Archtober, New York City’s Architecture Festival, Returns for its Twelfth Year

Archtober, the month-long festival of architecture and design, returns this year to New York City. Organized by the Center for Architecture in collaboration with partners and sponsors across the city, the 2022 installment of the festival will gather events, exhibitions, resources, and activities across the five boroughs. Despite the challenges of the past few years, Archtober has continued to expand, this year gathering more than 100 partners and sponsors to celebrate the importance of architecture and design in New York City. New this year: the Archtober Guide on Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app!

“As Archtober celebrates its twelfth year, I am thrilled to see how the festival continues to grow, with over 100 collaborating partners and new program offerings,” said Benjamin Prosky, Assoc. AIA, Executive Director, AIA New York | Center for Architecture. “This year, the festival feels especially relevant as we celebrate the re-opening of the city. Archtober 2022 provides numerous opportunities for in-person experiences, including our ever-popular Building of the Day series, founded on the principal that architecture should be experienced first-hand. Conversely, we have not abandoned some of the advantages of digital programming, including through a series of virtual talks on indigenous design developed with the Indigenous Scholars of Architecture Planning and Design. Finally, we are thrilled to launch a new collaboration with Bloomberg Connects to create an Archtober mobile experience that makes accessible a selection of Buildings of the Day that we have visited over years.” 

2022 Program Offerings

Archtober 2022 will continue to feature a combination of in-person and virtual programming, allowing partners to welcome audiences back to their spaces while also taking advantage of broader online networks.

Several partners will be offering their talks in virtual or hybrid formats to accommodate even larger and more international audiences, including the CCNY Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture’s Fall 2022 Sciame Lecture Series, “Border Crossings: Architecture and Migration in the Americas.” This year, Archtober has also partnered with the Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design on a special four-part virtual series, “In the Realm of Indigenous Architectures,” that will explore the preservation and the transformation of Indigenous communities in the United States.

The festival will also feature several exhibitions across the city, including Cooper Hewitt’s Mr. Pergolesi’s Curious Things: Ornament in 18th-Century Britain, opening October 1, and the Museum of Modern Art’s Life Between Buildings, an exploration of how artists have engaged the city’s interstitial spaces. Farther afield, don’t miss the site-specific installations for Robert Stadler: Playdate at the Glass House or Pamphlet Architecture at ‘T’ Space, showcasing the theoretical explorations of emerging architects.

For 2022, the festival’s popular “Building of the Day” series of architect-led tours will be fully in-person. In response to popular demand, this year’s series will feature two different building tours on Saturdays, allowing the festival to reach broader weekend audiences. This year’s selection of tours includes: 

• 9 Dekalb in Brooklyn by SHoP Architects

• The Living Breakwaters Project in Staten Island by SCAPE, offered in conjunction with

  Open House New York aboard a Circle Line vessel

• Pier 57 in Manhattan by Diller Scofidio and Renfro, Handel Architects, and !melk

• The Peninsula in the Bronx by WXY and Elizabeth Kennedy Landscape Architect

• Queens Public Library Steinway Branch renovation by Mario Gooden Studio 

Several Archtober partners will also be offering tours outside of the festival’s Building of the Day series. On October 2, Green-Wood Cemetery will lead “Grand Designs: Architecture at Green-Wood,” exploring the cemetery’s monuments and mausoleums by leading nineteenth-century architects and artists, and NYPL’s Seward Park Branch will guide participants through a tour of Manhattan’s Chinatown on October 29. 2022 also marks Open House New York’s 20th anniversary—join the urban exploration celebration from October 21 to 23!

No October celebration is complete without some end-of-month spookiness, and Archtober is no exception! On October 28, Pumpkitecture will return to the Center for Architecture, as architects go gourd-to-gourd to compete for the Pritzkerpumpkin. Families can also join the fun with Candlelight Ghost Tours of the Merchant’s House Museum, Manhattan’s most haunted house, the New York Botanical Garden’s Halloween at the Garden extravaganza, and the Lewis Lattimer House Museum’s spooky scavenger hunt.

Beyond timed and ticketed activities, the Archtober site will once again include “Anytime Activities,” a section of evergreen resources for architecture lovers of all ages. The Center for Architecture’s “Architecture at Home” resources and the Cooper Hewitt’s “Design It Yourself” series provide families with simple, downloadable instructions for DIY activities. Podcast lovers can also dive into the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation’s “New Angle: Voice,” focusing on the untold stories of women architects, or the Queens Public Library’s “Queens Memory Project,” which uses the library’s oral history archive to tell stories about the borough’s past.

And don’t forget to check out our Archtober Map to New York, available via Glide. Experience the city through the eyes of an architect while being pointed towards nearby architectural sites, cultural institutions, and parks (along with spots to stop for a drink or snack!) that help define New York City as one of the country’s most stimulating design arenas. While visiting our website, stop by the festival’s Archtober Shop, which features several items—from t-shirts to baseball caps to fanny packs and even socks—for you to explore the city in style.

New This Year: Discover Archtober Buildings of the Day on Bloomberg Connects

At its core, the Archtober festival is meant to encourage and inspire audiences to engage with the architecture and design that surrounds them. Building on our efforts to create year-round Archtober experiences, this year the festival has partnered with Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and cultural app created by Bloomberg Philanthropies, to develop the Archtober Guide. Over the past 12 years, Archtober has toured hundreds of projects across the five boroughs. The Archtober Guide on Bloomberg Connects allows you to explore a selection of these sites from your phone and dive deep into some of NYC’s most exciting contemporary and historical projects. View project images and listen to exclusive, app-only interviews with the architects and landscape architects who are shaping the future of New York City! 

Featured buildings include the Judd Foundation by Architecture Research Office, Weeksville Heritage Center by Caples Jefferson Architects, the DSNY Manhattan Districts 1/2/5 Garage & Spring Street Salt Shed by Dattner Architects and WXY, and Hunters Point South by SWA/Balsley and WEISS/MANFREDI. You can also use Bloomberg Connects to explore Archtober partners, including Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the Judd Foundation, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Museum of the City of New York, Neue Galerie New York, the New York Botanical Garden, New York Public Library, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The Archtober Guide on Bloomberg Connects will launch on September 16, 2022. 

Visit our website to see our lineup of events for 2022 starting September 14, 2022.