25 Things To Look Forward to in '25

John Hill | 6. January 2025

Image: World-Architects

With the new year upon us, World-Architects is looking ahead to some of the exhibitions, grand openings, and book releases that should be taking place over the next twelve months. Here we present 25 things to look forward to in 2025 in four categories: events, openings, publications, and reopenings.

5 Events

Manuel Herz is designing the Swiss Pavilion at World Expo 2025. (Visualization: Manual Herz)

LIVING Modernity: Experiments in the Exceptional and Everyday 1920s-1970s, an exhibition on different dimensions of modern houses, opens at the National Art Center, Tokyo on March 19 and runs until June 30.
The World Expo 2025 will be held in Osaka, Kansai, Japan from April 13 until October 13, with The Grand Ring, designed by Sou Fujimoto, encircling dozens of national pavilions in three thematic zones.
The World Around's annual summit will take place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in partnership with MoMA's Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, on Sunday, April 27.
The Venice Biennale's 19th International Architecture Exhibition, curated by Italian architect, engineer, author, and educator Carlo Ratti under the theme Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective, takes place from May 10 until November 23.
The Chicago Architecture Biennial celebrates its tenth anniversary with its sixth iteration, curated by educator Florencia Rodriguez under the theme Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change. It opens at the Chicago Cultural Center on September 12, 2025 and runs through February 28, 2026.

7 Openings

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which broke ground in 2018, is expected to open in Los Angeles in 2025. (Visualization: MAD Architects)

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Adu Dhabi, in the works since 2006 and drawn out thanks to numerous construction delays, is expected to be completed this year in the UAE capital's Saadiyat Cultural District, though no opening date has been set.
Planned for San Francisco, then Chicago, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, designed by MAD Architects, is finally expected to open in its third-times-a-charm home of Los Angeles later this year, seven years after construction started in the city's Exposition Park.
Moreau Kusunoki and Genton won a competition in late 2019 to design Powerhouse Parramatta, considered the largest arts and cultural investment in New South Wales since the Sydney Opera House, and then in 2023 an early-2025 opening was announced — fingers crossed!
The new home of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, designed by Adjaye Associates and Cooper Robertson, will open in the fall.
Construction on Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in China, designed by BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group, topped out last year, leading to anticipation that it will open later this year.
The V&A East Storehouse, which will display a half-million objects from the museum's collection in a building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will open in London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in May, while O'Donnell & Toumey's adjacent V&A East Museum will follow in spring 2026.
A short walk from Gehry's Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is the Zayed National Museum, designed by Foster + Partners with wing-like roofs that are meant to make it the centerpiece of the Saadiyat Cultural District when it opens this year.

7 Publications

Frida Escobedo, whose design for The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tang Wing was released last month, is the subject of a monograph coming out in 2025. (Visualization © Filippo Bolognese, courtesy of Frida Escobedo Studio)

Architecture, Not Architecture, the latest monograph on New York's Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has been designed by the studio as “a pair of structurally conjoined volumes” that allow for panoramic presentations of the studio's influential projects. It is being released by Phaidon in February.
Acclaimed Los Angeles architect Franklin D. Israel died in 1996 and next month, nearly 30 years later, Getty Publications is releasing Todd Gannon's Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture, a work of architectural history and biography on the influential architect whose career was cut short at the age of just 50.
Françoise Fromonot's The House of Doctor Koolhaas is the first book in the “Gumshoe” series “that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history.” The book, about OMA's Villa dall’Ava, is being published by Park Books in March.
Julia Watson's sequel to her immensely popular 2020 book Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism is Lo—TEK Water, which “explores sustainable technologies evolved by indigenous people who have built water-responsive infrastructures for generations.” Taschen is releasing the book in the spring.
To be published by Sternberg Press/MIT in May, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes's A Moratorium on New Construction will ask readers to take “a leap of faith” toward an alternative future: “Not demolishing, not building new, but building less, building with what exists, inhabiting it differently, and caring for it.”
Later this month Yale University Press is publishing Notes on Peter Eisenman: The Gradual Vanishing of Architecture, edited by M. Surry Schlabs, a celebration of Eisenman’s career as an influential architect, thinker, author, and educator, featuring contributions by “a distinguished group of architects and historians, teachers and students, and friends and colleagues.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is publishing a monograph on Frida Escobedo, the architect of the museum's recently unveiled Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing. Met director Max Hollein edits Suspended Moment: The Architecture of Frida Escobedo, set to be released in April.

6 Reopenings

OMA's addition to SANAA's New Museum will open in 2025. (Visualization: OMA/Bloomimages.de)

Donald Judd’s Architecture Office, one of the late artist's eleven buildings in Marfa, Texas, will reopen in September, following a years-long restoration and, due to a blaze in 2021, a reconstruction, carried out by SCHAUM/SHIEH.
Opening on May 16, Fenix is a new museum in Rotterdam housed in the grand Fenix Warehouse II, built on Katendrecht in 1923. Serving as a museum of migration, the design by MAD Architects is boldly signaled by a spiraling “tornado” on the roof.
Announced last September, Paris's Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain is reopening in a historic building on Place du Palais-Royal before the end of 2025. Jean Nouvel, designer of the institution's longstanding building, is also responsible for its new home.
The Frick Collection in New York City has been closed since 2020, first due to the pandemic and then for a renovation and expansion by Selldorf Architects. It will reopen its Fifth Avenue landmark in April.
The New Museum opened its first bespoke building in late 2007, a bento box-like design by SANAA. OMA's Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu are designing the museum's expansion next door, which will be linked to the SANAA building when it reopens later this year.
Closed since early 2023, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, will reopen on March 29 following the latest phase of Knight Architecture's conservation of Louis I. Kahn's masterpiece. (A previous phase reopened in 2017.)