In 2026, marking the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death, the research and exhibition project Gaudí: Windows on the Future unfolds across Barcelona and Tokyo, exploring the architect’s creativity through a singular lens: the window. In Tokyo, the satellite exhibition is currently being held at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT Gallery 3 through July 12, 2026.

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Gaudí’s architecture is often discussed through its flowing curves, ornamental language, and structural innovation. Yet this exhibition shifts attention toward the window itself. An architectural opening that admits light and air, mediates interior and exterior, and quietly shapes the relationship between the body and space, the window exists not merely as a detail of architecture, but as a point of contact with the world.

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The project is organized by YKK AP, the Japanese architectural products manufacturer that describes itself as “a company that thinks about windows.” On the occasion of Gaudí’s centenary, the company has collaborated with Gaudí heritage sites to stage a major exhibition at the UNESCO World Heritage site Palau Güell in Barcelona, while the Tokyo presentation reinterprets the same conceptual framework through the spatial language of 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT.

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What makes the project compelling is that it extends beyond the logic of corporate promotion. Through exhibitions, publications, documentary films, models, and academic research, YKK AP presents years of accumulated study surrounding Gaudí’s windows and architectural openings. What initially appears to be a narrowly focused theme gradually expands into a wider inquiry into architectural culture itself.

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For Gaudí, windows were never simple apertures. They were devices through which light, ventilation, vision, materiality, structure, and ornamentation could be orchestrated into a larger architectural harmony. At Palau Güell in particular, the extraordinary variety of openings—differing in shape, transparency, movement systems, and stained-glass treatment—reveals the architect’s relentless experimentation and curiosity.

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The Tokyo satellite exhibition condenses this inquiry into a more focused question: how might we read Gaudí through his windows? Models, archival materials, and research presentations reveal how inventive—and simultaneously functional—these architectural elements were.

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Yet the exhibition ultimately suggests something beyond architecture alone. A window is not simply an opening in a wall, but a device that connects light and the body, interior and exterior, environment and sensation. A slight shift in light can transform the atmosphere of a room; it can alter the way people move, behave, and even inhabit space. In this sense, windows are not entirely unlike clothing—both mediate the distance between the body and society.

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Gaudí’s windows continue to feel strikingly contemporary because they transcend the binary between ornament and function. They are, instead, forms of relational design. Between nature and architecture, craft and structure, inside and outside, past and future, the window becomes a quiet yet essential threshold through which these worlds are connected.

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Barcelona in 2026 is not only commemorating Gaudí Year, but also serving as the UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture. At a moment when architecture’s future is being reconsidered globally, YKK AP’s decision to revisit Gaudí through the seemingly modest element of the window carries unexpected significance.

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The future of architecture does not reside solely in monumental structures or urban masterplans. It also exists in smaller gestures: the angle at which light enters a room, the flow of air through an opening, the tactile mechanism of a handle, the framed act of looking outward. Within such details, futures quietly emerge.

Rather than positioning Gaudí as a master of the past, Gaudí: Windows on the Future reframes his work as a tool for thinking about what architecture may still become. To look at a window is also to reconsider how architecture shapes our relationship with the world itself.