monosedimentby Eva Franch and Gilabert and the TAKK team – formed by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño – is one of the outstanding proposals of the World Congress of Architects of the UIA 2026 Barcelonaone of the industry’s largest global gatherings, which will bring together more than 10,000 participants and 250 speakers from around the world between June 28 and July 2.
The installation is part of the exhibition Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transitionwhich will transform the turbine room of the Sant Adrià de Besòs power plant—the emblematic building of Les Tres Xemeneies—into a space for experimentation, research and architectural exchange, expanding the contents of the congress with a 4,000 m² exhibition open to the public until July 19. The Congress will take place in different emblematic spaces of Barcelona and its metropolitan area.
monosediment is framed in the search for Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architecturesthe proposal presented by the Ramon Llull Institute in the Catalonia in Venice space of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, which had the advice of the curators of the UIA 2026 Barcelona and the support of the Official College of Architects of Catalonia (COAC). It brings to the fore the sediments immobilized by hydraulic infrastructures and agricultural activities, as fundamental agents for biodiversity, soil fertility and the balance of the carbon cycle. It focuses on clays, silts, sands, organic matter, pollutants, spores, eggs and biological traces that rivers carry into wetlands, estuaries and deltas.
Conceived as a liturgical prototype, the installation works both as an altar and as a laboratory. It presents the river as a living and complex system, shaped by geology, toxicity, bureaucracy, extraction, agriculture, energy, pollution, species loss, and multispecies survival. The work invites visitors to understand the river not as a line on a map, but as a living archive of material relations and a contested space for future coexistence.
Eva Franch and Gilabert and TAKK will participate in the opening plenary session Becoming More-Than-Human on June 29 at 09.00 where, together with Mark Wigley, Bas Smets, Dirk Sijmons + KK+N+S, Design Earth and Simulaa, they will discuss environmental responsibility, territorial governance and the role of architecture in planetary transformation.
