10 can’t-miss architecture & design events to see this November in LA, NYC, Kansas City, Dublin, Fort Lauderdale, Buffalo, New Haven, Cambridge, and Helsinki | News

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In Los Angeles, LACMA’s Resnick Pavilion will host the new “Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living” exhibition. See below for details. Photo: Alexey Taktarov/Unsplash.

As we enter November and edge closer to the holiday season, now is the perfect time to get out and join the exciting events happening across the architecture and design community.

From Bustler’s roster of ongoing and upcoming events, here are 10 curated picks worth checking out.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Women’s Leadership Summit 2026 | November 1–3, Kansas City

“Experience the architecture profession’s premier leadership event designed to accelerate women into positions of influence, visibility, and impact. Across three inspiring days, you’ll gain the network, insights, and momentum to grow your career and lead with impact. WLS is powered by the AIA community—the largest network of women in architecture—and supported by sponsors from leading firms and building product manufacturers who are committed to gender equity and women’s success.”

Dark Matter: Revisiting the Architecture of Coal in Post-War Europe | November 5–6, Dublin

“We are excited to invite submissions for DARK MATTER: Revisiting the Architecture of Coal in Post-War Europe, an in-person conference hosted by the ACME (Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe) project (ERC Advanced Grant, 2024–2030), taking place at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin on 5+6 November 2026. In the decades following the Second World War, coal developed from an extracted energy source to a multi-dimensional modernist project. Across Europe, coal mining became an epicentre of technological optimism, democratic politics, urban regeneration, and mass communication—its architectures and spaces redefined as symbols and sites of progress, welfare-state ambition, and conduits for reorganising everyday life. This conference invites papers that revisit coal, for better and worse, as a formative force in twentieth-century architectural, institutional, and media practices.”

Moving Things About: Architecture & Art, and the Conditions of Making | November 13, Los Angeles

“Art and architecture occupy distinct cultural and disciplinary territories, yet their practices repeatedly intersect. This conference considers how the conditions in which architecture and art are made, encountered, and circulated to shape their meaning, use, and value. Bringing together recent history and contemporary practices, Moving Things About examines how distinctions between art and architecture are constructed through questions of purpose, place, use, authorship, audience, and value. Rather than seeking to collapse disciplinary boundaries, it asks what those boundaries make visible: why similar objects, spaces, projects, or ideas can acquire different meanings as they move between cultural contexts, and what these shifts reveal about the institutions and systems of value that surround them.”

Paul Revere Williams. Courtesy of the Art Museum of the University of Memphis

Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living | November 15 – May 31, Los Angeles

“The most prominent Black American architect of his generation, Paul R. Williams helped shape his native Los Angeles during its rapid growth from the 1920s through the early 1970s. Acclaimed as an architect to the stars, he brought his innovation and rigor to stylistically diverse residential, civic, religious, commercial, and hospitality projects that ranged from ambitious public housing to iconic hotels in Southern California, Las Vegas, and Latin America. LACMA’s exhibition will be presented alongside projects at the Getty Research Institute and USC Fisher Museum of Art, marking the largest and most comprehensive museum presentations to date of this influential figure. Paul R. Williams: Architect for Living demonstrates the impressive breadth of Williams’s contributions, showcasing never-before-exhibited drawings and photographs from his archive.”

World Architecture Festival 2026 | November 18 – 20, Fort Lauderdale

“World Architecture Festival 2026 brings the global architecture and design community to Fort Lauderdale for three days of awards, live presentations, talks, networking, and project showcases. The festival gathers architects, designers, developers, educators, and industry leaders to explore current directions in architecture and the built environment, with the 2026 edition taking place at the Broward County Convention Center. WAF is centered around its international awards program and live-judged presentations, offering attendees direct insight into leading projects, practices, and ideas shaping architecture worldwide.”

ONGOING EVENTS

Section as Cosmogram: From the Heavens to the Earth – Exhibition on View | Until November 6, Buffalo

“This exhibition assembles section drawings by contemporary architects and landscape architects depicting the real and imaginary relationships between the heavens and the earth. These two categories are broadly conceived to encompass phenomena that include: the universe and the underworld, the environment and the economy, the atmosphere and the soil, the microscopic and the mythological, the ephemeral and the eternal, and the scientific and the spiritual. In other words, it assembles sections that perform as cosmograms.”

The Yale Architecture Gallery. Image: Yale School of Architecture

Practicing Pluralism | Until December 4, New Haven

“In 2026, as we mark Deborah Berke’s tenth year as dean, the Yale School of Architecture mounts an exhibition that examines the trajectory of its pedagogy under her leadership. As the world experiences even greater strains on our population growth, urban infrastructure, and climate, architecture at Yale has increasingly been explored as a practice of social engagement. Dean Berke’s focus on this imperative has led her to attract and recruit advanced studio faculty who see architecture as a means through which to inquire about and intervene in cultural-spatial questions. This exhibition features one project each from twenty-one architects who have taught advanced studios at Yale between 2016 and 2026. Despite the plurality of their design approaches, the architects represented are united around the core assertion that architecture holds the ability to address some of the world’s most pressing questions.”

Infrastructure in a Time of Flux: Methods, Conditions, and Situations | Until December 20, Cambridge

“Infrastructure in a Time of Flux foregrounds a body of architectural, engineering, urban planning and design innovations whose potential remains largely unrealized within these contexts. Bringing together historical precedents and contemporary investigations, the exhibition examines methods of building that are adaptable, deployable, and materially efficient, while asking why their broader social and design application has remained elusive. The exhibition poses a critical question: if architecture has produced such sophisticated methods for building with fewer resources and increased efficiency, why have these innovations rarely been directed toward the conditions that constitute the lived reality of a large portion of humanity? In reconsidering this question, the exhibition invites a broader reflection on the relationship between invention and implementation, and on the capacity of design disciplines to engage a world defined not by permanence, but by flux. “

Humanist modernity | Until March 27, New York

“Humanist modernity, presented in collaboration with the National Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning in Poland, showcases the work of Stanisława Sandecka-Nowicka and Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki, two significant figures in the history of American and Polish architecture. Named for a concept developed in the 1940s by architects Maciej (Matthew) Nowicki and Stanisława Sandecka-Nowicka, Humanist modernity explores their vision of modernism as a human-centered approach to design—one concerned with understanding who a building is really for, and how it binds a human being to the space around them. The exhibition follows this idea across their work and asks what their architecture offers us today.”

Aalto Design – Shapes of Wellbeing | Until January 3, Helsinki

“The exhibition invites visitors to explore Alvar,  Aino and Elissa Aalto’s architecture and design from the perspective of wellbeing. The multidisciplinary exhibition boldly asks what these classics can contribute to contemporary discussions on the design of wellbeing. The exhibition highlights wellbeing as the Aaltos’ major contribution to Western architectural modernism and examines how their work and philosophy approach it as a balance between people, nature, the built environment, and materials. It connects the Aaltos’ idea of holistic wellbeing with contemporary thinking and the growing desire to understand wellbeing as extending beyond the individual to concern the whole planet. Aalto Design – Shapes of Wellbeing is based on a concept by Pilvi Kalhama and curated by Petteri Kummala and Jutta Tynkkynen, with Carson Chan as curatorial advisor.”

Do you have an architecture or design event you want to promote? Submit it to our event calendar via Bustler for review and a potential feature.

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