Prototyping the Future 2025 IAAC

On July 3rd I took part in Prototyping the Future exhibition at IAACs annual academic exhibition.

Held across the two floors of IAAC’s Atelier Building in the heart of Barcelona’s 22@ district, the exhibition brought together over 100 research-based prototypes developed by students from twelve master’s programmes. These projects explored cutting-edge intersections between architecture, computation, robotics, urban systems, and ecological design.

The event marked the culmination of a year of experimentation and served as a living archive of IAAC’s academic ethos: building knowledge through making. It also featured the IAAC Academic Awards Ceremony, where outstanding projects from each master’s programme were recognised by a jury of faculty and invited experts.

What did it mean to prototype the future in 2025? At IAAC, it means building visions into matter, challenging the conventions of design, and confronting urgent questions through hands-on research. The exhibition invited visitors into a vibrant lab of architectural exploration. Each prototype was a fragment of a broader ecosystem of inquiry and transformation.

The works on display spanned themes such as:

Each of these directions embodied the IAAC ethos: thinking through making, and making as a way to rethink. The projects were distributed throughout the building, creating a polyphonic narrative of what architecture can be when it becomes a tool for systemic transformation.

Master in Design for Distributed Innovation: Reimagining production toward planetary resilience

Text source: https://iaac.net/iaac-exhibition-2025-recap/