With lectures by Shirley Blumberg, Konstantin Grcic and Rossana Hu, exhibitions celebrating hip hop culture, the immersive world of Do Ho Suh and architecture from the American South, and blockbuster installations by Yayoi Kusama and Paolo Sorrentino, the next few months of architecture and design events promise a world of inspiration. While we hope this selection will banish the winter doldrums, and have you planning for A&D excursions across the globe well into June, it’s just the tip of the iceberg: See our regularly updated Events section for more architecture and design events in 2025.

1 Shirley Blumberg Lecture
Toronto | March 6, 6:30pm

In her talk “One Clover, and a Bee”, at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty, KPMB founding partner Shirley Blumberg explores architecture’s expanding role in addressing global challenges, focusing on climate action, social equity, and community impact. She introduces KPMB’s approach, which leverages innovative design and construction methods to significantly reduce carbon emissions. And she highlights some of the respected firm’s most recent projects, including the Harrison McCain Pavilion addition to the Beaverbrook Gallery and the award-winning Montreal Holocaust Museum.

2 Comics Sans Frontières
Houston | March 20 to 23

Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Maus, might be the biggest draw for this Rice University–hosted symposium. But the show features a full roster of iconic graphic artists delving into the artistic form and its notion of borders. “From panels and gutters to speech balloons and narrative boxes, comics are famously marked by graphic borders. Yet, with their inherent mixing of words and images, they are equally about the defiance of borders, offering a literary stage for artists and narratives that challenges graphic, national, and cultural frontiers.”

3 Winter Stations
Toronto | To March 30

Returning to Woodbine Beach, the annual Winter Stations installations serve up a great reason to frolic in the sand (and snow) during the coldest season. This year, the works include Trae Horne’s Watch, a “solar-aligned structure anticipating equinox”; Cláudia Franco, Mariam Daudali and Tom Byrom’s Slice of Sun, a bright and happy installation that visitors can climb within; and Peak, a vibrant cluster of pyramids by the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and Department of Architectural Engineering that “shift and settle with the ground as the sand moves and collects within the alcoves and sloped surfaces from the wind.”

4 Rossana Hu Lecture
Los Angeles | March 17, 6:00pm

Speaking at SCI-Arc under the theme of “Liminality,” Rossana Hu of renowned Shanghai practice Neri&Hu Design and Research Office will display a few of the studio’s works, each of which interrogates the role of cultural boundaries as sites of liminal engagement. It is through the notion of liminality, Hu explains, that “architecture finds its agency, engaging critically with the boundaries that shape both material and ideological constructs.”

5 A South Forty Exhibition
Washington, D.C. | To Winter 2026

Especially exciting among the top architecture and design events in 2025, the National Building Museum’s ambitious survey “aims to provide an overview of the current vitality of contemporary architecture and design in the American South, through both illustrated profiles of buildings and practices, and statements of principles and observations by those in practice in the region.” Among the firms highlighted are Brooks + Scarpa, El Dorado / KSU Design + Make Studio, in situ Studio (image shown), Katherine Hogan Architects, Marlon Blackwell Architects and Rural Studio.

6 Thomas Heatherwick Lecture
New York | March 24, 6:30pm

Little Island, Rolling Bridge, The Vessel, Azabudai Hills. The works of British designer Thomas Heatherwick, at turns awe-inspiring and controversial, are often iconic in scope and effect. In this talk at Columbia GSAPP, Heatherwick expounds on his ethos of creating joyful, humanized projects – a response to what he views as the “’blandemic’ of harmful, boring buildings that are bad for society and for the planet.”

7 Formafantasma: Oltre Terra Exhibition
Amsterdam | To July 13

Ever since its founding in 2009, the duo Formafantasma has been at the forefront in exploring – and experimenting with – the potential of natural and unusual materials. A continuation of this thread, the Oltre Terra show at the Stedelijk Museum takes visitors deep into the “history of sheep domestication, wool production, and material culture…unraveling the complexities of the cooperative symbiosis between animals, humans and the environment.”

8 Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrored Room
Toronto | Opening April 5

Anticipate lineups. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s mirror room installations attract art lovers the world over – and this April, Toronto gets its very own, at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Subtitled Let’s Survive Together, this latest, crowd-funded, iteration features mirrored spheres suspended from the ceiling and arranged on the floor; and a mirrored column that invites visitors to “peer into a seemingly infinite field of silver orbs.” It will be selfie central. But worry not, the installation will be up indefinitely so everyone will get their turn.

