Architecture or Perdition?

Our Paris-bound plane touched down in June in the middle of France’s hottest day on record. The first sleepless night after a sleepless flight held steady at 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the bedroom—fans whipped the air but didn’t cool it. Nighttime relief was a damp washcloth and five liters of Evian. Walloped, I walked the neighborhood at dawn as temperatures settled down to 80 degrees, the low that day. The occasional canicule—the dog days—were nothing new to the national psyche, yet heatwaves have started to appear more frequently and more intensely than ever before. Most of the French comedians I follow on Instagram offered bits about cooking filet mignon or eggs on their zinc roofs, wandering the aisles of the frozen food store Picard, or acting unusually unhinged in the streets. But, to my eye, everyone who passed my café table just seemed hot, slow and glum. Electric fans were hard to come by at this point in the heatwave, and portable climatiseurs—the size and shape of kitchen trash cans that most Americans would find cute and unserious—had flown off the shelves at area stores. If climate commerce is a zero-sum game, the winners this summer have been Chinese manufacturers and French retailers. If climate commentary is still considered a game at all, American media seemed giddy that France might finally sell its soul for air conditioning.

The weather broke by the time I left for Spain a week later—an auspicious start to the Union of International Architects (UIA) World Congress, held in Barcelona this year, whose sessions focused broadly on “Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition”—a stroke of optimism that plenary session hosts were eager to capture in their questions. Respondents seemed circumspect about defining the subthemes of what “becoming embodied” means, or “becoming interdependent” or “hyperconscious” or “attuned,” speaking agreeably if vaguely about research, cooperation and responsible materials.

More compelling were the showcases of design work and research in individual sessions. The architect Marina Tabassum spoke about working in what she calls a “locally grounded way” in the estuary waterscape of Bangladesh. “My understanding of architecture started from understanding vernaculars,” she said, introducing her firm’s first project, the Panigram Eco Resort, made of bamboo, clay and thatch, which employed a local labor force whose constructive layering techniques “imprinted” and enriched the architecture’s design—an ethos that other firms such as Shigeru Ban Architects (a featured speaker at UIA 2026), Kéré Architecture, Elemental, and Mass Design Group have embodied in their work, too.

Tabassum’s word “imprinted” is important here because it reverses architecture’s contribution to society to be responsive rather than prescriptive. And, why not? Prescriptions have led us to a building industry that’s contributed around 40% of global greenhouse gasses (GHG) to the atmosphere. That’s not the fault of architects per se—clients, owners, material pipelines and budgets have a lot to say about that number. But it is to say that it might be time to give responsiveness a try.

That was certainly the public message—even in private receptions. Velux, the window and skylight manufacturer, gathered invited architects in the belly of Antoni Gaudi’s Casa Milà—the Catalan architect’s final multifamily project—in a space converted from a parking garage to a lecture hall. The company has been promoting “Re:Living,” to help owners, architects and developers contemplate renovation as not just a sustainable practice but an affordable one, and invited Winy Maas from MVRDV, Xu Tiantian of DnA, and Arno Brandlhuber of B+ to talk about responsiveness as a driver of design. Their talks were wide-ranging, but Brandlhuber framed architecture’s new horizons as a practical matter of labor above all that might work best when it’s out of the hands of large firms.

“We have a renovation rate in Europe of 1%,” he said, a frustratingly low number that the European Commission’s “Renovation Wave” initiative aims to fix, “but renovation is not something you can do with BIM—it has to be done with local offices, it has to be smaller offices, and it has to be younger offices.”

What does “becoming” really mean?

If the global building industry were a country, it would be the second largest emitter of GHG after China, which releases 15 billion metric tons each year, according to the nonprofit Climate Analytics. If you believe the U.S. International Trade Administration, China’s building sector is shifting away from rapid expansion toward higher-quality, environmentally sustainable development, with government support for green construction creating new commercial opportunities for companies offering advanced, low-carbon building technologies. Looking beyond “becoming,” UIA’s cri de guerre, its next meeting will be in Beijing in 2029, and if the design profession manages by then to successfully “become” better at adapting to climate change, it will have to be done in China first in demonstrable ways—some say impossibly.

