The biggest World Congress of Architects of all times

After more than 70 years of World Congresses of Architects, in 2020 it was finally the time for Brazil to organize it. Every 3 years one of the member sections is elected to organize the event promoted by the International Union of Architects since 1948. Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the event in a high level dispute with Paris and Melbourne.

That was the beginning of years of anticipation, excitement and a lot of collective work to build up what we, as Brazilians, considered to be the ultimate chance to create a dialogue with society to make everyone understand the importance of our professional field.

A Theme That Anticipated Global Challenges

The event was prepared with a theme that seemed to summarize the current global challenges: “All the Worlds. Just One World. Architecture 21.” The activities would be organized under 4 tracks: Diversity & Mixture; Weaknesses & Inequalities; Changes & Emergencies; and Transience & Flows.

The Pandemic and the First Postponement in History

When the time has come, in 2020, few months before the big opening, the unimaginable happened and showed how prophetic this theme and tracks were. Suddenly, the whole world stopped because of an invisible enemy, that threatened our lives and the whole functioning of our cities.

Covid-19 suspended all activities around the world, specially the ones that would demand a big flow of people travelling across the globe. After a big shock, the organization of UIA2020RIO was forced to announce that, for the first time in history, the World Congress of Architects would need to be postponed to the following year.

Reinventing the Congress: From In-Person to Hybrid Format

Believing that the postponing would be more than enough for the World to go back to “normal”, we started working on the preparations for the UIA2021RIO as if the only difference would be the year of its realization. As time passed by, with the acceleration of the digitalization process of everything in life, we realized that digital activities could substitute the preparatory local events that needed to be interrupted by the new reality. In that point, a new Congress with a hybrid format was born.

The original 5 days of Congress were transformed in an extended event, with 5 months of activities: 4 months with digital events, with the participation of architects from the whole world even before they could travel to Rio, and 5 days in July with an in-person celebration of the overcoming of those tough times, and an important live discussion about how would this collective trauma affect forever our cities and our way of dealing with our planet.

A Second Wave and the Shift to a Fully Digital Event

But fate would once again put the organization under a lot of pressure when a second wave of the pandemic, in the beginning of 2021, showed that the challenging times would not be over so early. Just after the beginning of the digital activities, it became clear that Rio de Janeiro wouldn’t have the conditions to receive the estimated 15.000 people with the rise of the cases in the city and the new oversaturation of local hospitals.

It was a new shock and once again we needed to decide, together with the board of UIA, what to do with the responsibility that was upon our shoulders. But “we are Brazilians and therefore we never give up”, as states a very famous local saying.

The bigger the challenges became, the clearer became the signs that we were capable of realizing what we proposed to, no matter the conditions. The digital activities, distributed from March to June, with each month focusing in one of the prophetic tracks, became a huge success, with the participation of architects from all over the World and it became clear that even if the Congress needed to be fully organized in a digital format, we would have the most representative Congress of all times, with a very wide reflection in an essential moment in history, when we definitely needed to discuss, together with professionals from every corner of the globe, what do we need to make different to save our cities from this reality that our current way of living brought us to.

The Congress became fully digital and this was precisely what made it possible to transform it not only in the most relevant of all times, but also the biggest and the most representative, with so many architects that would certainly not be able to travel to Brazil in a “normal” situation.

The Largest and Most Representative Congress Ever Held

To be precise, 88.677 professionals and students from 188 Countries of all continents. The 8 keynote speakers became 20 and an incredible number of 540 lecturers were part of this huge collective international collaboration, added by 380 presenters of selected papers and projects, in more than 500 hours of activities simultaneously translated to 5 languages in 7 parallel virtual stages: Architalks; Public Health; Dialogues with Society; Rio Charter; UIA Stage; Expo UIA2021RIO; and the World Stage.

All that was recorded and made available to the participants during the next 2 years, until the next World Congress in Copenhagen, in 2023.

From Spectacular Architecture to Vernacular Intelligence

It was priceless to watch together with all these people the most relevant international architects drawing a clear line between the “spectacular architecture” on the centre of the attention in the last decades and the rising focus in the “vernacular architecture” of each place, bringing hope for a different relation with our cities in the future.

The German Architect Anna Herringer stated that it is not form that follows function, nor function that follows form, but, as her beautiful work with bio architecture shows, “Form follows Love”. The iconic architect from Burkina Faso Francis Keré presented the revolution he has been leading in his home country and continent with local materials and traditions meeting international knowledge and transforming cities with the irreplaceable collaboration of local population, with low technology, high creativity and traditional techniques.

With similar perspectives we learned a lot from architects like the Brazilian/French Elizabeth Portzamparc, the Japanese Kengo Kuma, the Dutch Francine Houben, the North-American Jeanne Gang, the Indonesian Andra Matin, the Portuguese Eduardo Souto de Moura and Alvaro Siza, the Chinese Li Xiaodong and Zhang Li, the Mexican Tatiana Bilbao, the Italian Stefano Boeri, the Pakistani Marina Tabassun, the Paraguayan Solano Benitez and the Brazilians Angelo Bucci and Carla Juaçaba.

They shared their experiences and showed the World that there is hope and that we are able, together, to create an alternative future for our cities. That hope is intimate to the vernacular knowledge that each corner of this world has built for centuries, in harmony with local weather conditions and culture. The Catalan Pritzker Prize winner office RCR, represented by founding partners Carme Pigem and Rafael Aranda made a statement that might summarize what was said and shown during the whole congress and that is clear in their amazing architecture: dreams are possible!

Lessons Learned: The Future of World Congresses

We learned so many other lessons during this Congress, they would never fit in an article. But maybe 2 of them deserve their place in this publication: the first one is that World Congresses will never be the same anymore. When we were forced to migrate part - and then the full congress - to a digital format, we learned that any World Congress from now on will need to create digital activities or broadcast live in-person activities to release the access to an immense amount of people that wouldn’t be able to be all together in one city.

On the other hand, we also learned how much we miss, in these difficult times for humanity, the socialization between pairs from the whole World. A Hybrid reality that gives space for the best of these 2 universes is still to be created. And we are very anxious to follow what will the Danish team develop in this history still to be written. The moments of anticipation are back! Our European pairs can count on us for any help in our reach. And let UIA2023CPH come! See you in Copenhagen!