A change of seasons always brings a slew of exhibition openings. This fall, exhibitions frame architecture as memory, material, and speculation. Across galleries from New Haven to Mexico City, artists, architects, and designers revisit modernism’s legacies, confront industrial and ecological histories, and probe the domestic as both subject and stage. Some shows turn to architectural icons and overlooked contributors, exposing hidden stories behind facades and spaces. Others trace contested material and urban histories, asking how preservation and regeneration can shape new futures. Through models, prints, photographs, collages, and immersive installations, these shows offer a season where architecture becomes a medium for reckoning and reimagining.
Sonoran Shapes + Structures: Desert-Inspired Architecture and Design
Chandler Museum
300 S Chandler Village Drive
Chandler, Arizona 85226
September 20–February 1, 2026
Presented with the Organic Architecture + Design Archives, the exhibition explores how architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri drew inspiration from the Sonoran Desert, showcasing organic design’s enduring harmony with landscape, light, and materials.
Baroque, The Soul of Brazil: Between Extraction and Expression
Cornell University
Sibley Hall
921 University Avenue
Ithaca, New York 14853
Through September 26
This project explores how European baroque architecture transformed into a uniquely Brazilian expression along the colonial Royal Road. Through photography, sketches, and text, it examines landscapes, social hierarchies, preservation, and national identity. Supported by mentors and collaborators, the designers investigate how architecture reveals hidden histories and confronts colonial legacies.
a83
83 Grand Street
New York, New York 10013
September 25–November 23
To mark the publication of a new three-volume set of books published by Buchhandlung Walther König, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen arrives for its first exhibition in the U.S. The show will include 96 new limited-edition silkscreen prints, produced by a83, along with several large-scale models by OFFICE and sculptures by artist Rita McBride.
Architectural Association Front Members’ Room and Bar
36 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3ES, United Kingdom
September 26–December 6
The Architectural Association presents Bad Language, a photography exhibition by Max Creasy exploring the relationship between snapshots and architecture, in collaboration with a group of architects and practices established in the past two decades. Curated by Guillermo Fernández-Abascal with design by Wayne Daly, the show features an essay by historian Frida Grahn.
MIT Maihaugen Gallery
Building 14N-130
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
October 1–December 11
Ink, Stone, and Silver Light explores a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo through manuscripts, architecture, and photography. Anchored in Kamil al-Ghazzi’s pioneering chronicles, the exhibition traces efforts by historians, architects, and contemporary Syrian scholars to document and safeguard the city’s memory. Highlighting resilience amid upheaval, it presents heritage as a living framework shaping community identity and envisioning dignified futures.
UC Berkeley
Lifchez / Stronach Exhibition Cases, Environmental Design Library, Bauer Wurster Hall, 210 Bauer
Berkeley, California 94720
October 1–February 1, 2026
This exhibition spotlights the overlooked contributions of six Asian American architects and landscape architects including Kinji Imada, Roger Yuen Lee, Terry Tong, Worley Wong, Mai Kitazawa Arbegast, and Casey Kawamoto to the development of midcentury modernism in Northern California. Drawing from the Environmental Design Archives, it interweaves professional drawings with personal documents, situating their architectural practices within the broader racial history of Asian American life in the mid-20th century.
Jorge Otero-Pailos: Treaties on De-Fences
Onera Foundation
63 Park Street
New Canaan, Connecticut 06840
October 1–March 28, 2026
The Onera Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of historic American architecture, opens its new home in a landmarked, 1,400-square-foot building in New Canaan with an exhibition by Jorge Otero-Pailos that explores the Eero Saarinen–designed U.S. embassy in Oslo.
USC School of Architecture
850 Bloom Walk
Los Angeles, California 90089
Through October 2
Alexander Robinson, associate professor in the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program at USC, is a landscape architect and researcher whose work focuses on reimagining civic infrastructure as ecological and community assets. Through the Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab and Los Angeles River Observatory, he develops interdisciplinary tools to engage the limits of flood infrastructure along the Los Angeles River. His projects treat hydraulic boundaries as opportunities for inclusive authorship and imagination, opening space for communities historically excluded from infrastructure design.
Architecture After the Fires: LA in Progress
SCI-Arc
W. M. Keck Lecture Hall & Adjacent Galleries
960 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles, California 90013
October 3–October 5
Hosted by SCI-Arc’s Resilient Futures Task Force, this multi-day exhibition invites architectural responses to wildfire-affected zones. Showcasing in-progress, speculative, and research-based projects of all typologies, the event highlights evolving strategies for building under heightened fire risk.
The Hiroshima Architecture Exhibition 2025
Onomichi City and Fukuyama City in Hiroshima Prefecture and surrounding areas
October 4–November 30
The Hiroshima Architecture Exhibition 2025 is a triennial festival that showcases architecture’s role in shaping society, featuring works by renowned and emerging architects. Through exhibitions, tours, lectures, and workshops, it highlights the Seto Inland Sea region’s architectural heritage while exploring how architecture can address today’s cultural, environmental, and societal challenges.
Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design
Museum of Wisconsin Art
205 Veterans Avenue
West Bend, Wisconsin 53095
October 4–January 25
The exhibition highlights Frank Lloyd Wright’s overlooked furniture legacy, presenting forty key chairs, sketches, and photos from 1911–1959. It also debuts fabrications of lost designs based on original drawings, offering new insight into Wright’s evolving process, philosophy, and material experimentation while underscoring furniture’s role in shaping modern living.
Doris Sung: New Thermobimetal Studies
USC School of Architecture
850 Bloom Walk
Los Angeles, California 90089
October 6–October 16
Doris Sung, USC Architecture professor and principal of DOSU Studio, pioneers dynamic, zero-energy building skins that respond to temperature like human skin. Her research into thermobimetals explores self-shading, self-ventilating, and self-assembling systems that expand the role of facades into urban infrastructure with benefits for both buildings and public health.
Anat Ebgi
372 Broadway
New York, New York 10013
Through October 18
Mapping the Middle marks Erin Wright’s first New York solo exhibition. Her near life-scale paintings explore domestic thresholds where intimacy and exposure meet. Using architectural drafting, isometric projection, and muted palettes, Wright reimagines the American house as both subject and instrument, blurring boundaries between interior, exterior, and perception.
Asya Geisberg Gallery
4.5 Cortlandt Alley
New York, New York 10013
Through October 18
Asya Geisberg Gallery presents Los restos, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s third solo show, juxtaposing his New Land canvases of the Atacama Desert with silver gelatin prints of abandoned objects. Through painterly transfers, cartographic grids, and stark documentation, Valenzuela explores the desert as both sublime and scarred—haunted by histories, relics, and failed utopias—while reimagining photography’s dual roles of cultural iconography and personal trace within a sculptural installation.
Pratt Institute
Higgins Hall, Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery
61 St James Place
Brooklyn, New York 11238
Through October 22
To celebrate 50 years of teaching, Dr. Sharon Egretta Sutton, presents Works on Paper: A Retrospective Celebration. The exhibition of collages is accompanied by two talks: a gallery talk on September 22 and a memoir lecture, Leaving Home for Uncharted Territory, on October 9.
Galerie56
240 Church Street
New York, New York 10013
Through October 22
Curated by Galerie56 founder and architect Lee F. Mindel, METALLICA is the gallery’s fourteenth selling exhibition, showcasing works by Jean Prouvé, Maria Pergay, Poul Kjaerholm, Jean Royere, and others. Spanning furniture to sculpture, the show highlights metal’s versatility, revealing its capacity to embody rigidity, dynamism, resilience, and expressive design across eras.
Iwan Baan: The Notational Surface
Rice School of Architecture Gallery
6100 Main Street
Houston, Texas 77005
Through October 25
Within the Rice School of Architecture Gallery in the new William T. Cannady Hall, photographer Iwan Baan showcases selections from his Houston Archive Project, which includes various helicopter trips over Houston’s “zoohemic canopy”—a phrase coined by Lars Lerup—and beyond.
LIGA 41: Unidad Vecinal (Mex), Departamento del Distrito
Liga Space for Architecture
Doctor Lucio, 181, Doctores
Mexico City, Mexico 06720
Through October 30
Departamento del Distrito, founded by Francisco Quiñones and Nathan Friedman, dissects architecture through design, curation, and academia. Its LIGA installation, Unidad Vecinal, aims to reimagine domestic space as a flexible, collective stage, activated through public programs blending rest, work, and community.
Sean Kelly Los Angeles
1357 N Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, California 90028
Through November 1
Sean Kelly, Los Angeles opens its fall season with The Poetic Dimension, a two-person exhibition featuring James Casebere and Jose Dávila. Both artists respond to the enduring legacy of Mexican modernist Luis Barragán. Casebere explores his work through meditative photographs of his signature, color-drenched spaces, Dávila through sculptural constructions of stone, concrete, and vivid color. Together, their works explore architecture as a language of memory, spirituality, and emotion.
Janet Echelman: Radical Softness
Sarasota Art Museum
1001 South Tamiami Trail
Sarasota, Florida 34236
Opens November 16
Janet Echelman: Radical Softness traces the artist’s four-decade career through paintings, textiles, maquettes, cyanotypes, and her monumental net sculptures. Highlighting her shift from painting to public art, the exhibition explores softness as material and philosophy, reflecting interconnectedness, resilience, and transformation.
Paparazza Moderna: Lovers & Frenemies
Yale Architecture Gallery
190 York Street
New Haven, Connecticut
Through November 29
Lake Verea presents photographic encounters with modernist houses, exploring both rivalries among iconic male architects and overlooked contributions of female architects and designers across Europe. Blending personal and fragmented imagery, the exhibition reinterprets architectural history, uncovering tensions, relationships, and hidden narratives behind modern architecture’s facades.
Material Cultures: Steel and Our Entangled Present in Gary, Indiana
Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Dean’s Office
48 Quincy Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Through December 21
Material Cultures: Steel and Our Entangled Present in Gary, Indiana reexamines the overlooked material and social history behind Chicago’s steel-framed skyline by tracing its origins to Gary, Indiana, a city built by US Steel. The exhibition investigates the ecological, labor, and territorial costs of steel production while speculating on Gary’s post-industrial future—not as ruins, but as a site with potential for regenerative, less extractive forms of living and building.
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