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RECORD’s monthly list of upcoming and ongoing exhibitions, events, and competitions.

Ongoing Exhibitions

Coming Together: Reimagining America’s Downtowns
Washington, D.C.
No end date announced
Now on view at the National Building Museum, this multimedia exhibition explores the transformations under way in American downtowns and how communities are joining forces to help cities thrive as the United States continues to adapt to a world changed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Fea-turing examples of downtown-revitalization efforts from more than 60 cities (Salt Lake City, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Portland, Oregon, among them), the exhibition uses case studies, data infographics, large-scale video, digital interactives, and voting activities to illustrate the vital role America’s urban centers play in the fabric of our society. Curated by Uwe S. Brandes, a scholar and practitioner in urban design at Georgetown University, and designed by Reddymade and MGMT, Coming Together is the first of three major exhibitions in the museum’s Future Cities initiative. This multiyear project explores the city as a hub, catalyst, essential building block, and reflection of society. See nbm.org.

The Poetic Dimension
Los Angeles
Through November 1, 2025
Currently showing at the L.A. outpost of the Sean Kelly gallery, The Poetic Dimension places photographs by James Casebere in conversation with new sculptures by Jose Dávila. Marking the first time these two artists have been paired together, the exhibition centers around their shared dialogue on the work of Mexican modernist architect Luis Barragán. Casebere’s featured photographs respond directly to Barragán’s architectural masterpieces, including the Gilardi House, the Galvez House, and the architect’s home and studio in Mexico City. He engages with Barragán’s spaces not simply as formal subjects, but as sites of emotion and psychological depth, subtly modifying architectural elements, adding apertures, altering proportions, and shifting light. For Dávila, who trained as an architect before turning to sculpture, Barragán’s architectural language has been a foundational influence. In these new sculptures, Dávila investigates structural equilibrium and formal restraint, using vibrant color and precarious construction to create works with both conceptual clarity and playful irreverence. Like Barragán, Dávila elevates raw, utilitarian materials into expressions of volume, color, and balance. See skny.com

Windows from the Post-Colonial Reclamations multimedia installation, African Aperture, featuring colonial-era photographs of the now-disused Benghazi rail line. Photo by Sanad Egrima  

Post-Colonial Reclamations: From Al-Berka to Sidi Hussein
Benghazi, Libya
Through November 3, 2025
Over ten years since Jawad Elhusuni Architects renovated an Italian square in Libya’s second city of Benghazi, the architect returns to the war-torn city center to curate an exhibition of work by artists, architects, and students to come to grips with how to deal with the country’s colonial heritage. The show, Post-Colonial Reclamations: From Al-Berka to Sidi Hussein, is currently on view at the Barah Gallery in Shajara Square, one of Libya’s very few cultural spaces. The exhibition calls for new ways to engage with both the architectural design process and the role of architecture in post-colonial geographies. From 1911 to 1943, entire new districts constructed by Italian authorities in Benghazi, redrawing the urban fabric to align with development happening on the mainland or, at other times, proposing totally new conceptions of exoticized Afro/Arab Italian designs. The early 20th century hallmark of modernism, reinforced concrete, became the norm for rationalist colonial architecture, while a pastiche of Islamic elements and Mediterranean porticos also lingered on some public buildings.  The “Reclamations” posited by the works on display—a combination of built work and proposals in two areas dense in colonial architecture, Al-Berk and Sidi Hussein—are anchored in the methodology of the studio: Afro-Islamic means to conceive of architecture, with a focus on geometry, narrative, geology, landscape, and materiality. But more than that, they are ways for local architects and students to engage with architectures that arrived on their doorstop from the outside world, and “reclaim” in ways that flips the narrative of control. See je-architects.com

The House Transformed
Princeton, New Jersey
Through January 9, 2026
Presented by the Princeton School of Architecture and curated by Mónica Ponce de León with Shoshana Torn and Massimo Giannone, The House Transformed calls for imagining new typologies that would provide homes for households that do not fit the conventional concept of the nuclear family. It gathers work by a global roster of practitioners—Steven Holl Architects, French 2D, Current Interests, MALL, Tham & Videgård, Preston Scott Cohen, Studio Barnes, Stan Allen Architect, and Neri&Hu Design & Research Office, to name just a few—that envisage alternatives to the domestic status quo. Following Emanuele Coccia’s premise that “we build homes to give a form of intimacy to the portion of the world—comprising objects, people, animals, plants, atmospheres, events, images, and memories—that makes happiness possible,” the exhibition focuses on the scale of the single household and does not attempt to address the complex issues of large-scale housing projects. See princeton.edu.

Ingeborg Kuhler: Poems of Spaces and Colors
Berlin
Through January 11, 2026

The Museum of Architectural Drawing presents a chapter of German architect Ingeborg Kuhler’s multifaceted oeuvre in travel sketches, watercolors, and technical drawings. Born in Dachau in 1943, Kuhler shaped German architectural culture from the 1980s onward as a designer and the first female professor of design on a West German architecture faculty at what is now called the Berlin University of the Arts. The show is divided into two spaces, one presenting the architect’s paintings, the second dedicated to her most famous project, the city of Mannheim’s Technoseum, revealing the building not only through Kuhler’s drawings but also with photography by Ivan Němec. See tchoban-foundation.de.

