On Monday, 12 November, UIC Barcelona School of Architecture was visited by 185 architecture students from the University of the Republic of Uruguay.  For the visit, the School organised the conference “Architecture, city and territory. 21st century challenges”, which included participation from lecturers at the School and the director of Barcelona Regional, Josep Bohigas. 

The session kicked off with an institutional welcome from the director of UIC Barcelona School of Architecture, Josep Lluís i Ginovart, who emphasised in his speech the importance of being able to establish a cultural dialogue with architecture schools in Latin America. “We hope that today’s conference will open a gateway between our two universities and we will look at the possibility of working together to build bridges between our postgraduate programmes and teacher and student mobility”, the director of the School stated. After his address, Jimena Abraham and Serrana Robledo took the floor, lecturers at the university in Montevideo, who were accompanying the students on the world tour they are doing in their final year of their degree in Uruguay. 

UIC Barcelona lecturer, Miquel Lacasta, was the first speaker with a speech entitled “The question of collective housing in contemporary Europe”.  In his speech, he went into typological innovations, the relationship between collective housing and public policies and relevant aspects of the construction industry by taking examples from recent jobs he recently completed in Paris through his architecture studio, Archikubik.  

Afterwards it was the turn of the director of Barcelona Regional, the architect Josep Bohigas. He gave a speech entitled “Barcelona: from rebuilding to reconquest”, in which he gave an overview of the urban development of the Catalan capital since the Olympic Games in 1992. 

After a short lunch break, the lecturer Afonso Orciuoli focused his presentation on the latest developments in digital manufacturing being applied in construction and architectural design. 

The conference was closed by lecturer Tania Magro Huertas who spoke of the new cooperative and social architecture model by giving examples of architecture cooperatives in Spain and professional collectives fighting for a new way to understand housing in large cities.

The conference ended with the Uruguayan students visiting the digital manufacturing workshops in UIC Barcelona School of Architecture and a group photo taken in the Aula Magna.