I. Leading ASEAN Voices in Architecture is coming to Intramuros for Shared Ground

Ground, in Southeast Asia, has never been neutral. It bends under monsoon rain, shifts with reclaimed coastlines, and carries the layered memory of settlements, colonial grids, and postwar cities built one on top of another. This is the premise the Anthology ASEAN Architecture Festival 2026 opens with: that the terrain our region builds on is shared, climatically, historically, and socially, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

This year's edition takes that idea as its title. Shared Ground convenes architects, researchers, policymakers, students, and communities from across ASEAN in Intramuros, the walled heart of Manila, for four days of talks, dialogues, spatial installations, and open critique. It coincides with the Philippines' hosting of ASEAN 2026, positioning the country not as a spectator to regional architectural discourse but as an active interlocutor within it.

The festival's manifesto frames Shared Ground around a simple but demanding idea: buildings only become architecture once they are shared. Rather than treating a structure as a finished object to be admired, the festival asks what a building owes the people and ecosystems around it: during construction, at the ribbon-cutting, and long after. As one recent commentary on the festival's theme put it, architecture stands not only on land but within a network of lives and futures that outlast any single project. Climate, heritage, and interdependence across borders are treated as design conditions, not side notes: resilience has to be built into orientation and material choices from the start, historical layers are read as living structure rather than backdrop, and a region whose water systems, supply chains, and labor all cross national lines has to treat its architectural decisions as regional in consequence, not just local.

Anthology unfolds as a sequence of assemblies rather than a fixed schedule of events (Gathering, Ground Works, Talks, Dialogues, Living Anthology, Raw, After Dark, and Assembly), each one moving the festival from conversation, to spatial testing, to collective reflection. Shared Ground is not offered as consensus. It is framed as a commitment to stay engaged across differences, and to shape, together, the futures the region already holds in common.

II. Festival Program

The festival runs across three thematic days, each anchoring a different lens on architectural responsibility, followed by a closing assembly:

Day 1

Care

wellbeing, stewardship, and the invisible labor of maintenance

What is owed to a building and its people after the ribbon-cutting?

Day 2

Culture

identity, memory, and plurality

How can architecture hold shared memory without fixing it into a static image?

Day 3

Collective Futures

resilience, agency, and scale

How do we negotiate the futures of our cities across differing needs and finite resources?

The program begins the evening before opening day with The Anthology Gathering, a fellowship dinner for invited architects, partners, and regional guests, followed the next morning by a public curatorial welcome and Opening Talks. It closes on Day 4 with the Shared Ground Assembly, a public civic forum where the festival's questions are distilled into a collective declaration, followed by a Gala dinner shaped around the idea of a shared table.

None of this would be possible outside of Intramuros itself. The Intramuros Administration has opened the Walled City's plazas, forts, and heritage halls as living venues for the festival: Plaza Roma, Fort Santiago, the Pasig River Esplanade, Foro de Intramuros, Centro de Turismo, and Teatrillo Casa Manila all serve as stages, forums, and installation grounds across the four days. Hosting a festival about care, memory, and collective responsibility inside one of the country's most historically layered districts is deliberate: Intramuros itself becomes a working example of the festival's manifesto, a ground shaped by centuries of migration, conflict, and everyday use.

Anthology 2026 is likewise mounted with the strong backing of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), whose support anchors the festival's civic and cultural program, from the Living Anthology exhibition to the Shared Ground Declaration that closes the event. Together, the Intramuros Administration and the NCCA give the festival both its physical ground and its cultural mandate, reinforcing Anthology's position as a national platform with regional reach.

III. Festival Map

All Anthology venues sit within walking distance of one another inside the Walled City, allowing delegates to move fluidly between talks, installations, and forums across the four days.

Primary venues:

Foro de Intramuros: main stage for Anthology Talks

Centro de Turismo: home to Shelter Dialogues and the Living Anthology exhibition

Teatrillo Casa Manila: venue for Anthology Raw open critique sessions

Centro de Turismo (2F): the Living Anthology's central exhibition space and 27-meter "Loom" archive

Ground Works installation sites (Days 1–3):

Plaza Roma: Day 1, Care

Fort Santiago: Day 2, Culture

Pasig River Esplanade: Day 3, Collective Futures

Nocturnal program:

Selected Ground Works and installation sites across Intramuros transform into night forums for Anthology After Dark on Days 1 and 2.

Because every site sits inside the Walled City, delegates need only their Digital Delegate ID, saved to a mobile device, to move between thresholds. No shuttle, no traffic: just a short walk between five centuries of layered ground.

IV. Navigate Festival Platforms

Anthology 2026 is built on five core platforms, each testing the festival's manifesto in a different register: from authored position, to public friction, to unfinished thinking out loud.

