Bay Architecture and Design Forum (BAD Forum)
1595 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94109
Nob Hill/Pacific Heights
Thursday, January 21 | 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Join us during SF Art Week to celebrate the inaugural BAD Forum (Bay Architecture and Design Forum) exhibition at Marine Layer.
The evening will feature a panel discussion with participating architects, who will share insights into their work, their contributions to the exhibition, and the ideas driving their practices. You’ll also learn more about BAD Forum, a new initiative bringing together emerging practitioners from across the greater Bay Area.
BAD Models for a Better Bay | January 16 - 24, 2026
BAD Models for a Better Bay is a collection of designs, stories, propositions, and ruminations that speculate on building a better Bay Area. Told through architectural models made by a collection of ideas-driven architecture and design practices rooted in the region—all founding members of the Bay Architecture and Design (BAD) Forum—the exhibition presents novel ideas about buildings and how they shape human experience.
Each model presents an idea, whether exploring a project’s relationship to its site, investigating formal and geometric principles, experimenting with materials, challenging inherited social conventions, or demonstrating how a project works. Together, the models explore new architectural expressions, respond to evolving housing laws, experiment with novel materials and fabrication methods, and speculate on how progressive architecture shapes the human experience in the Bay Area.
Complementing the models are Risograph-printed postcards featuring contributions from founding members of the BAD Forum in response to the prompt: How are you thinking about Bay Area design now?
BAD Models for a Better Bay represents an emerging collective of architectural practices rooted in the Bay Area and guided by the pursuit of architecture as a cultural act. The work is intentionally provocative, meant to elicit curiosity, debate, delight, innovation, and experimentation around how we build, live, and congregate today. This inaugural exhibition offers a snapshot of the ideas, practices, and questions shaping contemporary Bay Area design.
The work represents the range of practices and interests brought together through the BAD Forum, an independent collective inspired by organizations such as the LA Forum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Architectural League of New York. The forum aims to support a community of architects and designers—all based in the Bay Area—and engaging with critical issues through a cultural lens.
Images:
Founding members of the BAD Forum, Risograph postcards edition of 20
Dan Spiegel & Megumi Aihara, SAW // Spiegel Aihara Workshop, Inc. Title: AA_ADU
Clark Thenhaus, Endemic Architecture, Title: Heart Rock House