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Take home a piece of the festival
Fifteen years of celebrating NYC architecture—let's look back at the 2025 Archtober Festival!
As 2025 comes to a close, we're looking back at the 15th year of Archtober. This year's festival took shape under the theme Shared Spaces, considering a world where space and resources are shared responsibly, inviting participants to re-envision how we move, connect, and live together in New York City. The theme looked to the cast of collaborators who are actively shaping and experiencing the city: architecture firms, urban developers, civic organizations, activists, and the public. Through talks, tours, workshops, and more, this year's festival explored the significance and joy of public space.
This past Archtober, the festival hosted:
The Center for Architecture was delighted to host Head Hi in the City, a month-long pop-up of Brooklyn's architecture and design bookshop, Head Hi. Apart from featuring recent design publications and objects, Head Hi also hosted book launches, talks, and gatherings throughout the month of October. International guest program participants included Montreal based studio Daily tous les jours, The New York Architecture & Design Book Club organized in collaboration with design journal Untapped, Mexico City based cultural platform Proyector, Irish photographer Rich Gilligan, architecture firms WORKac and Mattaforma. Learn more about the pop-up here.
Memorable programs included Metropolis' Sustainability Lab + Conference at Parsons on October 17. Themed "Synergy," it brought together leaders across design, business, and academia to explore how sustainability, wellness, and creativity intersect in today's built environment. The conference began with a keynote from Jared Della Valle, CEO of Alloy, the developer behind the first all-electric skyscraper in New York City and the city’s first Passive House-certified public schools. Over 200 architects, designers, engineers, and industry clients gathered for the series of panel discussions and explored the 20 partner product kiosks.
The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Consulate General of Finland in New York hosted "Smaller is sometimes better: Collective shaping of public space in Helsinki, New York and Beyond," a presentation and discussion on October 29 with Helsinki-based architect and urban designer Arvind Ramachandran, current Architect-in-Residence at the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. Arvind’s work with the City of Helsinki’s placemaking program focuses on empowering underrepresented communities to improve their local public spaces. The event explored how communities shape small public spaces, sharing stories from Helsinki, New York, and beyond.
This Archtober, the Indigenous Society of Architecture and Planning (ISAPD) presented its Thinking/Being/Designing for the Collective series, developed in collaboration with the Center for Architecture. Speaking to the festival theme of Shared Spaces, this four-panel series explored the ways we can respond to the complex collective experience of living in 2025: learn Indigenous principles to re-establish a cyclical and renewable relationship with the environment, develop material conditions where communities can unite across separation, reflect on the role that reconciliation plays in rethinking spaces for diplomacy, and focus on design practices and tools where cultural lineages and lived histories intersect. The first event, LANDFRAME: A Shift in Practice, took place on Indigenous People's Day (October 13). It celebrated the beginning of LANDFRAME, a Page Foundation project and digital platform centered on strengthening tribal land relationships by integrating Indigenous knowledge into the architectural design process.
On October 24, in conjunction with International Production Design Week, the Center for Architecture presented Becoming Laszlo Toth. Renowned production designer Judy Becker discussed her Academy Award-nominated work on The Brutalist (A24, 2024) with director Brady Corbet. The pair shared behind-the-scenes insights into the creative process and how Becker surmounted the unique challenge of designing the life and work of a fictional, mid-century, brutalist architect.
This year, the festival held the second iteration of its Postcard Competition, under the theme "Wish You Were Here..." asking New Yorkers to submit a postcard design depicting their ideal public space. Three winners were chosen, each receiving $500 and their postcard distributed at the Center for Architecture. Congratulations to Olivia Baldacci, Megan Elevado, and Emma Sumrow! The jury also awarded three Honorable Mentions: Cara Cragan, Malavika Madhuraj, and Timothy Zhang. Learn more about the winning designs here!
On October 29, nine NYC-based design firms went gourd-to-gourd at Archtober's pumpkin-carving competition, Pumpkitecture. In honor of 15 years of Archtober and the festival theme, the annual competition was held under the theme of "Pumpkin Places," a celebration of public space. The evening's highest honor, the Pritzker Pumpkin, was bestowed upon Once-Future Office for their Squashington Square Station, an ode to the New York City subway, consisting of squash seats and pumpkin seed rats. The People's Pumpkin (the audience vote) went to Jane's Carousel, a living pavilion by MdeAS Architects. Read more about the frightful night here.
This year was also the inaugural launch of Archtober Coloring Sheets, where we got our youngest New Yorkers involved in the festivities—we partnered with select cultural institutions to share coloring sheets of iconic New York City public spaces. Created by Greater Studio, the drawings ranged from Coney Island’s Luna Park to the new Davis Center in Central Park to the Greenest Block in Brooklyn. A huge thank you to our distribution sites: Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn Central Library, Jefferson Market Library, and the Center for Architecture!
Thank you all for joining us for an extra special rendition of Archtober! It was a delight to explore Shared Spaces together and we're already looking forward to next year's festivities.
Archtober is a NYC-based platform that promotes the discovery of architecture and design through experiences and content, culminating in a month-long festival every October.
