Starchitects Gather in Spain Seeking To Build Calm Out of Chaos

The evening began with a ballet of cranes. Six of them, towering over a decommissioned power station on this city’s edge, swayed in choreographed unison beneath a full strawberry moon as a woman’s voice recited poetry — fragments of Calderón de la Barca, Richard Sennett, and the Psalms — over a pulsing score. Then, before 5,000 spectators, one crane uncorked a bottle of cava and poured a glass for a venerable Swiss architect, who raised it in a toast.Welcome to the World Congress of Architects: the strangest, most seductive cultural event you’ve never heard of.Every three years, the International Union of Architects (UIA) — founded in 1948, representing professional bodies from more than 130 countries — convenes its global summit. This is architecture’s Cannes Film Festival: five days of stars, lectures, parties, prizes, and existential dread about the future of the planet and the art form. This year it returned to Barcelona, the first city to host it twice, drawing 10,000 delegates under the theme “Becoming: Architectures for a Planet in Transition.” As far as I could tell, I was the only US correspondent at the Congress.You could spot the delegates at fifty paces: dressed in black. A murder of crows, a conspiracy of ravens — call this a gloaming of architects, descending nightly on the tapas bars of Poblenou. The vibe mixed glamour with anxiety. Christina, a Boston engineering student I met between sessions, told me she was here to escape the Trump administration, but worried she would never make any money. This recalled the profession’s oldest truth: How do you make a small fortune as an architect? Start with a large one.Jun’ya Ishigami at the UIA World Congress of Architects. Sebastian DoggartThe ideas on stage, however, were anything but gloomy. Consider Junya Ishigami, whom I found in my hotel bar at 2am, nervously lubricated and mobbed by students. Mr. Ishigami is the Lionel Messi of the architecture world. For a single Chinese patron in Shandong province, this Japanese visionary has conjured an entire micro-city of marvels: a museum nearly a kilometer long that floats on an artificial lake, water lapping across its concrete floors; a kindergarten built like a forest, with secret spaces only children can enter; and the world’s most expensive chapel — a sliver of a building whose entrance is four feet wide and whose walls soar 150 feet toward a ribbon of open sky.At breakfast the next morning, I sat beside Smiljan Radić, the ash-bearded Chilean who won this year’s Pritzker Prize — architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel — and is still shellshocked by fame. He builds roofs held aloft by giant boulders, once exhibited inflatable pavilions held together with Scotch tape, and is currently designing Barcelona’s new Montjuïc exhibition hall — a vast glass-and-steel palace due in 2029.Princeton’s Beatriz Colomina, promoting “We the Bacteria,” the book she wrote with her husband Mark Wigley, argued that microbes, not humans, are the true architects of our buildings. She documented a house that hangs suspended, floating, leaving no footprint on the earth at all. Leonid Slonimskiy, a Russian architect from the collective Kosmos, showed barns clad in salvaged ship hulls and bricks made from soda cans packed with earth. One of the world’s most exciting new firms was Cuba’s infraestudio, whose founding partner Anadis González Márquez was, at 31, the youngest of the Congress’s speakers — all the more remarkable since infraestudio has already built eight of its designs, and since private architectural practice is illegal in Cuba.If imagination was the congress’s first currency, courage was its second. The buildings-and-construction sector generates roughly 37 percent of global emissions — more than transport, more than agriculture — and nobody here was allowed to forget it. Andrés Jaque, the Madrid-born dean of Columbia’s architecture school, delivered the week’s most electrifying lecture, aimed squarely at New York. The self-cleaning “ultraclear” glass that makes Hudson Yards gleam, he showed, depends on titanium extracted from the sands of Xholobeni, South Africa. Stripped of their heavy metal, these sands turn to fine dust that smothers the crops and lungs of the AmaMpondo people. On screen, a red African sandstorm exploded against the shining Manhattan skyline. Architects, Andrés Jaque said, must learn to intervene the way Alcoholics Anonymous does. The profession seemed addicted to shininess.Andrés Jaque at the UIA World Congress of Architects. Sebastian DoggartAt a party in Poblenou I met Eyal Weizman, the British-Israeli founder of Forensic Architecture, who practices “architecture in reverse” using cellphone cameras, eye-tracking software, and survivor memories to reconstruct crime scenes — a Syrian torture prison, a murder scene in a German internet café, the Gaza road where Palestinian Red Crescent workers were massacred in March 2025. He delivers the evidence to Amnesty International and international courts. Architecture here is not decoration; it is testimony.The week’s most urgently poignant moment came from Shigeru Ban, the Japanese Pritzker laureate known as the Robin Hood of architecture. Mr. Ban described three decades of building emergency shelters from paper tubes and beer crates, from the Rwandan genocide to the war in Ukraine. “People are not killed by earthquakes,” he lamented. “They die because of buildings.” Then he left early — flying to Venezuela, where twin earthquakes had just killed nearly 3,000 people, to begin erecting shelters with his Voluntary Architects’ Network. Everyone else talked about saving the planet; Ban went to try and protect it.Even the artificial-intelligence panels crackled. The Italian historian Mario Carpo dismissed generative AI as “a powerful critical tool but a terrible design tool” — an opinion poll, not an intellect, incapable of even reliable arithmetic — though he conceded, brutally, that if you earn your living making renderings, “you should find another job.”The UIA World Congress of Architects. Sebastian DoggartThe awards ceremony unfolded inside the Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s majestic cathedral, still crane-crowned but newly the tallest church on earth at 566 feet, in the centenary year of its creator’s death under a Barcelona tram. There, before dignitaries including Portugal’s president, the UIA’s Gold Medal was awarded to the great Portuguese minimalist Eduardo Souto de Moura, who confessed he never thinks about the future “because it always gets ahead of you.”Here’s what struck me hardest. That same week, Barcelona was raging with World Cup fever, courtesy of FIFA, which has a rap sheet of bribery allegations longer than a Gaudí construction schedule. The UIA is what FIFA should be: a genuinely global body, led by actual architects. Its outgoing president, Regina Gonthier, is a Swiss practitioner with three decades of unglamorous committee service and not a whisper of scandal, let alone phony “peace prizes” or rule exemptions for demagogues. The UIA charges its host cities collaboration rather than billions. The organizers I met, like 40-year-old Catalan architect Pau Sarquella, were paid a tiny wage but maintained passion and integrity. The story here wasn’t corruption, so much as the absence of it.A slogan at the UIA World Congress of Architects. Sebastian DoggartThe congress ended, the baton passed to Beijing for 2029, and the gloaming faded to black. On the final night, at a moonlit beach party, I thought of the crane ballet’s closing toast, written by Catalan sound-art duo Cabosanroque: “We have torn the very entrails of the world to pieces, in defiance of hard rock. We have split open its breast to obtain food and oil… Let us then raise a toast this evening, for when humankind is gone, weeds, insects, and bacteria will once more flourish in the corners of this ruined theatre.”The architects raised their glasses to their own extinction. Then they debated how to rebuild.

Starchitects Gather in Spain Seeking To Build Calm Out of Chaos

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