BIG: Materialism
Suzhou, China
Through March 8, 2024
Housed within the new Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), this exhibition showcases representative projects from BIG's architectural endeavors. Organized around ten materials—stone, earth, concrete, metal, glass, wood, fabric, plastic, plant, and recyclate—it presents a material-centric perspective on spatial design. Co-curated by BIG and Suzhou MoCA, Materialism precedes the museum’s official opening this summer. See suzhoumoca.com.

Installation view of BIG Materialsm at the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo © StudioSZ Photo/Justin Szeremeta

Architectural Drawing 4
New York City
Through March 21, 2026
Architectural Drawing 4 is the fourth installment of A83’s ongoing exhibition series. It showcases artists, architects, and designers, at various stages in their careers, who use drawing in their practice. The show features pieces by Flores & Prats, Smout Allen, Isidoro Michan-Guindi, Naho Kubota, Sofia Mer­cado, Productora, and Office Jonathan Tate. The series prioritizes the presentation of two-dimensional creations, most often on paper, and utilizes A83’s printmaking facilities. See a83.site. 

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Hidden Furniture Masterpieces 1950-1991
New York City
Through April 30, 2026
Rarify presents Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Hidden Furniture Masterpieces, the first-ever exhibition devoted exclusively to the furniture and interior design legacy of SOM, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year. On view through April at Luisa Via Roma New York, the exhibition marks Rarify’s first curated public presentation from its archive and reveals a largely unseen body of work that quietly shaped the visual language of corporate modernism across the second half of the 20th century. Spanning more than four decades, the exhibition brings together approximately 60 pieces of historic, predominantly bespoke furniture alongside more than 100 archival artifacts drawn entirely from Rarify’s collection. The presentation is complemented by original architectural photography by Ezra Stoller, archival furniture drawings, and rare personal objects, including Gordon Bunshaft’s architect’s seal and his Pritzker Architecture Prize invitation, and offers unprecedented insight into SOM’s philosophy of “total design,” in which architecture, interiors, and furniture formed a unified whole. See SOM.com

Image courtesy Rarify and SOM

ROAD WORK
London
Through May 2, 2026
This exhibition by the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) brings together 16 large-scale prints taken from a series of 1,000 polaroid photographs that the artist (and former AA tutor) Andrew Holmes took in 1980s Los Angeles. The images of assorted Americana captured during these trips became the source material for the photorealist drawings for which Holmes is best known. But the polaroids are also artworks in themselves, first shown in the exhibition Hundreds of Things at the AA in 1986 and revisited now through this display of prints and a new publication, ROAD WORK (2025), featuring illustrations of 500 polaroid works and four pieces of original writing in the form of song lyrics. See aaschool.ac.uk.

Alessandro Mendini 
London
Through May 10, 2026
Currently on view at the Estorick Collection, this is the first solo exhibition dedicated to the influential Italian designer and architect Alessandro Mendini (1931–2019) in the United Kingdom. Bringing together around 50 key works—including drawings, paintings, furniture, and rugs—the show celebrates Mendini’s playful and poetic approach to design across his career and through his collaborations with companies such as Alessi and Swatch. See estorickcollection.com.

Designers of Mountain and Water: Alternative Landscapes for a Changing Climate
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Through May 15, 2026
Organized by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Korea Institute, this exhibition presents visions of alternative landscapes for a changing climate by contemporary landscape architects from Northeast and Southeast Asia. Designers of Mountain and Water features more than 55 works by 23 practices. These projects are organized by bioregions defined by geography, geology, fauna, flora, and other ecological and climatological characteristics, as well as the population settlements and cultural features shaped by such conditions. This show is curated by Jungyoon Kim. See gsd.harvard.edu.

Desert Mirror
Scottsdale, Arizona
Through May 31, 2026
Developed through the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s artist-in-residence program at Taliesin West, Desert Mirror by Erika Lynne Hanson reflects on the unique site. It features works in weaving, sculpture, and video inspired by Wright’s principles of organic architecture and the construction method of desert masonry. Installed across five historic spaces, this show illuminates how materials, landscapes, and systems shape the ways we build and live today. See franklloydwright.org.

