Conference 2026

Too much? What is just enough?

May 21 & 22, 10.00-18.00 | Grando, Obala 10, Portorož

The BIG SEE Conference is where architecture and design pause – and take responsibility. In a time of excess, acceleration and constant production, it asks a simple but uncomfortable question: Too much? What is just enough? This is not a conference about trends. It is for architects, designers and entrepreneurs who feel that decisions today carry more weight than ever – socially, environmentally, culturally and economically. For those who know that clarity has become a professional skill, and measure a competitive advantage. The programme unfolds through four essential themes – Relevance, Urban Humanity, The Great Reduction, Big, and Measure – each curated by an independent voice with a distinct worldview. Curators invite speakers who don’t repeat consensus, but challenge it. Established and emerging practitioners are intentionally paired to create friction, contrast and real conversation – not polite agreement. You won’t leave with ready-made formulas. You will leave with sharper judgment, renewed perspective and language for decisions you already know you must make – in your practice, your business and your role in society.

Architecture and Relevance

May 21, 10.00-12.15

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Has architecture moved from serving life to serving the eye? Or further still, from serving the human to serving the machine? In an age where algorithms shape our attention and AI promises to design our buildings, what architects actually stand for has become an urgent and largely avoided question.

The profession has developed a shape obsession. We build for the photograph, for the prize, for the scroll. The image has overtaken the inhabitation, and the tools we created have begun to dictate the form rather than serve the idea. Ivan Illich saw this coming. So, in their different ways, did Rudofsky, Alexander, Brand, and Pallasmaa, each of whom spent considerable energy asking what architecture is actually for, and each of whom found the profession’s answer wanting.

Yet somewhere along the way, we lost the thread. The profession fragmented into specialisms. The architect retreated into form-making while engineers, project managers, economists, and consultants carved up the territory of consequence. We became composers without orchestras, increasingly irrelevant to the decisions that actually shape our built environment, and worse, reduced to a dressing tool for the developers and institutions we now serve, styling their products rather than shaping their purpose.

This is an existential risk. The architect was once the sophisticated orchestrator, the one who held together the technical, the social, the environmental, and the aesthetic into a coherent whole. If we allow that role to be simplified into mere delivery of buildings, we lose not just our relevance but our reason for being. Others will fill the gap, and they will not ask the questions we should be asking.

Relevance is unforgiving. A building either matters to the life around it, or it does not. Either it responds honestly to place, climate, and the way people move through their days, or it is decoration with a roof.

And yet, to become relevant again, we may need to admit what we cannot do alone. The challenges we face, climate crisis, social fragmentation, resource depletion, the reshaping of life by technology, are too complex for any single discipline. Perhaps we need to invite back into our midst the philosophers who can sharpen our thinking, the economists who understand value beyond square metres, the artists who see what we have stopped seeing, the communities who will actually inhabit what we design. Where does relevance actually form, and how do we reclaim the orchestrator’s role without retreating into arrogance? These are practical questions, not moral ones.

Both speakers in this session have faced them directly. Diego Tobalina González leads the Innovation and Design Unit at the Norman Foster Foundation, an organisation that has taken one architect’s legacy and turned it into a platform for interdisciplinary research, asking where architecture goes from here. Tiago Sallas, at Saraiva + Associados in Lisbon, has directed large, complex buildings that simultaneously carry WELL, LEED, Passive House, and WiredScore certifications, which raises its own question: when a building achieves every benchmark available, does that make it relevant, or has relevance simply been redefined as compliance?

The session will include the audience. Bring your own experience of what it means to make architecture matter in the conditions you actually work in. Come prepared to think and to speak.

Selçuk Avcı

Curator

Diego Tobalina González

Head of the Innovation and Design Unit
at the Norman Foster Foundation | Spain

Tiago Sallas

Project Director and Architect
at Saraiva + Associados | Portugal

Urban Humanity

May 21, 13.00-15.15

This module asks:

Are we today true to the real tasks of Architecture? Is the architecture produced today relevant? Is the modern project capable of providing a lasting, useful, beautiful human urbanity? Or have we (The modern architects) dispersed the vocation into irrelevant relationships to a commercial system demanding newness, of misplaced rationality, of bland repetition? Has the ideal of the architectural star focusing on individual expression corrupted the real tasks of architecture to make a lasting, urban and human architecture?

And what about all the mediocre architecture produced by the less talented trying to surpass or copy the stars? Have we forgot the skill of making a human, urban architecture, the way most European cities utilized very well in the pre-modern period. Of making a usable vernacular architecture for day to day purposes? As Grafton Architects stated for the Venice Biennale; Maybe it is time to look at architecture as evolution again, not as revolution.

The module will be very hands on towards the daily profession of practicing architects, with concrete built examples. It will focus on two parts:

The facade

Architecture today has forgot the instrumental task of good buildings to provide an intelligent dialogue between public and private, between inside and outside. Do we have the necessary skills to make ”Metropolitan Façades”? What are good examples of this sensitivity to the human urban existence?

