BUILDING THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUTEC ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE

Contemporary architecture, or rather the best of contemporary architecture, is changing the face and the mutable reality of the cities of today. The process is a symbiotic one of reciprocal need between architecture and the city. How the city is seen and what involvement it has in cultural life have an impact on the thrust behind landmark architectural designs, and design’s own involvement in the city provides different thrusts that architecture can turn to its advantage. City and architecture, architecture and city, are now inseparable.

In the construction of the globalized twenty-first-century megacity, more and more factors traceable to emulation and interaction are coming into play. These factors assign  landmark architectural designs a key role, as the trigger or catalyst of processes of environmental trans-formation and instant recognition of contemporaneousness in our global communication hyper-networks.

Thanks to contemporary supertechnology, the dreams spawned by an architect’s imagination can be brought to life. The new metacity of today, with its scatter focus, has firmly embraced the dream of eventually transforming itself into a globalized common space where the new icons of today’s cutting-edge architecture will be forged.

The new boundaries between the construction of individual architectural designs and the construction of entire cities are blurring and merging; new shapes of buildings are reinforcing the image, the identity and the nature of pre-existing cities, recognising, through affinity or through contrast, the value of a city’s urban fabric in dizzying, non-stop transformation. We speed through the planetary megacities that we inhabit, and as we do our cities pick out new opportunities, create new places and non-places; their architectures interpret the enormous weight of the received city, and architecture and city redefine one another, enrich one another, bounce off one another.

In this interplay of scaleless scales or presences that vault beyond the physical limits of their material being, contemporary construction technology has an immense range of options to offer. With this technology, the city’s body is modified and transformed. Today’s constantly mutating metacities are thus made over into thrilling, ever-changing, ever-readaptable cyborg cities, while at the same time, through the construction of advanced buildings, inventive new systems of construction are created at the urban and multi-territory scale.

The SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUTEC ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE
BUILDING THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
is a part of CONSTRUTEC, the construction sector’s leading trade fair, which is held at the IFEMA fairgrounds in Madrid. The conference is also specially scheduled to coincide with Architecture Week, a yearly event organised by the COAM Architecture Foundation of the Official Professional Association of Architects of Madrid.

The point of this conference is to arouse interest and bring together the architecture and construction professionals who are creating architecture in and for the twenty-first century. It is one of the highlights of Architecture Week.

BUILDING THE CITY OF THE FUTURE
SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUTEC ARCHITECTURE CONFERENCE
A+B

A. SPEAKERS

By examining the work of a selection of architects who reflect the whole international architectural scene, we can see how the design/city system we are talking about is looked at globally. For that we will have six teams of architects who will be sharing their work with us. Every day three master lectures will be given, divided into morning and afternoon sessions.

B. ACTIVE DISCUSSIONS