Aerial view of future Museum of Architecture and Design on the Helsinki waterfront. Image © JKMM, rendering by MIR

Winner! 
Helsinki
Through February 8, 2006
This exhibition at the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki explores the background of the international design competition for Finand’s new Museum of Architecture and Design and presents the winning proposal, submitted by hometown firm JKMM Architects, alongside the four other finalists. The competition attracted 624 entries from around the world, highlighting the strong international interest in the project. In the exhibition, the different approaches taken by the shortlisted teams are showcased through drawings, visualizations, scale models, and video interviews. The design of the show evokes the waterfront setting of the future museum and the lively spirit of Helsinki’s Market Square through a soundscape by media artist Mikko H. Haapoja. The aim of Winner! is to invite the public to join the conversation about what kind of museum will best serve the future. Visitors’ ideas will be documented in the collections of Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki, where they may inform the development of the future museum. See admuseo.fi.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Portrait of I. M. Pei at the Opening of the Museum of Islamic Art (2008), digital print. Photo courtesy Keiichi Tahara (Kyoto, Japan, 1951 – 2017)

I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture
I.M. Pei and the Making of the Museum of Islamic Art: From Square to Octagon and Octagon to Circle
Doha, Qatar
October 30, 2025–February 14, 2026
A full-scale retrospective of the life and work of Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei comes to the Qatar Museums Gallery – Al Riwaq, featuring six key themes that shaped his singular vision: his upbringing, approach to cities, engagement with art, relationships with clients, masterful use of geometry, materials, and structure, as well as deep reflection on the past. Reconsidering Pei’s work through a contemporary lens, the exhibition features five models of built and unbuilt projects and newly commissioned photographs, taken during the Covid-19 pandemic, of 11 completed projects. Life is Architecture is organized in collaboration with M+ in Hong Kong, which unveiled the first full-scale retrospective of Pei in January of 2024. Coinciding with Life is Architecture is I.M. Pei and the Making of the Museum of Islamic Art: From Square to Octagon and Octagon to Circle. Jointly organized by the MIA and Doha's future Art Mill Museum, the concurrent show at the the Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) offers an in-depth exploration of his design for one of the city’s most celebrated landmarks.  See qm.org.qa, mia.org/qa.

View of the faceted central structure, Museum of Islamic Art (2000–2008), Doha 2022. Photo Commissioned by M+, 2022 © Mohamed Somji

Janet Echelman: Radical Softness
Sarasota, Florida
November 16, 2025–April 26, 2026
Based in Boston, award-winning artist Janet Echelman is renowned for her soaring installations that merge ancient craft with cutting-edge technology. Radical Softness, at the Sara­- sota Art Museum, offers an intimate look at Echelman’s artistic evolution, tracing her journey from early explorations in drawing, painting, and textiles to her monumental netted sculptures that have redefined public spaces around the world. This exhibition contextualizes Echelman’s practice, revealing the narratives, influences, and processes that drive her work. At its core, the exhibition highlights her use of softness—not only in material but as a philosophy—as a powerful tool. Showcasing a selection of works from across all four decades of the artist’s career, along with a series of never-before-seen cyanotypes, Radical Softness reveals how an artist’s work can carve out space for reflection in a changing world. See sarasotaartmuseum.org.

Bruce Goff: Material Worlds 
Chicago
December 20, 2025–March 29, 2026
This major retrospective celebrates the unbounded creative practice of American architect Bruce Goff (1904–82). Best known for his groundbreaking, idiosyncratic single-family homes in suburban and rural areas across the U.S., Goff charted an alternative narrative for a modern architecture imbued with individuality, materiality, and fantastical invention. The first major show of the architect’s work in more than 30 years, Material Worlds features contextual exhibition design by New York–based architecture firm New Affiliates and is drawn primarily from the Art Institute of Chicago’s vast Goff collection and archive. The project features over 200 works, including architectural drawings, elaborate architectural models, and a selection of Goff’s ambitious but little-known abstract paintings. The exhibition also mines his diverse collections, including seashells and crystals, popular magazines, clothing, and Japanese and Chinese embroidery. Additionally, the installation brings to life the architect’s intense engagement with music through a customized player piano featuring his own musical compositions. See artic.edu.

Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds
New York
January 28–May 24, 2026
This forthcoming show at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery will mark the first major U.S. exhibition dedicated to the life and work of architect, designer, and theorist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), bringing together nearly 150 drawings and objects, the majority of which have never been on view stateside, that highlight Viollet-le-Duc’s prolific work as a draftsman and the centrality of drawing to his practice. A transformative figure in the history of modern architecture, today he is best known for his restoration of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, a key focus here. Offering a chronological path through aspects of Viollet-le-Duc’s career, the exhibition examines his body of work from early drawings imagining bygone worlds in their golden age to his mid-career restoration campaigns, which defined the modern experience of Gothic France; also here, his late drawings, which blur the lines between geology and architecture. See bgc.bard.edu.

Upcoming Events

Abundant Futures/Live
Boston
November 10, 2025
Presented by MASS Design Group, this full-day event, held at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, brings together community leaders, workers in the arts and related professions, and philanthropists for an immersive gathering, with talks, performances, and interactive experiences. Throughout the day, three core themes—well-being, belonging, and flourishing—will be explored through conversation, breakout sessions, film, and more. Joining MASS cofounder Alan Ricks and design principals Jha D Amazi and Amie Shao are featured speakers such as architect Deborah Berke, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, social psychologist Amy Cuddy, and Tara Stoinski, president, CEO, and chief scientific officer of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. See events.massdesigngroup.org.