (Editorial Descontrol, 2018).
In addition to this book, Raquel Rolnik has numerous publications and articles and maintains a blog and a Facebook page where she critically follows urban and housing policies in São Paulo, Brazil, and around the world.
Pau Bajet and Tomeu Ramis
Pau Bajet:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2013. Awarded a PhD in 2023 by The School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University granted by La Caixa Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies. He is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design at ETSAB since 2017, and a teacher in Social Logics at MIAD, ETSALS-URL since 2020.
After working at David Chipperfield Architects in London, he co-founded Bajet Giramé in 2017 with Maria Giramé. The practice has been awarded the ARQUIN-FAD Award 2024 for the category of “City and Landscape” for the project Camping Alfacs and has been finalist for the AR Emerging Awards (UK) 2024 that recognises the 15 most relevant young architectural practices of the year. Other recognitions include the XI, XII, and XIII AJAC Awards as well as the Gold Award Best Architects 2018. Bajet Giramé has been acknowledged in international competitions, including the Lisbon Triennale, Eme3, and Europan, and has been awarded 1st prize in multiple national public competitions. Pau co-directed Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme No. 274 (Spring 2024) and co-curated the exhibition Unveiled Affinities: Quaderns in Europe at COAC Barcelona in 2019.
Tomeu Ramis:
Architect graduated from ETSAB-UPC in 2002. He is an associate Professor of Architectural Design at Washington University, since 2024, and at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia since 2003. His research studio was finalist at the best pedagogies of the XIII BIAU. Tomeu has previously taught and directed workshops at institutions such as ETSALS, URL, ETH-Zurich, UdG University, IE University, the IASAP-Illinois, and ESARQ-UIC.
He co-founded FLEXOarquitectura in 2002, whose work has been widely exhibited and published internationally. His projects have earned recognition as finalists for the ENOR Awards (2011), CSCAE Awards (2020–2021), and XV BEAU (2021), and have been shortlisted for the FAD Awards (2011, 2020). His work was showcased at the Venice Biennale (2012, 2016) and nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2013.He has received several prestigious prizes, including 1st Prize at the Premis AJAC IX (2014), the Ciutat de Palma award (2012), the Menorca awards (2005-2008) and the Mallorca awards (2007-2010). His work includes designing the exhibition “2G 10 Years Competition” (Barcelona, Venice, Las Palmas, 2019), the installation “Memoria Cronotopica” at MODEL architecture Festival (Barcelona, 2023), and co-curating the EPISODE lecture series at ETSAV-UPC (2020-2024).
Critical Essay Evaluators
ALBA ARBOIX-ALIÒ, PhD, UB; ALDO SOLLAZZO, CEO, Noumena Group; ALEX MADEMOCHORITIS, PhD Candidate, Université Gustave Eiffel; ÁLVARO CLUA, PhD, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; AMADEU SANTACANA, PhD, ETSAB-UPC; ANASTASIOS FLOROS, University of Ioannina; ANDREA IORIO, PhD, Università Iuav di Venezia; ANNA SALA, PhD, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; ANTHI KOSMA, PhD, University of Thessaly; ARIANE HARRISON, PhD, Weitzman School, University of Pennsylvania; ARNAU PASCUAL CARRERAS, ETSAB, ETSALS & GTech; ASPASO KOUZOUPI, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly; AVROKOMI ZAVITSANOU, PhD, University of Ioannina; AYESHA GHOSH, Studio Ghosh; CALAYDE DAVEY, PhD, University of Pretoria; CAROLINA DAYER, PhD, Aarhus School of Architecture; CARSON