The 2025 Latin American Architecture Biennial (BAL) convened in Pamplona from September 23-26, bringing together emerging studios and established voices from across the continent. This year's edition distinguished itself through the remarkable diversity and depth of its participants, showcasing projects of striking formal and conceptual richness developed by young yet notably mature architectural offices. Together, these presentations reflected the vitality of contemporary Latin American architecture - thoughtful, inventive, and deeply conscious of its contextual surroundings.
The Biennial revealed a fundamental tension defining Latin American architecture today: the conflict between feeling powerless against overwhelming urban forces and the critical need to maintain the capacity to envision the unbuilt - the horizon for the future. From this tension, a new generation of architects is emerging who reject promises of comprehensive solutions, instead focusing on creating openings of possibility within precarious conditions while leveraging the continent's immense natural, cultural, and indigenous heritage that continues to shape its identity.
BAL 2025 provided a valuable reminder that architectural discipline remains relevant not when it attempts to control urban destiny, but when it persists in imagining possible spaces within seemingly impossible contexts. Martín Benavidez situated his presentation within historical continuity by referencing the 1951 São Paulo Biennial, when figures like Max Bill and Oscar Niemeyer debated how modern architecture could participate in constructing a new postwar world. This historical reference illuminated a striking contrast with today's circumstances.
In the second half of the twentieth century, designing cities meant designing modernity itself - architecture was conceived as cultural vanguard and driver of urban transformation. However, seventy-five years later, the landscape has fundamentally changed. As Benavidez observed, Latin American architects have transitioned from designing entire cities and playing central roles in reshaping modern states to working, at best, as decorators of public space, and in many cases, as set designers for bourgeois family life.
Benavidez's analysis exposed a critical reality: while the modern movement projected the continent as a promise of emancipation, contemporary architecture faces fragmented cities marked by informality and inequality. The "magnificent beast," as he termed it, has escaped the categories of the modern project, creating a scenario no longer under professional control. Today's postwar scenario seems to reappear under new conditions, with war now broadcast in real time, while the future remains constrained by climate crisis, political tensions, and social inequality.
The discussion expanded toward Central America, where voices from the isthmus and those who have studied it extensively broadened the debate on informality and urban inequality. Spanish researcher José Ramón Moreno recalled that following colonization, Latin American cities were profoundly diminished in their urban, linguistic, and religious dimensions. His intervention posed a question touching a central nerve: "Is that informal mass a tragedy?" This query challenges practitioners to reconsider informality not as exception or failure, but as the dominant form of urbanization across much of the continent.
Costa Rican architect Michael Smith questioned the very rhetoric of sustainability, asking "Why sustain what cannot be sustained?" His critique challenges the term itself, suggesting it no longer adequately addresses present urgencies. Smith proposed a shift toward spatial justice and regeneration, emphasizing that "most people on the planet live without architecture." Both interventions destabilized established certainties, revealing what was once conceived as possible order now appears as heterogeneous and complex territory where disciplinary legitimacy must be reconstructed amid uncertainty.
Costa Rica's participation as guest country of honor offered concrete lessons in tropical architecture. The work and research of Bruno Stagno and Ximena Ugarte demonstrated that inhabiting the tropics requires understanding climate and culture while transforming these conditions into design material. They argued that tropical architecture represents not a style but an attitude toward place, where comfort can be achieved through design alone and sustainability emerges naturally through bioclimatic architecture grounded in common sense.
Architectural elements like overhangs, sloped roofs, shaded corridors, and integrated vegetation respond not only to climate but also to cultural and sensory structures defining tropical Latin American architecture. Each design decision enables harmony between inhabitants, space, and nature when architecture collaborates with the vital force of coastal tropics. Costa Rica currently protects approximately 25 percent of its territory through national parks, biological reserves, and wildlife refuges - a protection viewed not as burden but as context placing architecture and urban development within exceptional environmental awareness.
Designing in a country where nature predominates means recognizing its intrinsic value, engaging in dialogue with landscapes and ecosystems, and acknowledging that each intervention has potential to either enrich or disturb natural settings. Building upon this legacy, the new generation of Costa Rican architects participating in the Biennial has elevated the practice to new levels. Starting from bioclimatic architecture knowledge and sensitive site relationships, they study and research complex natural environment systems, recognizing essential needs and proposing adaptive interventions.
Constructed architecture emerges as mediation act - accompanying, regenerating, and protecting ecological processes, even suggesting abstention from building when the best territorial contribution involves helping places strengthen and recover. The Biennial revealed how young studios assume mediator roles, advising potential actors to avoid unnecessary impacts while redirecting and rethinking the design act itself, leaving the powerful message that truest work is not always visible.
Amid precarious conditions and disciplinary limits, what persists is the capacity to design as active thought and action - a practice that imagines in order to transform. Thinking about architecture remains a vital act through reflection, debate, and revision of its own tools, keeping the discipline alive and relevant. Latin American architecture has survived the loss of modern centrality, disillusionment of utopias, and exhaustion of sustainability as promise. Its strength lies in the persistence of those who continue thinking, designing, and acting even amid uncertainty.
To design in this context means opening spaces of possibility, questioning the present, and testing responses born from critical imagination. This lucid and committed gesture defines the power of contemporary practice - an imagination that assumes responsibility, sustains thought, and drives action. Latin American architecture is ultimately defined by what it dares to think and propose for discussion, by its capacity to open fissures of reflection and action. Within those fissures, in that will to review, propose, and persist, both life and disciplinary practice find their place, making design in Latin America an act of lucidity and hope while insisting on the possibility of a better future.
