Barcelona is preparing to be the World Capital of Architecture. More than 1,500 activities will make architecture breathable in the city and its neighborhoods during 2026, which will become an opportunity to highlight its importance. "Being a capital makes no sense if there is no legacy," warned Barcelona's Chief Architect, Maria Buhigas, along with architect and urban planner Daniel Mòdol, in a new session of the Moments Estel·lars cycle.
"The orientation we have given to 2026 is informative. It is not only about explaining Barcelona's architecture, but also about explaining that architecture, along with urban planning and landscaping, are disciplines that shape the space that surrounds us every day, and we are not aware of it," added Buhigas during the session, organized by The New Barcelona Post at Casa Seat and led by journalist and UPF-BSM professor Toni Aira. The meeting —the last of 2025 within the cycle— had the support of Casa Seat, Barcelona Global and Must Media Group.
In this sense, Buhigas has claimed the importance of everyday architecture: "95% of the space that surrounds us is ordinary architecture, and that does not make it less valuable. We want to use 2026 to explain how these disciplines provide solutions to challenges such as housing and climate change," added the architect and urban planner. Thus, she advocates for Barcelona to act as a "laboratory" from which to explain this role of architecture in the face of global challenges, she said in a session presented by the general director of Barcelona Global, Mercè Conesa, and the editor of The New Barcelona Post, Guillem Carol.
In this defense of the everyday, Mòdol added that "everyday life and ordinary architecture have a very important weight in the trajectory of this city." In fact, he has placed its valorization as a challenge to face as the future Capital of Architecture. And to this challenge, he added "homework," starting by addressing "how we take care of this city in which 70% of the buildings are more than 70 years old." Buhigas has joined this commitment to rehabilitation, because "the game board is built, but we have to keep adapting it, it is never finished." In this process, the architect contemplates continuing to advance in the "domestication of infrastructures," transforming large urban roads so that they interact better with the city and its citizens.
"Sometimes we have excessively sophisticated debates, and gratuitously sophisticated, when it's important to go back to basics," Buhigas defended, especially in a context where the urban environment in which one out of four people worldwide reside does not meet the characteristics that in Barcelona would be attributed to an urban environment as such: "Sometimes we get lost talking about the sex of angels."
Mòdol focused on one of the open debates in the city: the 30% reservation for protected housing in new constructions and major rehabilitations. "It wasn't done to achieve 30% affordable housing, but to prevent speculation in housing, and what it has done is slow down rehabilitation throughout the city," he criticized. "For too many years, the City Council has been regulating to slow things down," and he opened another front: the elimination of tourist apartments by 2028. "Are they really the problem? Instead of prohibiting certain activities, why don't we consider where to place them?" asked the former urban planning councilor, between 2015 and 2019.
"The city must be proactive, not strictly regulatory," Mòdol emphasized, while Buhigas recalled that "there is a will to change the 30%, but majorities that do not exist now are needed." To the question of what regulations they would change, Mòdol insisted on the importance of proactivity: "What I would change is the attitude; the city must be proactive, and if you are always reacting, you will never be at the right time."
Buhigas took up the gauntlet and, without going into details, announced that the city's program as World Capital of Architecture will include an exhibition that will depict Barcelona in 2035: "In this proactive line, we want the Barcelona of 2035 to become a reality."
Also within the program, Buhigas highlighted another "unpretentious" exhibition that aims to explain the city from three qualities: diverse, intense, and complex. "With this exhibition, I would like to invite citizens to let themselves be surprised by changing the point of view we usually perceive of this city."
In addition to this awareness of the importance of architecture through initiatives such as these exhibitions, being World Capital of Architecture will also leave a more visible legacy, which will begin with the commitment to transform party walls into facades, ceasing to be large anodyne walls to fill them with life with vegetation, openings and architecture: "We will do a lot of dissemination, we want to die of success with this program." It will be one of the hallmarks that Barcelona will imprint on the capital: "It will be a bit like with the Olympics; we will have the capacity to translate into Barcelona's style what it means to be World Capital of Architecture."