Still, a lot of the new building activity there is based on prefabricated building components, having a net positive effect on embodied carbon. The rub, at least for some architects working there, is the resulting homogeneity of its current and future architectural output, diluting the richness of rural construction methods and craft. John Lin, who teaches architecture at the University of Hong Kong and co-founded the research and design firm Rural Urban Framework, wondered if architects should consider themselves part of a field less obsessed with design and more focused on finding technical solutions that reflect what he calls “local cosmologies”—the beliefs and habits and rituals of any particular place. “These are things,” he says, “architects are already good at” —less of a mantra about being hyperconscious and attuned, and more of an occupational skill.

For UIA, they’re also pedagogical frameworks. L’Union Internationale des Architectes was founded in 1948 in Lausanne to stitch together the architects’ associations of individual countries—itself a postwar act of optimism. Today, UIA represents more than 100 countries and works beyond its original remit of cooperation and education, having taken up the mantle of sustainability. Over the past 25 years, UIA expanded programs and its global congresses in that direction, promoting climate-responsive, resource-efficient and socially inclusive architecture—embedding the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals into its ethical and professional guidelines and requiring the architects of its member countries to prioritize climate action. In 1996, UIA established a set of standards, the UIA/UNESCO Charter for Architectural Education, for minimum “competencies” for teaching and learning that include ethics and climate issues.

Extending John Lin’s claim that architects should be hyperconscious and attuned to local “cosmologies,” UIA hosted an exposition of its member countries concurrently with the general sessions. The Architects Council of Europe produced “Form Follows Transformation,” about two dozen successful examples of adaptive reuse with an explicit decarbonization agenda and, in most cases, strategies to improve biodiversity on site. Most individual countries featured award-winning projects and architects (Ireland and Slovakia being notable examples) although not always through a lens of sustainability. Busan, the coastal city in South Korea, produced an exhibit focused on density and urbanization, showcasing private and public development opportunities within its dramatic mountainside topography that might otherwise be eschewed by other cities in favor of more desirable flatlands—a language of adaptation that united the moral tenor that sustainability took in UIA’s plenaries and the pragmatic world of commerce that most architecture firms inhabit.

Indirectly but repeatedly, pragmatic solutions emerged as a theme elsewhere in Barcelona, driving an especially potent session about magazine publishing, which historically has focused on the contemporary architectural practices of those firms, as well as more laconic and provocative themes like ecology, community and identity. Jack Self, editor and publisher of UK-based Real Review, framed magazines as a post-digital lesson on adaptation. “We can’t compete on immediacy, but we can compete on context and sense-making,” he says, mirroring the value of architecture and design to approach thorny challenges (climate being just one). “The communication of architecture is not limited to drawing. There is discussion and there is discourse, and they’re essential to the communication of architecture.”

Carlo Menon, cofounder of the Brussels-based magazine and publishing house Accatonne, noted that print coverage in architecture has comfortably adapted to the digital world on the heels of the 2010s when publications with cash flow demands had to fold thanks to declining sales. Small print runs have helped keep costs low, but ironically digital media, itself, has pushed architectural coverage into arguably more useful directions. “Print magazines have been freed from the demands of immediacy in digital media,” says Menon, “and it’s allowed us to slow down and focus on issues.”

The broadcast coming out of UIA 2026 is certainly issues-based. Yet after the week’s earnest appeals to “becoming,” the Congress’s most convincing moments were also its least rhetorical. They came from architects who described listening before designing, adapting rather than prescribing and treating climate not as a theme but as the condition under which every project now exists. That may sound less visionary than the language of transformation, but it is probably more useful. Architecture has always been asked to imagine better futures. In a warming world, its credibility will depend less on what it promises to become than on whether it can measurably reduce harm while remaining faithful to the places and people it serves. Optimism, if it deserves a place at all, will have to be something architecture earns.