Calendar

Join us to celebrate the opening of our two newest exhibits, and to celebrate the 2024 Chapter Design Award and Washingtonian Residential Design Award Winners!

The exhibition opening in the Sigal gallery, titled Designing a Learning City, reimagines our cities and public spaces as playful learning opportunities so that we can better prepare children for success in the 21st century. This exhibit is built upon the research supported by William Penn Foundation exploring Philadelphia's Playful Learning Landscapes Initiative. A joint project of Temple University's Infant and Child Laboratory, Playful Learning Landscapes Action Network (PLLAN), and the Brookings Institution. Playful Learning Landscapes is a broad umbrella initiative that marries community involvement and learning sciences with placemaking in order to design carefully curated playful experiences in everyday spaces. As it focuses on learning outcomes, particularly for children and families from under-resourced communities, Playful Learning Landscapes offers a new way to involve families in the kinds of experiences that enrich relationships and enhance children's development.

The exhibit opening in the Sorg gallery, Homesick: Camila Mancilla, challenges the traditional view of the home as a space linked to health and well-being, proposing instead that our homes also reflect our illnesses and mortality. Homesickness can be seen both as a medical condition and as a commentary on the "sick home," critiquing dense architecture that often disregards the cultural values inherent to dwelling. This exhibition serves as a theoretical and practical reflection, intertwining human behavior theories with architectural science. Each piece seeks to evoke emotions such as the repetition of memories, mania, and hysteria associated with longing and the pain of return, as described in the concept of nostalgia. At the same time, it critiques the notion of domestic architecture as inherently healthy, revealing instead how it can repress and homogenize us into a singular way of living. It invites us to view homes as places for illness rather than merely spaces for healing.

The 2024 Chapter Design and Washingtonian Residential Design Award winners are a group of extremely talented architects who not only demonstrate the value of good design, but also illustrate the wide variety of services performed by architects. Please help us to congratulate the winners and toast to this huge accomplishment!

We welcome your presence at this opening and invite you to attend. Drinks and light hors d’oeuvres will be served.