10 must-see architecture & design events happening this March in LA, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Buffalo, DC, Montreal, Munich, and Weil am Rhein

As winter winds down, now's the time to get out and experience the variety of exciting architecture and design-related festivals, exhibitions, conferences, and symposia available throughout the month of March.

From the roster of ongoing and upcoming events listed on Bustler, here are our featured picks worth checking out.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Criticism Now: Where next for writing on the city? | March 11, Cambridge

"This panel discussion brings together five of the most prominent architecture critics and writers from across the US to discuss the evolving role and future direction of criticism today (Mark Lamster, Alexandra Lange, Thomas de Monchaux, Anjulie Rao, Mimi Zeiger, chaired by Oliver Wainwright). [...] In an underfunded media landscape, PR companies increasingly control the message, blocking probing eyes from access, and dictating who gets to publish, and for whom. Has criticism lost its way? How can we restore its urgency, engage new audiences, hold power to account, and shine a spotlight on the forces that are shaping the built environment, for better and worse?"

Core Samples | March 12 – June 30, Los Angeles

"'Core Samples' brings daylight to decades of previously unseen work and media in UCLA AUD’s archives, an assemblage that demonstrates the both volume and heterogeneity of how design has been recorded over the years at AUD and beyond. [...] The exhibition raises questions big and small: What is kept? What is lost? How can our generation solicit others to engage in the process of preservation? How can our effort be both beautiful and objective, aesthetic and scientific, and how can we seek to avoid the biases of our own priorities? How can the exhibit allow current students and faculty to connect to previous AUD generations? How does an institution look at itself and generate a draft of its own history?

The Big Draw | March 14, Washington, DC

"The National Building Museum hosts its third annual THE BIG DRAW, a free day-long festival that invites visitors of all ages to discover the power of drawing as a tool for better understanding the world around us. A standout attraction at this year’s festival will be a live drawing demonstration and smaller guided workshops from David Macaulay, Caldecott Medal-winning author and illustrator. Macaulay’s book, Rome Antics is featured in a special gallery within the Museum’s long-term exhibition Building Stories that explores the world of architecture, engineering, construction, and design through the lens of children’s books."

All Magnificent and Wild: Notes on Chicago Residential Hotels | March 14 – April 11, Chicago

"All Magnificent and Wild is an ongoing typological research project on Chicago’s residential hotels—a hybrid architectural form that emerged in the late nineteenth century to host a transient workforce seeking employment and inexpensive lodging: settlement houses, SROs, flophouses, YMCAs/YWCAs, charitable institutions, religious missions, women’s clubs, workingmen’s palaces, and cage hotels—whose traces have been largely erased by decades of urban renewal and gentrification. The forty case studies on view— each redrawn in plan and cabinet axonometric and correlated with archival material, texts, and historical maps—are the outcome of a graduate and undergraduate courses led by Associate Professor Francesco Marullo at the UIC School of Architecture."

Chimera: The Architecture of Contemporary Utopias | March 26 & 27, Los Angeles

"Are utopias still necessary—and if so, for whom? Fifty years ago, architects imagined worlds to come. Today, many have ceded the future to market logic, treating global capitalism as inevitable and reality as fixed. In this climate—where techno-optimism competes with ecological despair—it seems easier to picture the end of everything than the transformation of anything. The system endures because it convinces us that change itself is impossible."

International Mass Timber Conference 2026 | March 31 – April 2, Portland

"The International Mass Timber Conference is the largest gathering of mass timber experts in the world, focusing on the entire industry supply chain. This is our 10th annual event in Portland, Oregon, USA. Explore cross-laminated timber (CLT), nail-laminated timber, glulam, mass plywood panels, dowel-laminated timber, and laminated veneer lumber; and the opportunities and obstacles in global design, construction, development, manufacturing, and more."

ONGOING EVENTS

The Resilient Campus - Competition Exhibition | Until March 13, Buffalo

"The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning is excited to showcase the final team submissions for The Resilient Campus, an international design competition — which set out to address resilience and adaptability challenges to provide insights for rethinking campus environments at large. The competition challenges architects, landscape architects, planners, and other allied design professionals to boldly envision UB’s South Campus—a public campus on its way to becoming carbon neutral—as a socio-ecologically integrated landscape. Framed by a planetary polycrisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and human vulnerability, the competition positions the University as a test site where design strategies can be replicable across all scales of the built environment."

Don't miss Archinect's recent feature about the initiative: How International Design Teams, Students, and Faculty Reimagined the University at Buffalo as a Resilient Campus

City in the Cloud - Data on the Ground | Until March 8, Munich

"Despite their impact, data infrastructures are rarely discussed from architectural or political perspectives. Architectural research can reveal these hidden material and political entanglements. That is our goal: to shed light on the cloud, from its historical foundations to future possibilities, and to argue for integrating the design and planning of data infrastructure more closely into societal and political awareness. The exhibition is organized around three themes: Elemental – Spatial – Temporal and it unfolds through a series of guiding questions."

Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994 | Until August 30, Montreal

"Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994 proposes an understanding of the Culture Lab as a medium in its own right: a form of interactive entertainment that operates through liveness and staged conditions for participation, eliciting specific behaviours from participants. As evidenced by materials in the Brian Boigon fonds at the CCA, these principles also structured Boigon’s broader practice as an artist, data architect, and design theorist. The exhibition centres on Culture Lab, presenting previously unseen video recordings in an accelerated, thirty-six-channel display that fragments and recomposes the symposium’s architecture."

Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse | Until May 10, Weil am Rhein

"Numerous science fiction films – from Star Trek to 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner – are populated by classic designs that have shaped our image of the future. In reverse, many designers of objects destined for some type of imagined future seek inspiration in the genre of science fiction. The fascinating dialogue between science fiction and design is the subject of a new exhibition in the Vitra Schaudepot. Under the title »Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse«, over 100 objects from the museum’s collection will be staged in a futuristic display by the Argentine visual artist and designer Andrés Reisinger. Supplemented by selected works from the realms of film and literature, the show presents a range of examples from the early twentieth century to the so-called Space Age of the 1960s and ’70s, and even further to recent design objects that have been conceived exclusively for the virtual worlds of the metaverse."

Do you have an architecture or design event you want to promote? Submit it to our event calendar via Bustler for review and a potential feature.