As modernity conceals nature and digitalises life, Barcelona's River Parliament rises from river floodwaters, embodying nature's forces and mediating between land and sky, water and soil.

Contemporary cities move water silently through engineered networks, vital yet invisible, severed from cultural experience and symbolic imagination. This project asks how architecture can mediate between society and the elemental forces from which we have grown detached.

In a speculative near-future Barcelona, the Catalan government grants personhood rights to El Llobregat, one of Europe's most polluted rivers, underwriting a 250 year remediation plan. Water oriented architectures scatter along the river's urban corridor, culminating in the River Parliament: a ceremonial construction sited in the river's rerouted flood zone, designed through water itself, its form shaped by flood, flow, and accumulation. Built from riverstones and reeds harvested on site, it operates as flood debris barrier, rainwater harvester, and filtration system, a place of secular water veneration housing a new political process, where water's abundance, scarcity, and power are both explained and felt.