September 11, 2025
Searching for Superpublics explores current directions in the design of New York City’s public space. The work on view introduces a search for additions to city life that overcome the boundaries of neighborhoods, communities, boroughs, and typical public spaces. While not necessarily square, central, or as lush as some of the parks and plazas that predate them, the selected projects are super. They exceed the boundaries of traditional public spaces and neighborhoods by working together across the city, inventing new tools for participation, and occupying resources and infrastructure. In a city as dense as New York, these projects emerge as opportunistic and strategic sites of intervention that weave through the city’s fabric.
This search is framed through a series of questions: What is our current era of public space? Who designs and maintains it? The exhibition brings together eight primary projects and numerous other examples to explore these radical shifts between specific public spaces and the interstitial public realm at large. Each emerged through conversations with communities across the five boroughs, with stakeholders ranging from city agencies to designers, architects, planners, and activists. While by no means definitive—the curators invite agreement and critique—certain formal and organizational tendencies emerged along the way.
“We’re excited to present Searching for Superpublics, which includes some projects that will be familiar to many and some only to a few, but that together tell a story about the city that is both bottom-up and top-down; that synthesizes the desires of the city’s residents with the plans of its stewards; and that shows how design can be formal, informal, visionary and responsive all at the same time,” said Curators Ivi Diamantopoulou, AIA, and Jaffer Kolb, Co-founders of New Affiliates Architecture.
The exhibition documents a search through found materials, each presented as the outcome of past planning, current conditions, and ideas for future use. Featured projects are categorized under three umbrellas: Connectors, Temporals, and Constellations.
Connectors work across communities, neighborhoods, and lot lines to reunite disparate parts of the city. The four projects in this section of the exhibition often link together traditional public spaces, providing a means to traverse the city without cars, confronting environmental conditions, and mixing populations. They are sometimes continuous and often realized in phases. Sometimes they exist as single lines in discrete physical territories. For example, the Greater Rockaway Coastal Resilience Plan by RISE is linked by a continuous boardwalk that ties together numerous engineering projects. Like the High Line, the QueensWay by DLANDstudio Architecture & Landscape Architecture, Sasaki, WXY Architecture + Urban Design is organized over a disused rail system, cutting through Queens and remaining self-contained and, in some instances, quite isolated. The featured Reimagine the Cross Bronx Expressway initiative was prompted by local organizing to address a public health crisis. The Staten Island Bluebelt initiative manages the borough’s stormwater drainage through interconnected ponds, streams, and marshes that promote biodiversity, a network of trails and paths that serve as a public amenity.
Temporals are events which create major new arrangements of public life for discrete periods of time. Ranging from the Open Streets program—notably Open Streets 34th Avenue, which created Paseo Park—and the NYC Marathon to the city’s countless parades, these events are objects of design, evolving over time, and managed by multiple agencies and organizers. Temporals have both direct and indirect consequences, with secondary markets, food vendors, and performers all participating on their sidelines. This section of the exhibition brings together several examples that amplify and echo the civic life of the city and are increasingly omnipresent. The curators looked to the city’s quintessential stoops and public stairs as another example of temporary use, evoking images of outdoor lunches and places to spend a sunny afternoon. Referencing these symbols, the exhibition will feature an installation by New Affiliates and Stock-a-Studio titled “Roadie Stoop.” Made of aluminum, steel, foam cushions, and various street surfacing materials, the structure pays homage to the stoops that provide respite and theater to our daily life.
The projects within the exhibition’s third umbrella, Constellations, transform the city as a whole, representing collections of recognizable elements often centered on comfort and daily life. The city’s data platform lists 975 public restrooms, for example, that serve as essential public amenities. In a bid to increase this number, the city, led by NYC Parks, is testing out new comfort and construction standards, easily deployed modular units, and quick-to-build prefabricated components across the five boroughs. The exhibition features these new strategies alongside historic photographs of previous generations of bathroom design. Beyond amenities, new public spaces take the form of distributed networks like the Urban Forest Plan, which seeks to increase the city’s tree canopy coverage from 23.4 to 30 percent in the coming years—the design of these projects is about continuity, legibility, and a promise of open-ended usability. Constellations offer a collective sense of belonging and place across the city in its smallest sites.
Symbolically, the exhibition considers Connectors as lines, Temporals as dashes, and Constellations as points, producing a new, dynamic, and complex map of the city. It replaces traditional, delineated parks with patterns and intensities. These are infrastructures which both map the city and embed its public realm into its finest grain.
The exhibition is presented in tandem with 2025 AIANY President Benjamin Gilmartin, AIA’s theme “See You IRL: Designing for Public Life,” which explores the importance of our shared physical spaces in New York City. Throughout the year, AIANY is hosting a six-part dialogue series in tandem with Gilmartin’s theme, exploring Searching for Superpublics, Cooling Stations and the Public Realm, Democracy, Equity, and Public Space, A Primer on Race and Public Space, and two more topics forthcoming.
“Our public spaces—the theaters of our shared civic, social, and cultural lives—are more important than ever right now,” said Gilmartin. “Searching for Superpublics shines a light on the increasingly diverse connective spaces growing all across the New York City map, and the ‘superheroes’ responsible for creating them.”
Alongside these projects, the exhibition will feature a multi-channel film looking at Broadway as a progenitor of public space, past and present; an installation showing a large-scale map by Diller Scofidio + Renfro of the city overlaid with its Superpublics;and new seating elements referencing New York’s stoops and stairs that encourage visitors to linger in the gallery and to look back to the street and city. Together, the projects and installations on view illustrate an optimistic portrait of a city constantly striving to be more livable, collective, just, and radical.
The graphic identity for the exhibition is by Topos Graphics, referencing an aerial map of New York City that visualizes its Superpublics.
Searching for Superpublics will be on view October 3, 2025, through March 28, 2026.
EXHIBITION OPENING
Please join us on October 3, 5–8pm, at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY for an opening reception. From 4–5pm, members of the press are invited to a VIP tour with New Affiliates and the exhibitions team (RSVP to lkim@aiany.org).
About AIA New York and the Center for Architecture
Established in 1857, AIA New York is the oldest and largest chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), serving as the collective voice of nearly 5,000 licensed architects, allied professionals, students, and design enthusiasts in New York City. AIA New York cultivates an open, adept, and future-forward architectural community. The Center for Architecture, inaugurated in 2003 as one of the AIA’s first cultural institutions, engages local and international audiences with the value, impact, and wonder of architecture. Together, we advance the value and practice of architecture to promote just and sustainable communities.
Both AIA New York and the Center for Architecture advocate for the importance of design in enhancing urban life, offering programming that fosters engagement among architects, professionals, and the public. We prioritize values such as civic engagement, equity, environmental sustainability, resiliency, technological innovation, and inspiring design.
Through exhibitions, public programs, educational initiatives, and our Archtober festival and platform, the Center for Architecture brings together architects, designers, students, and the public to foster collaboration within the design community while creating accessible opportunities for the public to experience and learn about architecture. Whether you’re an industry professional, a curious visitor, or a student exploring the field, the Center for Architecture offers a space for connection, creativity, and critical conversation—empowering everyone to engage with the transformative power of architecture. centerforarchitecture.org