23rd Annual Festival, September 10 to 27, 2026

The whole city
becomes the gallery.

For three weeks every September, Architecture + the City opens San Francisco's buildings, studios, and streets to everyone, with tours, talks, films, and youth programs across the city.

See the program View the auction

You already live inside the answer.

You spend almost your entire life indoors, inside rooms and streets and skylines that someone designed on your behalf. Architecture is the one art you cannot look away from, because you live inside it. It decides how you get to work, whether your block has shade, who can afford to stay, and whether a downtown recovers or empties out.

Architecture + the City is the month San Francisco makes that visible. We open the buildings, the studios, and the arguments to everyone, not just the profession, because the built environment belongs to all of us and every one of us has a stake in what comes next.

This year is different

This year, the festival isn't a series of events.
It's the start of a permanent change.

Architecture + the City 2026 launches Design the City, the Center's campaign to secure its downtown home for the next generation. The festival is the opening. The campaign is what it opens onto.

About the campaign

Why the Center does this.

The Center for Architecture + Design is San Francisco's public front door to design. We are not a firm and not a members' club. We are the place where the profession meets the public, in a storefront anyone can walk into off Sutter Street. The festival is that mission at full volume: 23 years of making the city's design conversation something you can actually attend.

The 2026 program