AN rounds up architecture exhibitions in a year marked by interruption and afterlives

In 2025, structure exhibitions felt much less like polished statements and extra like provisional gestures. Exhibits have been staged beneath circumstances of interruption, uncertainty, and restore. The longest U.S. authorities shutdown in historical past shuttered all 21 Smithsonian museums and the Nationwide Zoo for 43 days starting in October, abruptly reducing off public entry to a number of the nation’s most vital cultural areas. Museums reopened in mid-November, however solely beneath a brief funding deal that expires in January 2026, leaving the specter of one other shutdown hovering into the brand new 12 months. 

In opposition to that backdrop, lots of the 12 months’s most compelling structure exhibitions have been preoccupied with survival over spectacle. They explored how buildings persist after demolition, how supplies age and re-enter circulation, how drawing expands to planetary scale, and the way biennials themselves pressure beneath the load of disaster, protest, and institutional contradiction. From Venice to Chicago, Copenhagen to Ithaca, displays in 2025 have been not often triumphant. As an alternative, they lingered in uncertainty, turned inward, and continuously introduced itself as provisional, unfinished by intention moderately than accident.

Venice Structure Biennale 2025: Structure is survival

AN’s Jack Murphy, contributor Matt Shaw, and others reported from Venice this 12 months as Carlo Ratti’s Intelligens-themed Biennale introduced collectively high-tech programs, vernacular constructing traditions, and materials experimentation throughout the Giardini and Arsenale. Relatively than advancing a singular imaginative and prescient of the long run, the exhibition emphasised coexistence between AI and craft, robotics and hempcrete, planetary considering and native information.

In protection from Venice, the writers famous the biennale’s restrained tone and its insistence that structure at the moment is much less about heroic options than about adaptation, upkeep, and ethics. Throughout each the central exhibition and nationwide pavilions, survival, not innovation, emerged because the present’s quiet thesis.

The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower: After the Constructing

At MoMA, The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower prolonged that logic of afterlife right into a single, cussed object. The exhibition opened simply three years after the demolition of Kisho Kurokawa’s metabolist icon, centering not solely on its unique futuristic ambitions however on the messy, human realities that adopted. One absolutely restored capsule sat in rigidity with documentation of rust, leaks, abandonment, and reinvention.

Aki Ishida argued in AN that the constructing’s decay and eventual demolition didn’t sign the tip of its architectural relevance, however moderately revealed how which means accumulates by way of use over time. Revisiting her earlier critique of Nakagin as an “obsolescent masculine dream,” she mirrored on how the tower’s remaining residents recast a venture initially designed for elite salarymen right into a website of adaptation, care, and social life. The exhibition, she suggests, positions obsolescence not as failure, however because the situation that made various architectural lives attainable.

On view by way of July 12, 2026

1925–2025: 100 Years of Artwork Deco on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

If MoMA’s Nakagin exhibition seemed ahead by way of decline, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris seemed backward by way of a century of artwork deco. AN contributor Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle takes readers contained in the expansive exhibition, which revisits the 1925 Worldwide Exhibition of Fashionable Ornamental and Industrial Arts and traces artwork deco’s world afterlife throughout structure, style, and the ornamental arts. In her evaluation, Mun-Delsalle displays on the motion not as a closed historic chapter however as an evolving design philosophy. An ethos that continues to tell modern approaches to supplies, luxurious, and the connection between handmade craft and industrial manufacturing.

On view by way of April 26, 2026

Salone del Cellular: The Furnishings Truthful as Cultural Barometer

Editor-in-chief Jack Murphy requested, “is Milan Design Week getting too sizzling for its personal good?” He describes Milan Design Week as successful that could be pushing its personal limits. Salone del Cellular continues to perform successfully as a world commerce truthful for furnishings and lighting, however the surrounding Fuorisalone has expanded into an amazing, brand-heavy spectacle. Whereas the week delivered sturdy exhibitions, notable collaborations, and moments of historic and materials consciousness, it was additionally marked by extreme advertising and marketing, restricted political engagement, and ongoing range points. Murphy left impressed by the vitality and creativity on show, however skeptical concerning the sustainability and path of the occasion because it continues to develop.

Sluggish Down, the Copenhagen Structure Biennial 2025, requested structure to ease up

On the Copenhagen Structure Biennial 2025, curator Josephine Michau and a roster of designers together with THISS Studio, Tom Svilans, and Slaatto Morsbøl made a case for endurance, reuse, and materials stubbornness. Unfold throughout pavilions, exhibitions, and talks in Copenhagen and Malmö, Sluggish Down let tasks arrive unfinished, weathered, or delayed, turning development time, salvage, and upkeep into the principle occasion. Reviewed for AN by Ellen Peirson, the biennial treats structure much less as a refined object and extra as an ongoing negotiation with supplies, labor, and time.

CAB6 confronted disaster with out consensus

AN’s Daniel Jonas Roche reported from Chicago this fall because the sixth Chicago Structure Biennial, Shift: Structure in Instances of Radical Change, unfolded throughout the Cultural Heart, Graham Basis, and satellite tv for pc venues. Framed round uncertainty, political urgency, and ecological disaster, the biennial introduced collectively materials experiments, housing prototypes, archival reconstructions, and acts of refusal that requested what structure can meaningfully do amid fascism, local weather collapse, and institutional compromise. Relatively than a unified curatorial assertion, CAB6 introduced a fragmented area of propositions starting from earnest critiques of worldwide provide chains and home life to lighter, typically tone-deaf spectacles.

In his protection, Roche famous a persistent rigidity between the gravity of the second and the biennial’s uneven responses. Whereas some installations leaned into irony or branding, others foregrounded reminiscence, upkeep, accessibility, and political refusal. Throughout the strongest works, survival, care, and moral positioning emerged as extra pressing than novelty, suggesting that in instances of radical change, structure’s most consequential gestures might lie in restraint, restore, and dissent moderately than spectacle. 

On view by way of February 28, 2026

Part as Cosmogram drew at a planetary scale

AN contributor Caroline O’Donnell reviewed Part as Cosmogram, an exhibition at Ithaca Faculty that rethinks the architectural part as each an analytical software and a cosmological diagram. Drawing on John McHale’s 1969 Tremendous Scale Survey, the present assembles modern drawings that collapse scales from geology to ambiance to planetary programs, refusing the part as a easy lower by way of a constructing. Throughout works by Pneumastudio, Lucito, Ibañez Kim, and others, the exhibition argues that architectural illustration should develop to embody local weather, ecology, politics, and “hyperobjects” that exceed human notion, positioning drawing as a type of world-making moderately than mere depiction.

Taken collectively, these exhibitions recommend that 2025 was much less about architectural ambition than about architectural reckoning. Throughout scales and geographies, curators and designers handled structure not as an answer machine however as a medium for grappling with limits. In a second formed by political disruption, local weather anxiousness, and institutional fragility, structure exhibitions didn’t promise readability or closure. As an alternative, they lingered within the unfinished, insisting that survival, care, and moral positioning might now matter greater than decision or spectacle.