Installation view of Desert Mirror at Taliesin West. Photo by Linda Brader

A World in the Making: The Shakers
Philadelphia
Through August 9, 2026
On view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, this exhibition explores the design legacy of the Shakers, a religious group whose values of community, labor, and equality shaped their furniture, architecture, and everyday objects. By pairing historical artifacts with newly commissioned works, the show invites reflection on how Shaker ideals continue to inform conversations around inclusion, gender, and intentional living in the 21st century. A World in the Making was organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Wüstenrot Foundation in collaboration with Shaker Museum. See icaphila.org.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Lella e Massimo Vignelli
Milan
March 25–September 6, 2026
Presented by the Triennale Milano, this major retrospective of Lella and Massimo Vignelli traces the couple’s contributions to the evolution of international design and graphic culture. Through a curated selection of objects, furniture, interiors, drawings, models, sketches, photographs, manuals, trademarks, books, covers, and magazines from their vast body of work, the exhibition reconstructs the Vignellis’ intellectual and human journey. The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with the Vignelli Center for Design Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology. See triennale.org.

Collecting Ourselves
Buffalo, New York
Opening March 27, 2026

This exhibition offers an unprecedented look at the decades long effort to recover, document, and reunite original objects designed for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House. Collecting Ourselves reveals how lost Wright-designed art glass, furniture, and decorative objects were tracked through private and institutional collections, and how their return has helped restore the Martin House to Wright’s original vision. While structural restoration often draws the most attention in preservation projects, Collecting Ourselves shifts the focus to the critical, and often overlooked, role of archives and collections. See martinhouse.org

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: un|realized
Münster, Germany
April 4–June 28, 2026
The Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso Mün­ster presents Christo and Jeanne-Claude: un|realized, the first exhibition in Germany dedicated to the artists’ unrealized projects. Bringing together over 100 works from the past 60 years, the show provides an in-depth look at Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s various proposals that were never actualized. See kunstmuseum-picasso-muenster.de.

Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship
New York City
April 13–July 19, 2026
This spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will show the first-ever exhibition to examine Gothic architecture drawings in an art historical context. The Gothic era produced some of the most monumental and beautiful structures of the Western world, recognized to this day as icons of the European cityscape, yet rarely discussed as the product of the ingenious and innovative contributions of individual architects. This design legacy has, however, been preserved in a substantial though obscure body of preparatory drawings and prints. Gothic by Design will introduce this body of work to a general audience and the scholarly community, illuminating the significant impact the practice of drawing had on stylistic developments during the Gothic period. See metmuseum.org.

The Fortune of the City is That it Has Never Been Perfect
Montreal
May 21, 2026–January 3, 2027
Presented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, this exhibition explores Álvaro Siza’s urban projects through his experiential way of understanding a place, its shape, its embodied history, and its life. In considering these aspects across his projects, Siza seeks to determine the right scale of intervening and building within existing frameworks, rather than only designing single buildings. Curated by Giovanna Borasi, show features material from Siza’s archive donated to the CCA, including drawings, photo collages, models, and his sketchbooks alongside photographs by Gabriele Basilico, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Alessandra Chemollo, and Balthazar Korab, as well as work by other architects and historians who were in dialogue with Siza or who worked on the same sites, such as Aldo Rossi, Gene Summers, James Stirling, Kenneth Frampton, and Jean-Louis Cohen. See cca.qc.ca.

Upcoming Events

The Spitzer School of Architecture Spring 2026 Lewis Mumford Lecture: Carlos Moreno: From Crisis to Proximity: A New Social Contract for Cities
New York City
February 26, 2026
Each spring, the Spitzer School of Architecture and its Urban Design Program present the Lewis Mumford Lecture and seminar. Named for writer, architecture critic, and urbanist Lewis Mumford, who attended City College, the series invites the world’s most distinguished urbanists to speak freely and publicly about the future of cities and the social purposes of architecture. This series was initiated by the late Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture and director of the Urban Design Program at the Spitzer School, and curated by him for 11 years. For year's lecture, Carlos Moreno, a French-Colombian scholar based in Paris known for creating the "15-Minute City," will present From Crisis to Proximity: A New Social Contract for Cities. See ssa.ccny.cuny.edu

Email information to kuthg@bnpmedia.com.