Brooklyn NOW! 2026

Brooklyn NOW! 2026 brought together projects, practices, and public conversations that reflected the people and ideas shaping Brooklyn’s built environment today. Drawn from more than 120 submissions, the exhibition presented 20 finalist projects across six thematic groupings, creating a collective portrait of a borough defined by housing, public life, education, adaptive reuse, infrastructure, and environmental responsibility. Rather than advancing a single curatorial thesis, the exhibition used thematic groupings and shared keywords to reveal connections across disciplines and scales, showing how Brooklyn’s design culture is increasingly civic minded, resourceful, and grounded in everyday forms of care and participation.

The selected projects made that argument tangible. Works such as Bernheimer Architecture’s 300 Huntington, MESH Architectures’ Timber House, Mookntaka’s Friends from the Canal, and WXY’s BQE Corridor Vision helped frame Brooklyn as a place where design is shaped less by monumentality than by resilience, access, and public engagement. Other featured projects, including Herkimer Apartments, Webster Apartments, Boys and Girls High School Passive House Training Center, City Kids Education Center, One World School + Community Center, and Asia Art Archive in America, expanded that picture through housing, educational, cultural, and community based work.

Exhibition Online Gallery

Public Programming Events

The public programming extended those themes into dialogue. Building Brooklyn NOW opened the series by asking who is building Brooklyn today and by framing the exhibition as a shared civic project shaped by architects, designers, students, and communities. It established the overall tone of the series by positioning Brooklyn’s built environment as something formed through public life, collective authorship, and ongoing conversation.

Taken together, the exhibition and its programs have presented Brooklyn as more than a site of development. They have offered a public record of how architecture, advocacy, education, infrastructure, and cultural work intersect in shaping the borough today, while also demonstrating that the most meaningful conversations about design are often those that move beyond objects and into questions of participation, equity, and shared civic futures.

BPL Library for Arts & Culture
10 Lafayette Avenue, Second Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11217

- 4/02 Building Brooklyn NOW | (Opening) Architecture, Community and the Next Generation

- 4/09 Housing Brooklyn NOW | Design, Advocacy and Community Voices

- 4/13 Futures Brooklyn NOW | Public Storytelling and Creative Place Making

4/23 Public Brooklyn NOW | How Public Spaces Shape Neighborhood Life

4/30 Practicing Brooklyn NOW | (Closing) Working Locally in a Global City

Resources

Brooklyn NOW! Information Sheet

Brooklyn NOW! Sponsorships