26 Things To Look Forward to in '26
John Hill | 2. 1月 2026
Image: World-Architects
With the new year upon us, World-Architects is looking ahead to some of the events, grand openings, and book releases that are planned to unfold over the next twelve months. Here we present 26 things to look forward to in 2026 in four categories: biennials and triennials, exhibitions, museum openings, and publications.
3 BIENNIALS + 3 TRIENNIALS
Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition: The scopes of the lines of inquiry, as envisioned by the curators (Image: BCN2026UIA)
- The second iteration of Qatar Museums' biennial Design Doha opens on April 12, running until June 30. The series of exhibitions, collaborative projects, awards, and other events across Doha are meant to “bring together designers, architects, and artists to explore new possibilities and shape the future of design.”
- As 2026 World Capital of Architecture, Barcelona is hosting numerous special events throughout the year, including the Architecture Studio Sessions organized by World-Architects, but the main draw will be the triennial UIA World Congress (UIA2026BCN), taking place between June 28 and July 1 under the theme Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition.
- The 9th edition of the Oslo Architecture Triennale opens on September 17 under theme “What if Nature Comes First?”
- The Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2026, organized by the Estonian Centre for Architecture, runs from September 9 until November 30 under the winning curatorial theme “How Much?”
- The inaugural Pan-African Architecture Biennale, which “repositions Africa not at the periphery of global architectural discourse, but at its center … as a site of spatial intelligence, epistemic innovation, and future making,” takes place in Nairobi in September.
- The 3rd Sharjah Architecture Triennial will launch in November under the theme “Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures.”
5 EXHIBITIONS
The Century of Gehry at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art: Model of Abu Dhabi Guggenheim (Photo courtesy Of Gehry Partners, LLP)
- Memoryscapes, the second exhibition in the “Architecture Connecting” series at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, will feature the work of DnA_Design and Architecture and ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects. It will open on January 22 and be on display until May 17.
- As part of the centennial of Antoni Gaudí's death, the completion of the tower of Jesus Christ at Sagrada Família, and the UIA Congress taking place in Barcelona, The Sagrada Família and Barcelona: 144 Years of a Shared Journey will be exhibited in the Gardens of the Palau Robert between April 27 and July 26.
- The late, great Frank Gehry will be the subject of a full-scale retrospective at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. The Century of Gehry will open in the museum's Álvaro Siza Wing in May (running until November) and present 26 major projects spanning Gehry's career.
- The M+ museum in Hong Kong will be celebrating its fifth anniversary with an exhibition devoted to its architect, Herzog & de Meuron, enabled by a “significant” donation of the Swiss architects' archive to the institution. Herzog & de Meuron: In Focus opens on September 12.
- Geoffrey Bawa: Architecture for the Senses, billed as the first major retrospective exhibition on the great Sri Lankan architect in two decades, opens at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, on September 26.
9 MUSEUM OPENINGS
David Geffen Galleries at LACMA; view from exhibition level northwest with Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass (2012) in background (Photo © Iwan Baan)
- Though no specific date has been set, OMA and Cooper Robertson's addition to SANAA's New Museum on the Bowery in New York City will open to the public in early 2026.
- Peter Zumthor's long-awaited, Wilshire Boulevard-spanning expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open to the public in April, with an exact date yet to be announced.
- Although the museum has remained opened during construction, Moshe Safdie's expansion of his earlier Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which first opened in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2011, will open to the public on Jun 6.
- The long-awaited opening of the Obama Presidential Center, designed by New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, will open to the public on Chicago's South Side in June; an exact date has yet to be announced.
- The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by Ma Yansong's MAD Architects for the famed Star Wars filmmaker on a site in Los Angeles's Exposition Park, will open to the public on September 22.
- Kanal – Centre Pompidou, designed by noAarchitecten, EM2N and Sergison Bates architects as the transformation housed in a former Citroën car factory in Central Brussels, will open on November 28.
- Herzog & de Meuron's design of the new Memphis Art Museum (currently the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) will open to the public in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, in December.
- The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art (Suzhou MoCA), designed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, wrapped up construction in 2025 and is expected to open to the public at some point in 2026. Its inaugural exhibition will be Materialism, curated by Bjarke Ingels.
- A year ago we were hoping for a 2025 opening of Frank O. Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. While that didn't come to fruition, and a 2026 is far from certain, some reports point to a 2026 opening of Gehry's second Guggenheim branch.
6 PUBLICATIONS
MAKI OPUS (Photo courtesy of Thames & Hudson)
- The latest pick in Domus magazine's annual Guest Editor program is MAD Architects' Ma Yansong, who will develop ten issues beginning in January under the theme Architecture is not architecture.
- MAKI OPUS, the career-spanning retrospective on the late, great Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, will be published by Thames & Hudson on January 15. “At 400 pages and with 1,000 illustrations,” the book is billed as “the biggest survey of Maki’s work to date, and was compiled in close collaboration with his studio both before and after his death.”
- Paul Groenendijk has collected the “finest, strangest and most remarkable architecture covers” for the aptly titled Architecture Record Covers, to be published in March by nai010 Publishers in collaboration with Design Museum Den Bosch.
- Following Four Walls and a Roof and architect, verb, the latest book by OMA partner Reinier de Graaf “lays out the future of the profession, challenging readers to question the fundamental assumptions of the discipline.” Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto will be published by Verso in March.
- Michael Murphy, the founder of MASS Design Group who struck out on his own in 2022, has penned Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live, which will be published by Atria/One Signal Publishers in April.
- Since it launched in 2019, New York Review of Architecture (NYRA) has grown from a one-page broadsheet to a large-format newspaper with dozens of pages of in-depth and insightful criticism. NYRA has also published two issues of Los Angeles Review of Architecture (LARA) and will see the inaugural publication of Chicago Review of Architecture (ChiRA) in mid-2026.