9 Salone del Mobile
Milan | April 8 to 13

The mecca beckons: The world’s most important furniture fair returns, as does its biennial focus on lighting. In fact, this year establishes the first edition of The Euroluce International Lighting Forum, a series of talks and workshops centred on the future of lighting design and hosted in The Forest of Space Arena designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Plus, offsite at the Museo Pietà Rondanini – Castello Sforzesco, the American light artist Robert Wilson creates a special installation, Mother, dedicated to Michelangelo’s masterpiece. 

Back at the fairgrounds, the other highlights include filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s “La dolce attesa,” which the fair describes as a “timeless space and an invisible bridge between present and future, where desire is intertwined with the fear of meeting one’s destiny.”

10 The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
Toronto | To Apr 6

With works by artists including Derrick Adams, John Edmonds, Deana Lawson and Hank Willis Thomas, this Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition celebrates the conceptual and material innovations of hip hop culture. It features various media in dialogue – from fashion and marketing to music and photography – in order to consider “activism and racial identity, notions of bling and swagger, as well as gender, sexuality and feminism.”

11 Konstantin Grcic Lecture
Houston | April 14, 7:00pm

One of the design world’s most inventive minds, Konstantin Grcic has crafted ground-breaking lighting and furniture for companies including Flos, Magis and Vitra. In this keynote hosted by Rice University, and entitled “Man Machine: My Story About Human-Tech Creativity,” Grcic traces the arc of his career alongside the rapid transformation of design technologies. “Grcic will share personal reflections on the transition from analogue methods to the digital revolution, from a time before CAD and the internet to the advent of 3D printing and generative AI.”

12 Do Ho Suh: Walk the House Exhibition
London | May 1 to Oct 19

The textile sculptures of South Korean artist Do Ho Suh evoke ghostly architectures. Aptly, then, this exhibition at the Tate Modern asks, “Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea?” The immersive survey invites visitors to walk through the ephemeral structures he has composed over three decades, as well as new, site-specific works. The show is certain to be one of the most memorable architecture and design events in 2025.

13 Venice Architecture Biennale
Venice | May 10 to Nov 23

Under Carlo Ratti’s direction, the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale embraces a theme – “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” – that interrogates how architecture can confront climate change and other major issues by “harnessing all the intelligence around us.” The Canadian Pavilion will be animated by the Living Room Collective, comprised of Andrea Shin Ling, Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui and Clayton Lee – a group of architects, scientists, artists and educators working at “the intersection of architecture, biology and digital fabrication to situate architecture as an integral and supportive component of our ecosystem.”

14 ICFF
New York | May 18 to 20

New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair is the pre-eminent U.S. expo of modern residential design. It features over 450 established brands (including Bernhardt Design, shown) and emerging talents from over 35 countries as well as the ICFF Talks series. Plus, WANTED platforms the next generation of designers through initiatives like Launch Pad, Look Book, Schools Showcase.

15 RAIC Conference
Montreal | June 1 to 4

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada gathers for its annual conference at Montreal’s Hotel Bonaventure. The impressive speaker roster includes Sergio Morales of Chevalier Morales; Michael Conway of Hariri Pontarini; Lise Desjardins of Evoq Architecture; Paul Fast of hcma architecture + design; and Leslie Lokko, founder and chair of the African Futures Institute (AFI) and Director of the Nomadic African Studio. Education sessions will be delivered in eight themes, including climate justice and resilience, sustainability, adaptation and mitigation; equity, diversity, inclusion and social justice; Indigenous-led architecture and design; and the practice and business of architecture.

16 3daysofDesign
Copenhagen | June 18 to 20

What began as a small design event held in an old warehouse in Nordhavn, a harbour area overlooking Copenhagen’s waterfront, now extends to the entire city of Copenhagen – and is considered the most significant annual design festival in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. This year’s theme: Keep It Real.

17 International Garden Festival: Reford Gardens
Grand Métis, QU | June 21 to October 5

Four jury-selected landscape installations take over Quebec’s Reford Gardens for its Borders-themed International Garden Festival. They are: Back/Ground, by Patrick Bérubé, “a vision of the world in which nature is not simply a background but a living environment;” Peek-a-Boo, by Hermine Demaël and Stephen Zimmerer, which flips a border on its side to interrogate the edge between earth and sky, articulated as a colourful field of powder-coated steel grates; Scars of Conflict, by Michael Hyttel Thorø, inspired by the physical devastation and psychological scars left by warfare; and You Shall (Not) Pass by Simon Barrette, composed of thousands of surveying markers strung onto a steel wire canopy, recalling the type used by surveyors to physically mark the edges of a property.