The Extended Entry Deadline for Architizer’s 2025 A+Product Awards is Friday, February 21st. Get your brand in front of the AEC industry’s most renowned designers by submitting today.
NYCxDESIGN returns this year, running from May 15 to 23. As ever, the schedule is broad and ambitious. More than 280 events, exhibitions, product launches, gallery shows, open studios, guided tours and more will unfold across the city over the course of the week.
Usually, NYCxDESIGN is an event revered for spectacle and scale; however, this year, the exhibitors have taken a considered approach. Among the ambitious schedule, brands, designers, artists and studios are opening their spaces and sharing work in a way that is far less ostentatious display and more inhabitation of design. Some exhibits invite visitors into studios, kitchens, or furnished interiors. Others walk guests through the production and process of their pieces. In many cases, the materials and mechanisms are on show to be used and experienced. The idea has become not to simply view design, but to step inside it.
Ilene Shaw, Executive Director of NYCxDESIGN said of the 2025 production, “This year’s NYCxDESIGN Festival feels especially energetic — full of new ways to connect, learn, and meet first-time participants. We’ll experience parks, revitalization and new infrastructure projects, and connect with the great minds that actually shaped them.
You can walk through MADE’s Building A with nARCHITECTS and see adaptive reuse in action. Go behind the scenes at the transformed Davis Center at Harlem Meer in Central Park. Tour the stunning public art program at the new Grand Central Madison Terminal — 17 stories below ground.
One of the most meaningful experiences we have organized is a high school student tour to the end-of-year design school exhibitions at a number of NYC design schools. Throughout the city, the festival opens doors — quite literally— inviting you into studios, exhibitions, tours and installations that celebrate the full spectrum of New York’s creative energy. It’s design up close, in context, and in conversation.”
The shift feels timely. While design culture and discourse are dominated by hyper-realistic rendered imagery and immaculately staged press photography, the type of intimate encounter offered at NYCxDESIGN is something tangible and explicitly needed. It prioritizes access over image and tactility over narrative. For architects and designers, it provides the chance to experience work as it is intended to be used, alongside the opportunity to speak directly with the minds behind the work.
Architizer is proud to celebrate the creative forces shaping this year’s festival, and the following selection highlights just a few of the many events we think are worth taking the time to visit. Each invites a kind of closeness and intimacy, not as a concept, nor as a curated atmosphere, but as a way to showcase something real and meaningful.
Tour of Building A at the MADE Bush Terminal Campus
MADE Bush Terminal, 13 42nd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Saturday, May 17, 2025, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
Free with registration via Eventbrite
Hosted by nArchitects and the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), this exclusive tour explores the newly completed Building A and sections of the public campus at the adaptive-reuse MADE Bush Terminal waterfront site in Sunset Park. The tour highlights modern manufacturing, artisan workshops and entrepreneurial spaces within one of New York City’s most ambitious industrial transformations.
Espasso presents: Take A Seat by Carlos Motta
Espasso New York, 38 N Moore Street
Opening: Thursday, May 15, 2025, 6:00 – 9:00 PM (cocktail and book launch)
Exhibition: May 15 – June 9, Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Espasso hosts a major retrospective on Brazilian designer and master woodworker Carlos Motta, tracing four decades of his work in furniture and architecture. The show centres on Motta’s celebrated seating designs — including the Rio Manso, CJ and Asturias collections — and launches a new edition of the Asturias chair, now with armrests.
Grand Central Madison – A New Landmark and Cultural Corridor
Grand Central Madison LIRR Terminal,Madison Avenue from 42nd to 48th Streets,New York,
Tour date and time: May 18, 1:00 – 3:00 PM
Spanning five city blocks beneath Midtown, Grand Central Madison is the largest transit terminal built in the U.S. in decades. Beyond its scale, it serves as a cultural corridor featuring permanent works by Yayoi Kusama and Kiki Smith, large-scale digital commissions, and public poetry displays. This guided tour with MTA Arts & Design offers insight into how art and architecture converge in one of the city’s most complex public spaces.
Design Pavilion by Lexus at Hudson Yards
Hudson Yards Public Square and Gardens, 11th Avenue and Hudson Blvd East
May 10–19, 10:00 AM – 8:00 PM daily
Returning to NYCxDesign for the first time in years, Design Pavilion presents “Lexus Ambiance,” an interactive installation by artist Nick Thomm. Set beside the Vessel, the piece invites visitors to shape a personalized light environment through movement and presence, offering a glimpse into future modes of responsive, experience-led design.
Davis Center at the Harlem Meer Tour
Central Park, enter at 110th Street and Lenox Avenue
Tour date and time: May 16, 3:00 – 4:30 PM
Designed by the Central Park Conservancy with Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture · Design and Mitchell Giurgola, the Davis Center redefines the northern edge of Central Park as both civic landmark and ecological restoration. This guided tour offers an early look at the new year-round facility, green roof, and reconnected watercourse, exploring how architecture and landscape come together to support access, biodiversity and public use.
