AIA NY Center for Architecture to present New Practices New York 2025: Voice

Manhattan, NY The Center for Architecture is presenting “New Practices New York 2025: Voice”, opening on Thursday, May 8, 2025, at 6:00 pm. The exhibition will showcase the six winners of the most recent cycle of the competition, offering a glimpse into the future of New York City’s architectural landscape.

The Competition

Since 2006, the New Practices New York competition, organized by the AIANY New Practices committee, has served as the preeminent platform for recognizing and promoting young and innovative architecture and design firms in the city.

For the ninth cycle of the biennial competition, launched in 2024, the committee asked applicants to consider the theme “Voice,” seeking practices who offer a distinctive voice in engaging present-day critical issues. The competition called for portfolios with innovative design work and thinking that draws upon voice, both as an expression of unique identity and as an instrument for communicating purpose and intent. On February 11, 2025, a panel of jurors composed of Alice Grandoit-Šutka, Co-founder and Editor in Chief, Deem Journal , Kim Yao, FAIA, Principal, Architecture Research Office, Chris Leong, Co-founder, Leong Leong, Jaffer Kolb, Co-founder, New Affiliates, Beatrice Galilee, Co-founder and Executive Director, The World Around, selected the following six firms:

• A+A+A

• Aanda

• AUR

• BAAB

• IGG

• Mattaforma

"We gravitated towards firms that embodied the ‘Voice’ prompt—beyond demonstrating design excellence, these firms bring research, intelligence, humor, and an embrace of daily life into their work,” said Kim Yao, FAIA. “Mattaforma embeds research into practice, creating projects that celebrate shared experience and embrace responsible, innovative, and ethical material sourcing ... Inquisitive, provocative, and optimistic, Aanda’s work imagines what is possible, as an outgrowth of close dialogue with individuals and communities."

"This competition is such a great window into the landscape of emerging architects in New York at a given moment,” said Chris Leong. “I was glad to see such a diversity of practices in this group that were committed to building ideas and cultivating their voices in a challenging field.”

THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition will showcase built, unbuilt, and speculative work by the firms through photography, diagrams, and renderings. The exhibiting six firms feature new approaches and models for working in architecture, promoting a spirit of experimentation in the design process. The highly innovative work by these young, emerging practices will provide audiences with an opportunity to glimpse into the future of New York City’s architectural landscape.

“We are excited to have the exhibition be a larger public platform to share the voices of this new cohort of New Practices,” said Ryan Brooke Thomas, Principal, Kalos Eidos, and Max Worrell,

Partner, Worrell Yeung, Co-chairs of the AIANY New Practices Committee. “The winners represent a diverse range of firms but each of them is thinking and working in a unique way that influences the communities and environments in which we live. This exhibition, and future programming, provides an important venue to amplify and highlight their individual work while articulating common threads that connect this group."

New Practices New York will be on view through September 2, 2025.