Overview

The Center for Architecture presents “CFA Lab: Repair — Democracy and Urban Spaces,” a multi-month exhibition and residency running May 7 through September 2, 2026, at 536 LaGuardia Place in New York City. The exhibition opens as part of the Center’s Spring Exhibitions Opening Night on May 7, 6 to 8pm.

CFA Lab is the Center for Architecture’s annual multi-disciplinary residency programme that offers new voices in architecture and design full authorship over dedicated areas of the Centre’s platforms. The 2026 cohort was selected through an open call inviting architects, urban planners, designers, artists, cultural conservationists, and community activists to respond to a single prompt: Repair. Two group residents were selected whose projects operate at the intersection of ecological systems, energy infrastructure, community power, and the politics of the ground.

Focus

The prompt “Repair — Democracy and Urban Spaces” frames the concept of repair as simultaneously material and political. The CFA Lab brief positions repair not merely as the maintenance of physical infrastructure but as a lens through which to examine and reimagine democratic, equitable urban spaces, addressing the political and social inequities embedded within the built environment.

The two selected projects approach this prompt from different but complementary positions: one working through the lens of community energy and fossil fuel infrastructure; the other through the ecological and political implications of pavement and the ground beneath cities. Together they propose that the repair of democratic urban space requires attending to both who controls energy and what covers the ground.

Residents will address the urgent need to repair not only the physical infrastructure of our environments but also the political and social inequities embedded within them.
Center for Architecture, CFA Lab 2026 Brief

Resident Projects

Graphic design for the exhibition is by WSDIA. Both projects were developed over the Lab’s multi-month residency period, with public programming running alongside the exhibition throughout its run.

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Residents and Context

Andrea Johnson and Ashley Dawson bring together community organising practice and academic environmental humanities to focus on New York City’s fossil fuel infrastructure as a site of both harm and potential repair. Their project, developed across the Lab residency, maps the geography of energy inequality in the city and argues that energy transition is inseparable from democratic repair of urban communities historically burdened by extraction and pollution.

Friends Making Work, the collaboration of Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, and Gabriel Vergara, addresses the ecological violence of urban pavement: the suppression of ground hydrology, heat island intensification, loss of soil ecology, and the foreclosure of community green space. DEPAVE frames the removal of pavement as an act of design and civic repair simultaneously, connecting material ground conditions to the democratic access to urban nature.

About CFA Lab

CFA Lab is the Center for Architecture’s residency programme for new voices in design. By offering full authorship over dedicated platforms, it provides an institutional infrastructure for emerging practitioners to develop content beyond what the conventional exhibition format typically allows. Past Lab cohorts have addressed food systems, climate adaptation, housing, and civic technology. The 2026 edition is the first to take repair as its central framework, a choice that is both timely and politically specific given the current condition of public infrastructure, democratic institutions, and urban ecology in the United States.

Audience

The exhibition is open to the general public at the Center for Architecture, free of charge, through September 2, 2026. Its four-month run allows for extended public engagement. The related events programme, which includes field tours to specific New York City sites, extends the exhibition’s frame beyond the gallery into the urban landscape it addresses. The audience spans architecture and design professionals, community advocates, educators, students, and general visitors.

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