Archtober 2026 Opens With 100+ Institutions Across NYC

More than 100 cultural institutions will host tours, talks, screenings, and workshops across New York's five boroughs through October 31 as Archtober, the city's architecture and design month, opens today. This year the program also reaches up the Hudson, with stops in Newburgh, Rhinebeck, and New Windsor.

The calendar includes "Building of the Day" tours of new work by OMA, Studio Gang, Adjaye Associates, and SO-IL, a Pritzker Prize winner's film premiere at MoMA, a weekend of hard hat tours in Newburgh, and a Halloween visit to a sanitation garage in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The 2026 theme, "In Our Hands," responds to climate change, fast-moving artificial intelligence, and divisive politics, reminding designers, architects, and citizens that they still have agency over what gets built. For the first time, every event is sorted into one of five categories: Nature, Media, Culture, History, and Education.

The Opening Week

On Thursday, October 1, the Center for Architecture opens three shows at once. Humanist modernity: Maciej and Stanisława Nowicki, organized with Poland's National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning, is the first exhibition to present the couple as equal partners. Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki died at 40 in a 1950 plane crash while returning from India, where he had been planning Chardigarh before Le Corbusier took over the commission. Stanisława Sandecka-Nowicka went on to become the first woman appointed full professor of architecture in the United States, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1963.

Dark Matter U: Justice, Pedagogy, Design is the first major U.S. exhibition by the BIPOC-led Dark Matter U network, founded in 2020 to challenge systemic inequities in design and reimagine architectural education and practice. The exhibition traces the network's evolution through three parts, documenting its past work and current initiatives while exploring its vision for the future. A third show, Why Design?, presents work by teens in Justice by Design, a program run with Queens Public Library.

On Friday, October 2, Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation hosts the 2026 Fitch Colloquium, Preserving Independence: Architecture and Heritage in Western Africa. Organized in conjunction with MoMA's exhibition on western African architecture, the colloquium brings together architects, preservationists, historians, archaeologists, and cultural leaders from Africa and the U.S.\n The weekend moves upstate. On Saturday, October 3, The Fullerton hosts a full weekend in Newburgh, including a hard hat tour of the Foster Supply Company Hotel conversion, a walking tour of the city's masonry, a talk by city historian Mary McTamaney, and an evening keynote by MacArthur fellow Tonika Johnson. On Sunday, October 4, the Steven Myron Holl Foundation opens its Rhinebeck campus, offering access to its Architectural Archive and Research Library, the Threads exhibition by Anne Lindberg and H. L. Hix, and the experimental Ex of IN House.

Books, Gardens, and Archives

On Monday, October 5, Francis Kéré joins Tippet Rise Art Center cofounders Cathy and Peter Halstead to launch Spirits Out of Trees, a Park Books volume pairing two of his projects: Xylem, the pavilion in a Montana aspen grove, and the Naaba Belem Gouma Secondary School in his hometown of Gando, Burkina Faso. Nora Lawrence, executive director of Storm King, moderates.

On October 8, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's curatorial team leads a sunset walk through Ancestral Ecologies, four multisensory installations by Brooklyn-based artist Olalekan Jeyifous and the practice AD—WO, this year's Heidi Nitze Art × Environment Fellows. The works draw on Afrodiasporic and Latinx worldviews to propose ways of caring for land.

Also that day at the Cooper Union, author David Jacob Kramer and photographer Michael Schmelling document the back-to-the-land movement of the late 1960s in Northern California, where hand-built domes, shingled cabins, and salvage-built houses—many hidden for decades from building inspectors and drug squads—now belong to builders in their seventies and eighties.

At the Van Alen Institute, Open Access puts 130 years of competition boards, jury records, and correspondence to work: five artists and design teams asked what the archive reveals about who design has served and who it has left out. Participants include Annie Barrett, Daniel Pittman, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel; Kholisile Dhliwayo; Friends Making Work; PROPS SUPPLY; and Gillian Waldo.

Fragments, Films, and a Ball

On Saturday, October 10, Untapped New York's Secrets of Penn Station & Moynihan Train Hall points out more than a dozen fragments of McKim, Mead & White's Pennsylvania Station—torn down in 1963, a loss that helped spur New York City's landmarks law—still in plain sight.

The Architecture & Design Film Festival opens at MoMA on Monday, October 12, with the world premiere of MUNDO FRÁGIL, in which filmmakers Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine travel across Chile with Smiljan Radić, this year's Pritzker laureate, from the Atacama Desert to the Andes. Radić joins the filmmakers afterward for a conversation with MoMA chief curator of architecture and design Martino Stierli. Screenings continue through October 17.

On October 15, speakers including Lori A. Brown, Mary McLeod, Cathleen McGuigan, and Roberta Washington launch The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960–2020. Its 1,160 entries make it the first comprehensive global survey of women in architecture. The same day, a Judd Foundation guided visit at 101 Spring Street opens Donald Judd's 1870 cast-iron SoHo building—bought in 1968 and arranged over decades across five floors—with a new exhibition of paintings by Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun.

Open House New York Weekend runs October 16–18, opening more than 300 sites across the city to the public. Over 150 are drop-in. Ticketed sites include a midnight leak detection outing with the Department of Environmental Protection, the old 19th Street PATH station and its abandoned tunnel, and the DOT's sign shop in Maspeth.

Buildings of the Day and Closing Programs

On October 21, the "Building of the Day" tour visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Condé M. Nast Galleries, where Peterson Rich Office and Beyer Blinder Belle designed galleries for the Costume Institute's spring shows; the walls enclose what were once the exterior facades of the Met's 1880s and 1890s buildings. The next day's tour stops at ISSEY MIYAKE / NEW YORK, SO-IL's flagship on the ground floor of Cass Gilbert's 1928 New York Life Building on Madison Avenue.

On October 23, the Architectural League's Beaux Arts Ball returns with Home Sweet Home, transforming the historic Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx with a commissioned installation by TAKK, lighting by Joel Fitzpatrick Studio, music by DJs Bojaq and Madre Guia, and a graphic identity by Eddie Opara and Pentagram.\n On October 24, the "Building of the Day" visits Marcus Garvey Village in Brownsville, the 1970s project designed with Kenneth Frampton that tested whether low-rise housing along pedestrian streets could match tower density. Curtis + Ginsberg Architects rehabilitated its 99 buildings and turned its parking lots into 637 new affordable homes. The same day at Grace Farms, Julia Gamolina moderates Francine Houben, Dorte Mandrup, and Sharon Prince on buildings that respond to landscape and community, with projects from Greenland to Abu Dhabi.

The closing week brings the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design's programming, including Victor Pascual of DSGW Architecture on Diné concepts of land on October 20, and Diego A. Tituaña Matango of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on Indigenous rights and the built environment on October 27. Landscape architect Douglas Hoerr delivers NYBG's annual portfolio lecture, Reading the Landscape, and Perkins&Will—recipient of FIT's 2026 Lawrence Israel Prize—closes the month on October 29 with firm leaders Jennifer Graham, Sommer Schauer, and Matthew Krissel presenting the practice's work and design philosophy.

With a theme premised on agency over what gets built, and a calendar stretching from a Bronx sanitation garage to the Andes on film, Archtober 2026 positions preservation, reuse, and equity at the center of the city's design conversation.