Design Legacy: The Poul Kjærholm Collection
Fritz Hansen New York Showroom, 22 Wooster Street, New York, NY 10013
May 15–21, 2025, Monday–Friday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Free, open to the public
Fritz Hansen presents a focused survey of Poul Kjærholm’s work, marking the first exhibition in the Americas dedicated to the Danish modernist’s legacy. Known for refining cabinetmaking traditions through steel and precision joinery, Kjærholm’s designs are positioned here not just as furniture, but as studies in proportion, restraint, and material structure.
HUNDŌ by Emily Thurman Studio
86 Walker Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013
Opening Reception: May 14, 2025, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
On view May 15–21, by appointment, 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM
Salt Lake City–based Emily Thurman presents HUNDŌ, her debut furniture and lighting collection, in a multi-sensory installation at 86 Walker Street. The show features works made in collaboration with StudioDanielK, Alexis Mazin, and Camille Tan, using cast bronze, glass, stone, and salvaged wood, all framed within an environment of scenography and sound.
TM Italia NYC Showroom First Look
20 West 20th Street, Floor 5, Suite 502, New York, NY 10011
Opening: Friday, May 16, 2025, 5:30 – 8:30 PM (by invitation only)
Open Hours: May 17–18, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM
TM Italia’s first New York showroom invites guests into a fully realized domestic interior, where each zone is designed around a different style of kitchen use. From a compact working setup to a larger family configuration, the layout reflects the brand’s approach to bespoke cabinetry as both spatial system and crafted object. Materials, finishes and functional elements are on full display, offering an unusually tactile insight into how the Italian atelier works at 1:1 scale.
Known Work
Multiple locations including Love House, ZAROLAT, Host on Howard, Luisaviaroma, and Simple Flair Apartment
May 9–30, 2025 (dates vary by venue)
Design studio Known Work presents new and site-specific pieces across five exhibitions citywide, from Dimes Square to Dumbo. With new editions from its Perceptions Collection, designed by Parts and Labour founders Danu Kennedy and Jeremy Levitt. At Love House, the studio debuts The Mother, a dramatic metal mesh pendant that reframes the domestic light fixture as an heirloom. Other showings include sculptural seating at Host on Howard, a capsule at Luisaviaroma, and immersive staging at Simple Flair Apartment. Each show places collectable furniture and lighting in context-rich, spatially intimate settings.
Oui Design! Festival 2025
Various locations across New York City
Pop-up at Payne Whitney Mansion
May 15, 11 AM – 5 PM (Registration via villa-albertine.org)
Similarly, Villa Albertine’s annual festival of French craftsmanship returns with open studios, exhibitions, and talks across the city. The programme begins with a daylong pop-up at the Payne Whitney Mansion, featuring live craft demonstrations and immersive scenography by Aurore Vullierme. Visitors can engage directly with master artisans working in ceramics, featherwork, jewellery and painted marble. This year’s edition expands spatial access across dozens of venues, from heritage galleries to contemporary showrooms.
Birth of the Polar at Royère Gallery
315 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013
On view: May 7–30, 2025
Open House: Friday, May 16, 2:00 – 5:00 PM (as part of Oui Design!)
Jean Royère’s Ours Polaire sofa is so familiar that it’s easy to forget how strange it once must have been when it first launched— all curves and no corners. This exhibition puts the piece back in context, not as an icon but as an object. The original frame, shaped like a boat hull and built in solid beech, is still assembled by hand in Lyon using the same layered construction Royère specified in the 1940s. Visitors are invited into the process to witness the immense craftsmanship of the famous piece.
Cornell Tech and FDR Four Freedoms State Park
Bloomberg Center Lobby, Cornell Tech, 2 West Loop Road, Roosevelt Island
Tour date and time: May 20, 4:00 – 6:00 PM
Cornell Tech, photograph by Max Touhey.
This two-part walking tour explores the architectural and civic ambitions of Roosevelt Island, beginning with Cornell Tech’s high-performance campus and concluding at Louis Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park. Highlights include the Bloomberg Center, the Tata Innovation Hub and The House — one of the world’s largest Passive House residential buildings — followed by a guided discussion of Kahn’s axial granite memorial and its role as a site of political reflection and urban poise.
School of Constructed Environments: End of Year Exhibition 2025
Parsons, The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, 63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011
Opening: Wednesday, May 14, 2025, 6:00 – 9:00 PM
On view through May 19, 2025
Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments presents its annual graduate showcase across architecture, interior, lighting and product design. The exhibition offers a direct look at how the next generation is responding to contemporary spatial challenges through new formats, tools and ways of thinking — all displayed in one collective environment.
The Extended Entry Deadline for Architizer’s 2025 A+Product Awards is Friday, February 21st. Get your brand in front of the AEC industry’s most renowned designers by submitting today.
