Collateral Events & Parallels

Europe’s built environment is at a crossroads: the interconnected crises of housing and climate change demand a paradigm shift. With between 85% and 95% of today’s buildings expected to remain standing in 2050, the urgency of renovating, adapting, and reusing the existing building stock has never been clearer.

The architecture and design sectors face a triple crisis: economic uncertainty, the urgency of decarbonization, and a shortage of affordable housing. Organized by C40 Cities, this session explores the so-called “Architect’s Blues”—the professional and ethical tension between climate and social responsibilities on the one hand, and harsh market constraints on the other.

Our exhibition centers on novel circular and sustainable innovations in architecture from Japan, with the CATALA-AN tea house — made from food-waste material — as its centerpiece. A Japanese tea master will be present, and the public will be able to take part in the tea ceremonies, as we have done at the Venice Biennale and Dubai Design Week.

Recent decades have witnessed the highest levels and fastest rates of construction development worldwide. Yet, the largest share of this record volume of construction is not designed by architects, and much of what has been built is of poor quality and therefore likely to have a short lifespan. In fact, the global production of the built environment reflects growing social inequalities, being neither sustainable nor appropriate.

Public architects will assemble in Barcelona on 1 July for Finding Common Ground – Public Architects in Dialogue, a focused exchange on architectural quality, climate resilient planning and regenerative design. Designed to turn parallel conversations into collective action, the event is co-hosted by EIT Culture & Creativity and the World Cities Culture Forum, as part of the UIA World Congress of Architects Barcelona 2026.

This side event aims to foster exchange between Chinese and Spanish experts in the fields of built heritage conservation and artificial intelligence. Both fields are experiencing significant recent developments in areas such as documentation; diagnosis and preventive conservation; restoration; management and dissemination; as well as risk assessment and prevention.

The Laboratori d’Urbanisme de Barcelona (LUB), a research group at ETSAB-Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, presents a series of complementary guided tours designed to explore the layers that shape everyday Barcelona. Each tour will be led by a member of the LUB and will feature an exclusive, unpublished thematic map from the “Barcelona en mapas” collection. This initiative is free of charge and is supported by La Casa de la Arquitectura (Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda).

Architects, not Architecture (AnA) and VELUX join forces for a special evening in Barcelona focused on the reuse and transformation of buildings. The world-renowned event series brings a unique format where three international architects—Winy Maas (MVRDV), Xu Tiantian (DnA), and Arno Brandlhuber (bplus.xyz)—are invited to talk about their paths, major influences, and key career moments.

Atlas Re-Building proposes a relational gesture: bringing architectural photographs of buildings undergoing rehabilitation into dialogue with works by contemporary artists from the Catalan and Spanish contexts, mainly sculptures and installations, in order to reveal shared approaches, languages, and interests between construction practice and artistic practice.

The Value of Being an Architect is a cultural, academic, and professional initiative that brings together prominent Dominican architects in the city of Barcelona to reflect on how architecture has enabled the leadership of transformative spaces within society. Over the course of three days, Dominican professionals will share experiences in fields such as heritage, urban planning, communication, education, research, cultural diplomacy, and innovation.

Exhibition and future archive of more than 110 works presented to date by former resident architecture students who were not originally from Barcelona, but who made Barcelona their city—a place to study, to learn architecture, and to become architects.

This project “Gaudí: Windows on the Future” is to contribute to world architectural culture through comprehensively disseminating research and knowledge pertaining to Gaudí-designed openings.

As part of Barcelona 2026 World Capital of Architecture and the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026, this forum forms part of the public programme accompanying the exhibition REGENERATIONS: China and Spain in the Mirror, on view until 31 July.

This lecture inaugurates the series “Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Architecture: The Legacies of Ignasi Solà-Morales”, which will take place across several institutions in Barcelona

The House of Encountering the Other is an architectural structure composed of rooms built with fertile soil bags and native Mediterranean seeds. It poses the following question: Can architecture facilitate encounters between bodies, cultures, species, and narratives in a world marked by fragmentation?

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Perpetual Movement of the Wall explores the artist’s evolution throughout the 1950s through the lens of exhibition formats and contexts, as well as gallery display strategies, circulation in publications, and reception by critics and the public. Continuing the research initiated in 2025 with the exhibition Antoni Tàpies. The Imagination of the World, which focused on the artist’s early years of production, this project offers new perspectives on a period of significant transformation in Tàpies’s practice, with the aim of viewing his work from different vantage points.

‘Cities and Pavilions’ showcases the recent works of pioneering English architect Sir Peter Cook, director of Peter Cook Studio. It features the a series of recent drawings of future cities and also two built pavilions. The one being the Play Pavilion (2025), commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and the Lego Group and the Drawing Studio for the Arts University Bournemouth (2016).