Off Mugak/, a space for architecture that knows no limits

2025 July 1

The Basque Country International Architecture Biennial Mugak/, promoted by the Basque Government's Department of Housing and Urban Agenda, has successfully closed the third and final call for proposals for its fifth edition: Off Mugak/. This process, which reinforces the open and participatory nature of the biennial, has selected projects to be developed between October and November 2025 in Bilbao, San Sebastian, Hernani and Vitoria-Gasteiz.
The jury particularly valued the diversity, innovation and social commitment of the proposals received. The selected projects that will make up the Off Mugak/ 2025 programme are presented below:

1. Habitar comunitario: arquitectura rural desde la participación 
Promoted by Cooperación Comunitaria and Arquitectura Sin Fronteras Euskadi, this project combines a talk and a photographic exhibition to reflect on architecture as a social process linked to identity, territory and environmental justice. Through cases in rural communities in Mexico, self-building practices, traditional knowledge and participatory methodologies are highlighted. Extractivist models are confronted with proposals for the social production of habitat. The approach promotes sustainability, the use of local materials and territorial equity.

 

2. B(as)erri
The B(as)erri project explores the role of the Basque farmhouse in peri-urban contexts as a tool to reactivate territories in population decline. It promotes the reuse of rural architectural heritage as a path towards sustainability and territorial resilience. Beyond physical rehabilitation, it values elements such as self-sufficiency, community management and intergenerational coexistence. It proposes imagining a new model of rural life adapted to the present, with roots in the past and a utopian view of the future. B(as)erri is an opportunity to rethink the territory from the collective and the possible. It is promoted by Museum Cemento Rezola and K6 Gestión Cultural and has the support of Heidelberg Material, Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, Gordailua, Igartubeiti and Ganchegui Studio.

3. Arquitectura para el Mañana: Hacia una Construcción Sostenible
This conference, organised by the COAVN Gipuzkoa Sustainability Commission together with the Donostia Sustainability Forum, will feature the participation of Bruno Sauer, general director of the Green Building Council Spain, who will address the current challenges of sustainable architecture and present the future European criteria that will guide responsible building, encouraging interdisciplinary debate on the future of the built environment. The activity will discuss how the technical and ethical criteria of sustainability are necessary pillars for imagining and building new sustainable and habitable architectures.

4. Basamortua
Basamortua consists of a photographic exhibition and a lecture by the architect Oscar Cruz García (Cruz Atelier), which explores the desert as a territory where modern utopias - energetic, technological and territorial - are projected and fail. A critical reflection on the real and symbolic space of the desert. Through images of nearby technified landscapes, it questions how these empty territories become scenarios of failed promises. The project dialogues with the slogan ‘Castles in the air’, opening a reflection on the limits between technique, ecology and utopia in the contemporary construction of the landscape.

5. Arquitecturas invisibles: una conversación sobre el legado de Lilly Reich
This round table discussion will examine the legacy of Lilly Reich (1885-1947) in order to vindicate gender equality in architecture. A space for debate on authorship, visibility and historical recognition, with the participation of the director of the Museum of Architecture of the Technical University of Munich, Andres Lepik (Architekturmuseum der TUM); the chief curator of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, Gillermo Zuaznabar (Bilbao Museoa); and the lecturer at the Donostia-San Sebastián School of Architecture, Ula Iruretagoiena (EHU-UPV), in dialogue with Laura Martínez de Guereñu, author of the new book Lilly Reich in Barcelona: The Materialization of a Neglected Authorship (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2025) and professor at IE University School of Architecture & Design (IEU). The activity is promoted by the book's author Laura Martínez de Guereñu, IE University Architecture & Design and the Fundació Mies van Der Rohe.

 

6. Entretejidas en la frontera
The exhibition Entretejidas en la frontera, organised by the School of Architecture, Art and Design (EAAD) of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, is a spin-off of the exhibition "Entretejidas. Arquitectas mexicanas: pasados, presentes y futuros", scheduled for 2026. The border is seen not as a limit, but as a pretext to make visible networks and projects that are interwoven in the territory, highlighting how Mexican women architects, artists, designers and citizens have traced collective, sensitive and transformative actions on both sides of the line that separates (and connects) Mexico and the United States. Curatorial team: Alessandra Cireddu, Zaida Muxí Martínez, Sofía Valenzuela Fuentes, Igor Delgado Ojeda and Alexa Valenzuela. School of Architecture, EAAD, Tecnologico de Monterrey.

Photograph Mercado Mirador in Naco, Sonora, 2023. Architect Fernanda Canales

These six projects reflect the wealth of perspectives, disciplines and contexts that converge in Off Mugak/, confirming its vocation as a space open to new ways of thinking and practising architecture. From the critique of extractivism to the vindication of invisible memories, and including reflections on sustainability, territory and equity, the selected proposals share a common desire: to expand the margins of architecture in order to inhabit the present with awareness, imagination and commitment.

Off Mugak/ 2025 thus consolidates itself as a plural and committed programme that values architecture as a tool for social and cultural transformation. An invitation to build, from the collective, the castles in the air that we need today.