Speaking of Tomorrow explores a set of ideas and questions at the heart of Phyllis Lambert’s thinking and practice in architecture. Over the course of two months, the CCA’s Octagonal Gallery hosts conversations on photography, the environment, housing, the transformation of the city, the role of institutions, and the accountability of architectural practice. The gallery becomes an agora where guests and the public sit together to examine the connections between architecture and broader questions of society and collective responsibility. The format creates space for exchange and disagreement, and brings different forms of knowledge and experience into contact.

Throughout this program, conversations consider how photography and other forms of representation can reveal, document, and produce knowledge about architecture and the city; how institutions that produce, collect, exhibit, and circulate architectural knowledge might reconsider their relationships with their publics; how architectural practices can respond to ecological change and shifting relationships between human and non-human worlds; how preserving the city confronts the tension between the need for housing and the environmental consequences of construction, asking what preservation might mean today and whether building less can itself become an architectural position; and how architects can remain accountable to the people, places, and consequences affected by their decisions.

Speaking of Tomorrow takes Phyllis Lambert’s as open questions and brings them into contact with the present, asking what they might reveal about the conditions we face today and what they might make possible for the future.