The structure

Our profession loves innovation. Buildings has never before been more advanced technically. But at the same time experience shows that we build with materials as well as detailing that often requires replacement much earlier than anticipated. Greenwashing is nevertheless a serious challenge to our profession. Large parts of the European cities built until the early 20th century still exists, often in better shape than their modern neighbors. Today, we are rebuilding structures not more than 20-30 years old. Several architects work with traditional materials and methods, showing that cost might not disqualify such use. Especially when we consider time as a dimension in addition to cost.

Einar Jarmund

Curator

Amin Taha

Architect and Chairperson
at Groupwork | United Kingdom

Ola Broms Wessel & Klas Ruin

Architects and Founders
of Spridd Architecture | Sweden

The Great Reduction: Stripping Down Space, Tech, and Ego

May 21, 16.00-18.15

The session program:

Slot 1: Too Much Space: The Minimum Viable Space Question
What can high-end architecture learn from the masters of getting the most living quality out of the smallest footprints?
We look outside our industry to find the answer.

Slot 2: Too Much Tech: The Return to Common Sense
We have over-engineered our lives and architecture. This block argues that the smartest technologies are often the oldest (Wind, Sun, Gravity) and that true intelligence lies in simplicity.

Slot 3: A few Confessions (Architect’s Edition)
A radical departure from the standard “Success Panel.”
A combined “Confessional” TOO-MUCH Coming-Out Session designed to break the toxic perfectionism of the industry.

Lutz Kucher

Curator

Frans Joziasse

Co-Founder and Director
of PARK | Germany

Sebastian Aristotelis

Architect and Co-Founder
of SAGA Space Architects | Denmark

Big

May 22, 10.00-13.30

The Question of the Right Measure in Architecture

May 22, 14.00-17.30

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“A little too much is just enough for me,” declared the notorious Jean Cocteau in the middle of the 20th century. The state of affairs has changed considerably in less than a century: ecological and climate crises, social unrest and migration, absurd wars in Europe and around the world… It seems that hope has been replaced almost suddenly by anxiety, wholeness by dispersion, opulence by sustainability…
But how much is just right in life, in art, in architecture? If we would search for a holistic wisdom in antiquity that had not yet been dialectically divided into opposites, we would have to turn to the pre-Socratics, Parmenides or Heraclitus. But usually the »scientific« sources lead us to the first reflections on this topic articulated by the fathers of modern philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. Through teacher and student we encounter the relationship between idealism and realism (empiricism), ideas and deeds, theorising and applicability etc. But actually their beliefs don’t differ that much: while the former one discusses ideal measure, the latter seeks advice in the middle (golden mean). While Plato’s (right) measure gives things and phenomena their identity and protects them in the embrace of the good and the beautiful, Aristotle grounds it in the “right middle/measure” (golden mean or right measure) and, through “practical wisdom” (phronesis), finds advice for a balanced life between extremes that are best avoided.
Here the older sophist Protagoras with his statement that “man is the measure of all things” could help us by omitting the »absolute thruth« and introducing the relativity of human perception, trying to bridge the gap between “heaven and earth”, objective and subjective, eternal and transient. This again- in a different way- would lead us to the question of the “right measure, the golden mean, the ethical mean,” which has recently been addressed even by (ethical) economics (…how much money do we actually need, when is it (finally) enough, what is its true value, etc.). Whithin this view important life issues are not left to be decided solely to an absoulte, objective category (God, Logos, Dharma… ) nor to only subjective one (human being/man), but—depending on the theme, context, the person, and the situation—they dynamically and empathetically travel between the two principles and constantly search for its true position and measure within spatiotemporal context.
Good architecture has always sworn by the right measure, harmonious relationships, balanced proportions, the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence etc. It avoids excesses and insists on a highly ethical stance, seeking beauty, but also truth and goodness. Unfortunately, such architecture and architects are becoming increasingly rare in the modern world, driven out by greed, pragmatism, globalism, and opportunism. On the other hand, there are signs of old-young growth emerging in the profession, promising and already demonstrating maturity, responsibility, and ethical principles in their work.
In the third consecutive 2026 BIG SEE edition of the architectural conference, which this year I am co-curating, we will meet precisely such thinkers and creators in architecture; those (old and young, big and small, original and innovative…) who discover the principles of “the right measure” in each of their works and are at the same time harbingers of a new, emerging, comprehensive and culturally responsible architectural paradigm. They understand and live it with their whole being as a professional mission that should serve life, people, and all of creation!

Aleksander Ostan

Curator

Boris Bežan & Mónica Juvera

Architects and Founders
of BAX Studio | Spain

Bruce Engel

Architect and Founder of BE_Design | New York, USA / Rwanda

Francesco Giacobello

Associate Architect and Project Lead
at Renzo Piano Building Workshop | Italy

Ana Maria Goilav

Architect and Researcher
at The School of Bunești | Romania

Conference Background

BIG SEE Conference is rooted in two established international conferences: the BIG Design Conference, organised since 2003, and the BIG Architecture Conference, organised since 2008.
From 2026 onward, they come together as one platform for international dialogue, connecting architecture and design through a shared focus on quality, response and change. The conference brings a curated selection of internationally engaged speakers and creates space for clear ideas, honest debate and exchange across disciplines. Participants can expect strong case studies, fresh perspectives on current challenges and real opportunities to connect with peers and collaborators.

As part of BIG SEE, we have welcomed many distinguished internationally recognised speakers over the years, as seen below.