On View: Open Access
October 12, 2026
Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design
A group exhibition that responds to Van Alen Institute’s design archive through the lens of access and erasure
On view through November 13, 2026
October 12, 2026 — Brooklyn, NY — Van Alen Institute presents Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design, a mixed-media exhibition that responds to Van Alen’s extensive institutional archive. Through five projects by Annie Barrett, Daniel Pittman, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel; Kholisile Dhliwayo; Friends Making Work; PROPS SUPPLY; and Gillian Waldo, the exhibition asks: What does this archive tell us about who design has historically served, and who has it erased? Open Access is curated by Andrew Brown, Director of Programs, Van Alen Institute; Hayley Eber, Executive Director, Van Alen Institute; and Mina Morales, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition is on view at 303 Bond Street, Brooklyn through November 13, 2026.
Van Alen Institute has spent more than 130 years at the intersection of design ambition and civic life, and its archive — comprising design competition boards, jury records, travel logs, and correspondence — is one of the most extensive records of U.S. architectural history. But an archive is never neutral. It reflects the priorities, blind spots, and values of those who built it: who was invited in, whose ideas were resourced, and whose were left out entirely. Open Access: Exploring 130 Years of American Design treats the archive as living material: something to be questioned, reinterpreted, and held accountable.
“What an archive leaves out says as much as what it keeps,” said Hayley Eber, Executive Director, Van Alen Institute. “Van Alen’s 132-year collection is an extraordinary record of American design. In Open Access, five artists and design teams push us to look critically at this history. With wit and ingenuity, they ask who has shaped our built environment, and who has gone unrecorded.”
In examining Van Alen’s archive, the exhibition’s participants surface the intertwining themes of structural exclusion and architecture’s relationship to land. Through a series of posters on trace paper, Kholisile Dhliwayo’s Whose Land Are You On? places selected archival programs in direct dialogue with the political landscape of those same times and places. By drawing attention to contemporaneous political legislation and activist materials, the project emphasizes the importance of acknowledging Indigenous lands where one lives and works, and challenges societal narratives that erase colonial actions. Gillian Waldo’s Western Pattern Language draws attention to the grammar and language use within competition briefs and entries, often revealing an implicit message of colonization, domination, or obliteration of others. Through imagery and text on three CRT monitors and a microfiche station, the project asks us to consider the role architects play in furthering the objectives of state power. Haunting the Archive by Annie Barrett, Daniel Pittman, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel also searches for suppressed voices, focusing on those absent from Van Alen’s awards, briefs, and long-running Beaux-Arts Ball. Using projections and a sound installation of archival fragments, reconstructed testimonies, and the atmosphere of past Beaux-Arts Balls, Haunting the Archive makes the structurally invisible appear.
Re-grounding the Archive by Friends Making Work examines architecture’s tendency to abstract land into a single, stable line. Looking at the institution’s attitudes toward the ground over the last 100 years, the project features a series of speculative “core samples” made of paper pulp and clay, with each “core” referencing competition proposals at various moments in Van Alen’s history. Changing views of the environment are also found in PROPS SUPPLY’s Survival — A World Ecological Study Centre, which traces ecological thinking in design over the past five decades. Simulating a working research environment, the project responds to Van Alen’s 1973 competition of the same name through a survey of the competition’s cultural and political context, and culminates in a new architectural response redesigned for 2026.
Open Access is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Material support is provided by METALSISTEM, TALAS, K-array, Qualia Forge, Sharp, and TAD.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS
The Architectural Anarchive: Reimagining the Design Archive
Monday, October 19, 6–8pm (RSVP)
Shannon Mattern (Metropolitan New York Library Council) leads a discussion around how archives determine what’s worthy of collection and preservation, and the role of the architectural archive in an age of extractive technologies.
The Accidental Archive: A Community Workshop
Thursday, October 22, 6–8pm (RSVP)
Writer and artist Divya Mehra leads an interactive workshop to explore our own personal archives, asking questions about the value of the mundane and what it means to embrace our own archival practice.
An Archival Séance: The Critical Record
Thursday, October 29, 6–8 pm (RSVP)
Architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier, in collaboration with Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, conducts a séance-inspired performance that tunes into the spirits of those not present in the archives.
Visit vanalen.org for additional program information.
EXHIBITION TEAM
Curators: Andrew Brown, Director of Programs, Van Alen Institute; Hayley Eber, Executive Director, Van Alen Institute; and Mina Morales, Curatorial Assistant
Exhibition design: NOT NOT
Graphic design: Studio Loutsis
Fabrication: Kurt Brosnan, East Hill Digital Fabrication
LOCATION
303 Bond Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
HOURS
Open Access is on view during Van Alen Institute’s opening hours:
Monday–Thursday, 10 am–6 pm
Select extended hours
Van Alen Fall Fest: Saturday, October 17, 12–4 pm (RSVP)
Friday/Saturdays, 12–6 pm: October 23–24 and 30–31, November 6–7 and 13
About the participants
Annie Barrett is a founding principal of aanda architects, an award-winning, women-owned architecture, design, and planning practice based in Brooklyn, NY and Philadelphia, PA. Daniel Pittman is a partner at TAD (technology, architecture, design), a consultancy operating at the convergence of digital and physical environments, where he is responsible for company strategy. Paula Vilaplana de Miguel is a designer, creative director, and curator working across architecture and design, technology, and contemporary art.
Kholisile Dhliwayo is an architect, artist, and curator working between Lenapehoking-NYC and along the east coast of Australia: Naarm-Melbourne and Warrane-Sydney. His interdisciplinary practice draws on cultural practices and collective histories to produce community-centered architecture, art, and installations. His work through art, architecture, exhibition and installation is grounded in a commitment to spatial equity and justice, embracing multiplicity and intersectionality.
Friends Making Work is an NYC-based design collective and practice of material interests co-founded by Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, and Christine Giorgio. They make material interventions that span exhibitions, media, and transdisciplinary design, with cumulative backgrounds in architecture, digital media and illustration, urban design, and film.
PROPS SUPPLY is a multi-disciplinary design studio based in Brooklyn, New York, cofounded by Lucy Siyao Liu and Matthew Bohne. PROPS SUPPLY specializes in visual identities, brand systems, world building and architecture. PS projects have been featured in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, ArchDaily, The Architect’s Newspaper, e-flux Architecture, Art in America, New York Review of Architecture, Brutus, Fader, and the Mozilla Foundation.
Gillian Waldo is originally from Baltimore, Maryland, based in Chicago, and makes short nonfiction works on 16mm. Her work is interested in the intersection of history and the built world and how decisions regarding infrastructure, policy, and labor have informed the environments we live in. Her work has screened at Prismatic Ground, Indie Lisboa, Open City Documentary Festival, UnionDocs, Cosmic Rays, Rooftop Films, Arquiteturas, Grain Urbain, and ICDOCS, among other festivals. She is the recipient of a 2026 Creative Capital Award for a project on the life of architectural photographer Richard Nickel.
About Van Alen Institute
Van Alen Institute is a driving force behind community-led urban design, which believes that local knowledge and care enrich the design process. Since 1894, Van Alen has invested in people with a passion for improving cities through the power of architecture and design. Our public space projects build unconventional coalitions of designers, local stakeholders, and city leaders, and we support their visions through project scoping, hands-on guidance, and seed funding. From our home in New York City, our work confronts longstanding power imbalances in citymaking, showcases the vanguard of community-led design, and supports the next generation of designers in creating more just cities.
See all work at vanalen.org.
Media contacts
Alisha Kim Levin, press@vanalen.org
Elisa Smilovitz, elisa@elisasmilovitz.com