UIA World Congress of Architects 2026, Barcelona: Becoming
kb&co attended the World Congress of Architects 2026 in Barcelona this June, joining more than 10,000 participants and 250 speakers, to hear some of the latest architectural thinking geared to address current and future challenges and opportunities of a planet in transition and affected by the climate and social crisis. Organised around three themes, “Becoming More than Human,” “Becoming Circular” and “Becoming Embodied,” a series of presentations and conversations among architects, landscape designers, consultants and critical thinkers showed through their practice and theories how the built environment can be reshaped to create a diversity of more environmentally attuned habitats.
We resonated most with “Becoming More than Human,” which opened up a conversation about designing for more natural, rather than purely artificial, conditions. While the sessions demonstrated strong environmental design principles, we felt there was room to go further, to talk about how natural, healthier conditions can genuinely revolutionise design, bringing environmental quality into the conversation alongside energy performance.
This connects closely to our own philosophy: environmental design begins with people. At the core of this is Culture, the first of our 3Cs (Culture, Climate and Context) — observing how individuals live, interact, find comfort in their environments today, how they aspire to live tomorrow, and how their past informs both. It’s not about replicating traditional or vernacular forms, but about genuine engagement with the values, rituals and rhythms of everyday life. People rarely seek complexity; they seek the simple, familiar qualities that vernacular architecture has always offered, and it is in doing these simple things well, rather than chasing absolutism in environmental performance, that architecture becomes truly of its place. Humanising architecture starts here.