Each invited ASEAN architect is paired not with an interviewer but with a Filipino co-thinker, situating regional ideas within local realities. A 15–20 minute position talk opens each session, followed by 40 minutes of genuine dialogue, moving across the three days from care for people and wellbeing, to culture as community practice, to futures shaped across scales. Each day closes with a keynote from a major international voice in architecture.

Ground Works are the material expression of the Shared Ground manifesto. Each of the ten installations is co-authored by a Filipino architect and an ASEAN counterpart, built as a semi-permanent, reversible 3x3–4x6m structure across Plaza Roma, Fort Santiago, and the Pasig River Esplanade. These are not national pavilions or standalone artworks; they are tested daily against real public use, read through a different lens each day: access and comfort on the Day of Care, gathering and belonging on the Day of Culture, and replicability and stewardship on the Day of Collective Futures.

Where the Talks articulate positions, Shelter Dialogues test them against lived conditions. These are unscripted 75-minute roundtables: architect, government leader, and moderator, no slides, no prepared remarks, built around a core question and a productive tension: design authorship versus invisible labor, capital versus community, participation versus control. The aim isn't resolution. It's clarity.

Not a static exhibition but a record in motion. Excerpts from Talks, reflections from Shelter Dialogues, Anthology Raw contributions, and Ground Works documentation are added and rearranged daily on a 27-meter "Loom," so the exhibition itself changes with festival use: an evolving archive of ideas still in formation, feeding directly into the post-festival Anthology Field Notes publication.

The festival's most unfiltered platform. Anyone can present, 5 to 10 minutes, followed by 30 to 40 minutes of moderated crit, on speculative, early-stage, or unresolved work. Raw does not reward polish; it examines judgment, exposing architecture in formation across sessions like Care Under Constraint, Contested Ground, and Unfinished Futures.

V. Ticket Promos and Merchandise

Anthology 2026 is built on the belief that architecture only becomes shared ground when as many people as possible can actually stand on it. We want the festival to feel less like an industry conference and more like a citywide gathering, accessible to students, young practitioners, and communities, not just established firms.

Regular Passes give full four-day access to Anthology Talks, Shelter Dialogues, the Living Anthology exhibition, Anthology Raw, and Ground Works, everything you need to move freely between Intramuros' venues across the festival.

Group Promos are built for the people who'll enjoy this most together: design studios, architecture and planning classes, and barangay or community organizations. Book as a group and unlock discounted bulk rates, priority seating at Anthology Talks, and reserved viewing slots for Ground Works installations, so no one in your group is left navigating the festival on their own.

Merchandise, including the limited Anthology 2026 tote, notebook, flat carpenter’s pencil, and the Shared Ground print edition, will be available on-site at Centro de Turismo and through the festival's online store, with proceeds supporting the raw open-crit program and future editions of Anthology.

Ticket tiers, group rates, and merchandise availability will be published on the official Anthology ASEAN Architecture Festival channels ahead of the festival.

GET YOUR TICKETS HERE: https://www.anthologyfest.com/tickets

VI. JOIN ANTHOLOGY!

Alongside the talks and installations, Anthology 2026 opens four competitions for anyone who wants to bring their own lens to Shared Ground, from a camera, to a sketchbook, to a thesis defense. More information at https://www.anthologyfest.com/competitions2026. Submit until September 19.

Photography Competition: Capture Intramuros and the festival itself through the lens of care, culture, or collective futures. Open to both amateur and professional photographers documenting the Walled City during the four-day event.

Live Sketch Competition: An on-site, real-time drawing competition held throughout the festival grounds, inviting architects, students, and illustrators to interpret Ground Works, heritage sites, and festival moments as they happen.

Mapping Competition, in partnership with WTA Labs: A spatial and data-driven competition challenging participants to map, visualize, or analyze urban and ecological conditions across Southeast Asian cities, from connectivity and green space to heritage and access, in the spirit of the festival's Collective Futures theme.

Thesis Competition: Open to graduate and undergraduate researchers, this competition invites submission of thesis work engaging with care, culture, or collective futures in architecture and urbanism, with selected finalists featured in Anthology Raw and the Living Anthology exhibition.

ANTHOLOGY RAW. Anthology Raw is a platform for architects, designers, researchers, and students to share ongoing, experimental, or in-progress work in an open and critical format. Rather than focusing solely on completed projects, the session creates a space where ideas, processes, and works-in-progress can be presented, questioned, and developed through dialogue with an engaged audience and a panel of architects and practitioners of notable distinction in the field.

Details on submission guidelines, deadlines, and prizes for each competition will be released through official Anthology 2026 channels: @anthologyfest on Instagram.

Anthology ASEAN Architecture Festival 2026, Shared Ground, runs October 2–3, 2026, across Intramuros, Manila. For festival coordination, email Program Manager Arvin Pangilinan, Curatorial Associate Carmelo Arancon, or Business Development Representative Alyanna Faustino at info@anthologyfest.com.

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