CHAN; CATERINA VIGUERA, Caterina Viguera Studio; DANA CUPKOVA, Carnegie Mellon University; DE PETER YI, University of Cincinnati; DEEPIKA RAGHU, PhD, ETH Zurich; DESPOINA ZAVRAKA, PhD, Aristotle University Thessaloniki; DIEGO RODRÍGUEZ LOZANO, PhD, Tecnológico de Monterrey; DIMITRIOS GIANNISIS, University of Patras, Department of Architecture; DINORAH MARTÍNEZ SCHULTE, MANUFACTURA; EDUARD FERNÀNDEZ GARCIA, Self-office; EDUARDO RICO CARRANZA, PhD, Co-director Master in Advanced Urban Planning and Data Analytics; EDUARDO CHAMORRO MARTÍN, PhD, Tecnalia Research & Innovation; FABIOLA BÜCHELE, Studio NEiDA; FERRAN GRAU VALLDOSERA, PhD, ETSA URV (Spain); FIONA DEMEUR, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC); FIRAS SAFIEDDINE, Spatial Forces; GABRIEL HERNÁNDEZ, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; IACOPO NERI, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC); IGOR BRAGADO FERNÁNDEZ, IE University, Common Accounts; IONNA SYMEONIDOU, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Thessaly; JAKO-ALBERT NICE, PhD, Tshwane University of Technology, University of Pretoria; JAMES MARTIN, Ithirlann; JEANNE AUTRAN-EDORH, Studio NEiDA; JOAQUIM MORENO, PhD, University of Porto; JORDI VIVALDI, PhD, University of Innsbruck, UCL Bartlett; JOSÉ CARPIO-PINEDO, PhD, ETSAM – Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM); KATERINA RITZOULI, PhD, Democritus University of Thrace; KATHERINE LIAPI, PhD, University of Patras, Greece; KONSTANTINOS KOSTOPOULOS, National Technical University Athens; LAURA SOLSONA RAMO, Self-Office; LEON GUILLERMO STAINES DIAZ, PhD, Tecnológico de Monterrey; LEONIDAS KOUTSOUMPOS, PhD, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens; LUÍS RIBEIRO DA SILVA, PhD, Ursa Architecture; MACARENA DE LA VEGA LEÓN, PhD, ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; MANUEL SÁNCHEZ GARCÍA, PhD, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; MARIA KUPTSOVA, University of Innsbruck; MARIA RIUS RUIZ, PhD, Yale/Columbia; MARIA DE LA TORRE, PhD, Tec de Monterrey; MARIA BENI EZQUERRO, Polytechnic University of Catalonia; MARILENA SKAVARA, FABRICATE / Codica; MARIONA ALCARAZ CORBELLA, Synapcity Studio; MARTINA FABRÉ, UPC-DTHATC; NICO BOTES, PhD, University of Pretoria; NIL BRULLET, Director of Brullet de Luna Architecture / Teacher at UdG; NOELLE THE, Common Ground Landscapes; NURIA ORTIGOSA, PhD, Polytechnic University of Catalonia; ORIOL CARRASCO, PhD, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC); PABLO VILLALONGA, PhD, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; PETER FISHER, PhD, University of Sydney / University of New South Wales; PETER STEVENS, Previous University of Newcastle Australia, Tom Farrell Institute for the Environment; POLYXENI MANTZOU, PhD, University of Ioannina; RAÜL AVILLA-ROYO, PhD, ETSAB; SARA VIMA GRAU, PhD, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; SERGI SERRAT GUILLEN, Tulane University; SERGIO CASTILLO HISPÁN, PhD, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Granada, Universidad de Granada; SONSOLES VELA NAVARRO, Tulane University of Architecture; SORACHAI KORNKASEM, PhD, Chulalongkorn University; THEODORA PAPIDOU, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki; VASILEIOS NTOVROS, School of Architecture, Technical University of Crete, Greece; WARISARA SUDSWONG, INDA, Chulalongkorn University, Faculty of Architecture; XAVIER MARTÍN TOST, PhD, ETSA La Salle, Ramon Llull University; JUANA MARÍA SÁNCHEZ GÓMEZ, PhD, Profesora Titular, Universidad de Málaga; MONTSERRAT SOLANO-ROJO, PhD, Universidad de Granada; NIKOLAS PATSAVOS, University of Ioannina, Department of Architecture; PATRICK DONBECK, Chulalongkorn University.