11th Advanced Architecture Contest

This new edition invites architects, designers, and visionaries from around the world to rethink the near future of cities and architecture at a time when humanity faces unprecedented challenges related to urban life: climate change, housing crises, social inequalities, and the emergence of artificial intelligence.

Description
This new edition invites architects, designers, and visionaries from around the world to rethink the near future of cities and architecture at a time when humanity faces unprecedented challenges related to urban life: climate change, housing crises, social inequalities, and the emergence of artificial intelligence.
The contest aims to explore how the city --as a living and evolving organism-- can reinvent itself over the next 25 years. Participants are encouraged to imagine new urban models, systems, and experiences that respond to these challenges through design, technology, and collective imagination.
Projects may approach the topic through utopian, dystopian, or realistic perspectives, speculating on how the built environment, its governance, and its inhabitants will transform by the year 2051.
While the competition focuses on Barcelona --the city where the term urbanism was first coined-- participants may also address any other city in the world, as long as their proposals offer ideas and strategies that could be applicable to Barcelona's future. The contest thus invites a global conversation about how architecture can shape more resilient, inclusive, and intelligent urban environments.
Proposals may include designs and ideas related to architecture, urban planning, landscape design, artificial intelligence applied to cities, interaction design, or any other practice or technique that uses design as a means to envision new futures for Barcelona and other cities around the world.
Competition Objective
Participants are invited to propose design visions that reimagine the architecture and cities of the future across multiple scales --from the building to the neighborhood, the metropolis, and the planet. Projects should integrate spatial, technological, ecological, and social dimensions, offering strategies that address the following challenges:
1. Climate and Decarbonization
2. Housing and Urban Inclusion
3. Digital Intelligence
4. Ecological Metabolisms
5. Public Life and Civic Imagination

Jury
See https://advancedarchitecturecontest.org/jury/

Prize
1st Prize: 3,000 € + Master at IAAC (value aprox 19.875,00 €)
2nd Prize: 2,000 € + Master at IAAC (value aprox 19.875,00 €)
3rd Prize: 1,000 € + Master at IAAC (value aprox 19.875,00 €)

Entry Fee
None

Timetable
Results Announcement: March 1st 2026
Exhibition and Publication: June 2026

Links
Past winners

Organizer
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia

Official Website