Madrid Design Festival, a Neri Oxman retrospective and a drag-queen-led tour of celebrity homes during Palm Springs' Modernism Week are among the architecture and design events featured in Dezeen Events Guide this month.

Among the other events taking place in February is the World Around architecture summit in New York, which will include presentations on major projects from the last year including Tadao Ando's controversial Bourse de Commerce redesign, Depot Boijmans by MVRDV and David Chipperfield's restoration of the Neuenational Gallerie in Berlin.

Read on for details of our five highlights from January and see Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

Madrid Design Festival
1 February to 31 March, Spain

Designers Hella Jongerius and Patricia Urquiola feature alongside curator Jane Withers in a female-heavy speaker line-up at this year's Madrid Design Festival.

Now in its fifth year, the event is set to host more than 60 talks and masterclasses as part of its Design Pro conference, in which leading local and international voices will reflect on their practice and speak first-hand about recent projects.

The accompanying events programme, which spans nearly two months, will see more than 40 exhibitions and hundreds of other happenings taking place in galleries, showrooms and workshops across the city.

Build
3 to 5 February, Portugal and online

Housed in Porto's OMA-designed Casa da Música, as well as being live-streamed online, this three-day conference will look at how high-tech and low-tech construction techniques can be combined to decarbonise the built environment.

In attendance will be Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari, who has built more than 45,000 affordable climate-change resilient homes using mud and lime, as well as representatives from Kengo Kuma & Associates and Ibuku, a Balinese studio specialising in bamboo construction.

Modernism Week
17 to 27 February, USA

Iconic modernist homes over more than 30 Palm Springs neighbourhoods are opening their doors this February as part of Modernism Week, including Albert Frey's Cree House and the former residence of architect William F Cody.

Visitors can explore the city's architectural landmarks by foot, bike or bus with the help of a number of guided tours, including a sunset drive past famous celebrity haunts and homes hosted by drag queen Bella Da Ball.

Meanwhile, the event's extensive speaker programme will encompass two talks from MAD Architects, a three-part symposium on the legacy of black designers in Southern California and a presentation from Signe Nielsen, the landscape architect behind Heatherwick Studio's floating park Little Island in New York.

Nature × Humanity: Oxman Architects
19 February to 15 May, USA

A biopolymer pavilion, 3D-printed death masks and a chaise longue that doubles as an anechoic chamber are among more than 40 projects by American-Israeli architect Oxman, which are on show as part of this exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The retrospective spans work created by Oxman's eponymous studio and under her leadership of MIT's Mediated Matter research group, looking at how it combines biomaterials and novel fabrication techniques to create a regenerative architecture that works for other species than just humans.

Collect Fair
23 to 27 February, UK and online

After moving online in 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the Collect fair for contemporary collectable craft and design is once again returning to London's Somerset House this month for its 18th edition.

Participating galleries are set to exhibit an unprecedented number of new artists while the Collect Open exhibition will showcase 12 installations from emerging artists hailing from Chile, Israel and the UK.

For those unable to attend in person, the fair is presenting virtual showrooms via the online art platform Artsy, while its accompanying talks programme will be live streamed.

Yasmeen Lari's portrait is courtesy of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan and the top image is by Yoram Reshef.

About Dezeen Events Guide

Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year.

The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks, as well as up-to-date information about what events have been cancelled or postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Inclusion in the guide is free for basic listings, with events selected at Dezeen's discretion. Organisers can get enhanced or premium listings for their events, including images, additional text and links, by paying a modest fee.

In addition, events can ensure inclusion by partnering with Dezeen. For more details on inclusion in Dezeen Events Guide and media partnerships with Dezeen, email [email protected].