Valencia International Biennial of Research in Architecture

Architecture schools in developed countries are educating more architects than ever. After graduation, a vast, diverse and exciting labor market awaits them. The traditional professional practice in architecture that we used to know was configured after the armed conflicts in the first half of the twentieth century. This model is being nowadays substantially complemented by new professional tasks as a result of the period of reflection propitiated by the economic circumstances of the beginning of the present century. Contemporary architects are becoming aware of which jobs they can undertake beyond the habitual ones, of how society should change in order to avoid committing the same mistakes from the past, and especially of architecture’s leadership in these changes.

History shows that architecture has always emerged strengthened from any crisis period. Frequently, architects knew not only how to react to the new circumstances but also how to promote changes from the architectural production itself, and from the underpinning values and reflections that preceded this architectural production or that even are developed simultaneously in an experimental process which never ends.

Our schools, faculties and departments have been devoted until recently almost exclusively to education. But now, an awareness of the importance of developing research tasks in the same way that other humanistic and scientific disciplines have done has been raised. We have now learnt that architecture is the right discipline for providing answers to a variety of demands put forward by today’s society. And it is also the right discipline for posing questions that make society progress in a faster, adequate, fair and even unexpected manner.

The first edition of the Valencia International Biennial of Research in Architecture aspires to be a meeting point of researchers from all over the world and from any kind of discipline, but always linked to architecture and human habitat, whose works react to the current demands in an attempt to provide responses or that pose new questions in order to design the future.

Ivan Cabrera i Fausto
ETSA-UPV Director | Conference Chair