Where was the design at NYCxDESIGN 2026?

New York is still buzzing from another event-filled design week. NYCxDESIGN featured over 250 events and activations across the last seven days. Even still, new exhibitions kick off this weekend. (Lichen, off the heels of its Up in Smoke exhibition, is mounting a new show today on pieces made from city property.)

If events are happening later they’re also starting earlier and in more locations beyond Manhattan. The expanded week of design is no doubt a sign of a growing, lively design week. But with growth comes more people, more people begets more money, and more money brings bigger brands and installations. Lexus returned to the fair with another pavilion, showcasing a new car adorned with art by Alex Alpert and employees all outfitted in luxury leather by Denise Fócil. It’s here that the official week of design kicked off with a press conference.

An AI Summit, dubbed Future Now, was also part of the official week of design, along with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars North America, which hosted a salon for design students about its bespoke design process. Technogym got in on the action, too—Is this Milan Design Week or New York?

The increasingly buzzy festival was met with aptly larger spectacle and fanfare. This year, many showrooms didn’t have anything new to show or re-conceptualize. Instead, tattoos, oysters, ice cream, and or a VIP after hours party hosted in an empty pool with no phones allowed were the stars of the show, sadly not design.

Where was the design at New York’s design week? When it did show up, so did the community (and, coincidentally, a lot of lighting design), which is part of what makes New York’s festival different from Milan. While Milan has the critical mass, the internationality, A$AP Rocky, and CEOs to get face time with, New York offers a place to walk right on up to designers with no line or pretense, to put emerging, local, and independent designers on the map and engage with the people actively shaping the fabric of the city.

Not everything was spectacle, no substance. Adam Rolston of INC Architecture & Design’s Salon series returned for another year, opening studios to host discussions on the housing crisis, the business of running an architecture practice, and image-making. Guided tours across the city also returned, highlighting projects in Brownsville and Harlem, including tours dedicated for high school students to learn about design.

Hopefully future iterations of the festival continue and expand on these engaged and intimate offerings to resist true Milan-ification. Of course, some presentations this year already did. Resourceful constructions, innovative reuse, and resistance to waste and political-born nihilism were active and present. See some of the exhibitions that cut through the fluff and got to the heart of design week below.

Safe & Sound

Slow Construct, a curatorial platform for design and architecture, and Leroy Street Studio, a local architecture firm, collaborated on an exhibition exploring what refuge looks like amidst political and economic upheaval. Presented at Allen Street Studio, Safe & Sound brings together 24 architect-makers responding to the theme through different art, design, and materiality. Han Seungmin showcased White Picket Chair, a stainless steel seat that takes after the metal fences that line homes in New York, familiar to many Asian and West Indian families. Che-Wei Wang brought a traveling light to offer companionship in the darkness. As a whole, the show mediates on how homes, and thus design, can make you feel safe.

Material Innovations with Ancient Roots

Parsons Healthy Materials Lab—sponsored by Hydro, Cosentino, and Habitat Matters—put together a library of sustainable design materials. These focus on innovations that reduce carbon, eliminate toxins, and are rapidly renewable, based on plants or minerals. The library included Alkemis paint, Durra Panel (wall panels made of straw), and Hempitecture, and more. It also hosted workshops and conversations around repairing design and unboxing carbon.

Frame in Frame: Swiss Design in Motion

This exhibition brings together Swiss film and furniture in a new, expansive visualization of Swiss design’s modular and systems-based thinking. Presented by the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, the show pairs experimental films, never-before seen in the U.S., from Basel School of Design’s pioneering Film + Design program. It’s paired with design interventions by Ben Ganz and Panter&Tourron, featuring furniture by Vitra and USM Modular Furniture.

High Touch

The legacy of Joe D’Urso and Ward Bennett was on display at the MillerKnoll Gallery. Luke Baker, curated the show after speaking with D’Urso and the duo’s collaborators and colleagues. The exhibition pairs how both designers were united by a sense of modular, minimal industrialism, as seen in imagery of their interiors (including the Calvin Klein offices) and original furniture.

Put Together

Twenty nine local New York designers presented work opposing the rules of their craft. Presented by Placed gallery within the historic AT&T Long Lines Building (thanks to real estate company Rudin), Put Together traversed material and typology. Miles Lawton Gracey brought forth a hand-carved Conch Couch. Henry Merker continued the wooden materiality with a mahogany table lamp, and Andee Ashelman crafted lighting from supermarket ad paper from the stoops of Ridgewood, Queens. playinghouse also curated a selection of lighting within the show.

Afternoon Light Design Fair

The sophomore fair from Minya Quirk and Deirdre Maloney merged contract design with collectible works even further, and the result was both smart and stylish. Humanscale showed off a new lounge chair, pushing their ergonomic design a step further. Palet, the Netherlands-based ceramic tile brand debuted in North America with a light installation. Rhyme Studio debuted Lanalux, a wool-based interior system for lighting, acoustics, and air filtration. Meanwhile, Symbol and USM installed a listening lounge to showcase their Symbol Speaker Collection, and a number of brands—Dimwit and Zetr—showed a chic twist to electrical hardware.

144 Vanderbilt Avenue Exhibitions

Office of Tangible Space and VERSO, Luke Malaney, and Paraphernalia took over different parts of 144 Vanderbilt, the new pinky-hued campus by SO—IL and Tankhouse. It made for a celebration of local, independent, and emerging designers throughout the city and beyond. Paraphernalia’s Alien exhibition was particularly unique, no doubt in part because of the theme of being an outsider. Case in point: Adeye Jean-Baptiste’s kooky creatures nod to both Pac-Man and Caribbean masks.

SHINE

Curated and designed by Harry Allen at The Seaport, SHINE is one of NYCxDESIGN’s Festival exhibitions, and it brought a wealth of creativity. The 70 participating designers approach lighting in diverse ways: John Junior Kim uses rocks atop a carved wooden board as a way to tune light; Max Knecht uses a milk jug to cast a ceramic table lamp; Bechara Maalouf draws forms from cast iron windows in Lebanon; LOT-EK reuses a fragment of a shipping container to in an ode to Castiglioni; and much, much more.