Please join us for the opening night celebration of two exhibitions—Searching for Superpublics and Making Energy Visible—that will be on view at the Center for Architecture from October 3, 2025–March 28, 2026. The evening will include remarks from each exhibition team as well as mingling and light refreshments! Opening night is also the unofficial kickoff of Archtober, New York City's month-long celebration of architecture and design, taking shape for its 15th year under the theme "Shared Spaces." Explore the festival lineup at archtober.org.
About the Exhibitions
Searching for Superpublics explores current directions in the design of New York City’s public space. The work on view introduces a search for additions to city life that overcome the boundaries of neighborhoods, communities, boroughs, and typical public spaces. While not necessarily square, central, or as lush as some of the parks and plazas that predate them, the selected projects are super. They exceed the boundaries of traditional public spaces and neighborhoods by working together across the city, inventing new tools for participation, and occupying resources and infrastructure. In a city as dense as New York, these projects emerge as opportunistic and strategic sites of intervention that weave through the city’s fabric.
This search is framed through a series of questions: What is our current era of public space? Who designs and maintains it? The exhibition brings together eight primary projects and numerous other examples to explore these radical shifts between specific public spaces and the interstitial public realm at large. Each emerged through conversations with communities across the five boroughs, with stakeholders ranging from city agencies to designers, architects, planners, and activists. While by no means definitive—the curators invite agreement and critique—certain formal and organizational tendencies emerged along the way.
The exhibition documents a search through found materials, each presented as the outcome of past planning, current conditions, and ideas for future use. Featured projects are categorized under three umbrellas: Connectors, Temporals, and Constellations.
Curators: Ivi Diamantopoulou, AIA, and Jaffer Kolb, Co-founders, New Affiliates Architecture
Graphic Designer: Topos Graphics
Energy drives modern life. We encounter its effects—light, warmth, motion—yet the infrastructures, landscapes and costs that sustain them remain mostly unseen. In a time of the climate crisis, it is urgent to rethink energy not only as a technical problem, but as a cultural, political, and spatial one.
Architecture and design can play a central role in thinking about energy today. While these fields can contribute to the decarbonization of building systems and the adoption of new technologies, they can also expand how energy is imagined: beyond quick fixes, toward visibility, legibility and new forms of collective value.
Making Energy Visible gathers interpretations, representations, and visualizations of energy in architecture. The exhibition unfolds in six parts—Bodies at Work, Sources of Energy, Conserving Energy, Systems of Conversion, Distribution of Power, and Consumption to Expenditure—each presented through a timeline of architectural, infrastructural, and environmental projects. Alongside these timelines, invited artists and practitioners explore how architecture today can make energy perceptible, debatable, and public.
By gathering historical trajectories and contemporary works, Making Energy Visible suggests that energy is not only a matter of physics and policy, but also of culture, imagination, and form. Architects and designers cannot invent new fuels, but they can shape how we understand them, how we live with them, and how we envision their futures.
Curator: Tülay Atak
Graphic Designer: Annija Ceska
Exhibition Designer: Clouds Architecture Office
