IAAC Exhibition 2025: Prototyping the Future
A living lab of ideas, materials, and radical visions
On July 3rd, IAAC hosted Prototyping the Future, the 2025 edition of its 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:
- Bio-based and synthetic materials
- Self-sufficient and regenerative buildings
- Robotic and automated construction
- Data-driven urban planning
- AI-powered architectural intelligence
- Citizen-led participatory platforms
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.
At the heart of the exhibition stood a sequence of taglines—one for each master’s programme—that framed the intent behind the work. These were grouped within three thematic domains:
ARCHITECTURE, COMPUTATION, AI
- Master in Advanced Architecture: Crafting responsive architectures for a rapidly changing world
- Master in Design for Distributed Innovation: Reimagining production toward planetary resilience
- Master in Advanced Computation for Architecture and Design: Envisioning tomorrow’s habitats with today’s tools
- Master in Design for Emergent Futures: Exploring design’s frontiers by materializing alternative presents
- Master in AI for Architecture & the Built Environment: Pioneering AI applications for the built environment
DIGITAL FABRICATION & ROBOTICS
- Master in Robotics & Advanced Construction: Powering the next wave of sustainable, tech-driven construction
- Postgraduate in 3D Printing Architecture: Augmenting material research through robotic manufacturing
- FABRICADEMY: Synthesizing circularity, textiles, and bio-digital design
- FAB ACADEMY: Expanding fabrication through distributed education
REGENERATIVE BUILDINGS & ECOLOGICAL URBANISMS
- Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings & Biocities: Transforming local ecologies into regenerative buildings
- Master in Advanced Urban Planning & Data Analytics: Shaping data-driven and spatially just cities
- Maestría en Urbanismo Próximo: Rethinking urban development across Latin American landscapes
Together, these lines built a rhythm that defined the collective spirit of the exhibition:
We crafted, reimagined, envisioned, explored, pioneered, powered, augmented, synthesized, expanded, transformed, shaped, and rethought the future—one prototype at a time.
Visitors experienced how the next generation of architects, designers and technologists are reshaping the built environment—materially, digitally, and ecologically.
The exhibition remains open for visits until September 2025.