Heritage has never been a neutral category. The question of what we choose to protect—and what we allow to recede into the past—is inseparable from the hierarchies of power, notions of belonging, and our systems of value. As architects have gained awareness of the environmental impacts of the building industry, the discipline has been forced to confront those questions with renewed urgency.

The second session of Summit 2026 gathered practitioners whose work operates at the intersection of these overlapping imperatives: a museum in Senegal conceived as a place of return for the artifacts of precolonial African cultures, a former factory dismantled and reconfigured from within, a handicrafts center on an Andean caldera built using practices transmitted across generations.

Together, their projects present a case for rethinking how we relate to the inheritance of the past, contending with how our histories live on in the present to ask what we want for the societies of the future.

Featuring Bas Smets, Mariam Issoufou, François-Xavier Gbré, Róisín Heneghan, and Marie Combette of La cabina de la Curiosidad, and chaired by Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, this town hall was recorded at the end of the second session of The World Around Summit 2026, a full-day program dedicated to Architecture’s Now, Near & Next.

Taking place at The Museum of Modern Art, the program was co-organized by Beatrice Galilee, founder and executive director of The World Around, and Martino Stierli.