Based on the published book monograph Autonomous Urbanism: Towards a New Transitopia (AR+D Publishing), this exhibition translates an extensive body of research on autonomous mobility from the printed page into a spatial and experiential format. While the book examines the transformative impact that driverless vehicles will have on the future of cities, the exhibition focuses on how this research can be communicated through physical models, large-scale drawings, transportation maps, graphic narratives, and their spatial arrangement within the gallery.

 

The exhibition is conceived as a three-dimensional extension of the book, expanding its visual language beyond the conventions of publication. Research developed through maps, diagrams, typological studies, and speculative scenarios is reformatted across multiple scales and media, allowing visitors to move physically through ideas that were previously encountered sequentially on the page. Nearly 40 multi-scalar models spatialize and compare before-and-after transformations to streets, blocks, buildings, and transportation systems, while enlarged network drawings situate these architectural & urban propositions within broader metropolitan patterns of movement. Together, the models and drawings create a spatial field through which the research can be read comparatively rather than linearly. A second component translates the book’s architectural graphic novel into an exhibition-scale narrative, expanding its frames and scenarios into an environmental form of storytelling that allows visitors to encounter the day-to-day experience of a future driverless city.

 

The exhibition therefore moves between analytical research and narrative experience, between metropolitan systems and the perspective of an individual inhabitant, using scale, sequence, models, drawings, and graphic media to communicate the spatial consequences of emerging mobility technologies. Through this translation from print to exhibition, Autonomous Urbanism becomes both a representation of research and an experiment in how architectural research can be communicated spatially. The exhibition invites architects, urban designers, planners, and the broader public to engage with autonomous mobility not simply as a technological development, but as a design question whose future outcomes will be shaped by collective decisions about our cities and their public realms.​

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Displayed from 2/7/25 to 4/18/25 at Education Hall Gallery, New York Institute of Technology.

 

Exhibition Curator: Evan Shieh (Assistant Professor of Architecture)

Exhibition Design Team: Carolina Flores-Iglesias, Elise Park, Juan Ramirez, Kendal Eastwood, Melanny Rodriguez, Natalia Orellana (B.Arch ’25)

Exhibition Construction Team: Carolina Flores-Iglesias, Elise Park, Juan Ramirez, Kaleigh Trentadue, Kendal Eastwood, Lily Kljyan, Melanny Rodriguez (B.Arch ’25), Emily Galofaro, Sharon Cunningham, Yedeida Kariyev (B.Arch ’26), Yiki Dingmeng Liu (BFA.Arch ’25)

Fabrication Consultants & Support: Brian Polgar and the NYIT Fabrication Lab Team; Jeff Yinong Tao (Bjarke Ingels Group)

 

This exhibition was made possible thanks to the funding and support provided by the Dean’s office at the School of Architecture & Design, NYIT.