"Building Memory," New Exhibit by Auburn University Art Students, Open Now at the Central Library

"Building Memory" is an art exhibit is a collaboration between Auburn University’s Interior Architecture Program and the Birmingham Public Library’s Department of Archives & Manuscripts

Written by Roy L. Williams, Public Relations Specialist - Birmingham Public Library 

“Building Memory,” a new art exhibit by architecture students from Auburn University, is now open in the Central Library’s 4th Floor Gallery. The exhibition debuted on Tuesday,  October 20, and will be open during library hours through December 31, 2026.

The exhibit is a collaboration between Auburn University’s Interior Architecture Program and the Birmingham Public Library’s Department of Archives & Manuscripts.

Every summer since the program’s inception, Auburn University’s Interior Architecture students have ventured into the BPL Archives Department to encounter the past firsthand, engaging with primary resources, uncovering stories, and translating historical research into creative visions for the future.

In 2025, with the centennial celebration of the Linn-Henley Research Library on the horizon, the Archives Department of the Birmingham Public Library invited Auburn University’s Interior Architecture Program to turn its creative lens toward the home of those treasured resources.

The challenge: to imagine what the next chapter of this historic institution might look like.

This exhibition celebrates that collaboration and the transformative ideas that emerged from it. Students were invited to reimagine the third floor of the Linn-Henley Library as a Community Memory Lab and expanded Archives, a space where preservation and participation, scholarship and storytelling, history and contemporary life could intersect.

Drawing inspiration from the Archives’ collections and the layered histories held within them, the students’ proposals explore how physical space can become an active vessel for memory. Their designs ask us to consider not only how we preserve the past, but how we create spaces that invite communities to discover, contribute to, and shape their own histories.

The resulting work is both a design study and an act of imagination: a glimpse into how the Archives might evolve as a living, accessible, and creative center for collective memory.

Here are some photos from an opening reception for "Building Memory" held on Tuesday, October 20, in the 4th Floor Gallery of the Central Library.

An Auburn University student with his parents at the exhibit, looking at some of his artwork.

Auburn University art professor Rebecca O'Neal, left, poses with a fellow professor and the department head of AU's Interior Architecture Program  

AU students at "Building Memory" opening reception on October 20.