HELEN BECHTEL

Helen Bechtel is an architect and independent curator who specializes in exhibitions that feature design and the built environment.

Bechtel’s newest exhibition, “Practicing Pluralism” opens at the Yale School of Architecture in the fall 2026.

Prior to that, her recent The Tuskegee Chapel: Paul Rudolph X Fry & Welch debuted at the Yale School of Architecture in 2025 and travelled to the National Building Museum in 2026. This exhibition features the collaboration between architects Paul Rudolph, Col. Louis Fry, Sr. and John Welch in the design and construction of the Tuskegee Chapel, a landmarked building completed in 1969 at the center of the historic Tuskegee University campus.

Previously, Bechtel was the Curator for Special Projects at the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, partnering with architect and artist Suchi Reddy, curator Isolde Breilmaier, and teams at Amazon Web Services and Autodesk to establish two works of installation architecture for the 2022 exhibition FUTURES.

In 2017, as a Guest Curator at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. she organized and curated an invited competition titled ABOVE The Renwick to establish a new work of installation architecture in the museum’s largest gallery space. She established the jury that selected Parallax Gap, by FreelandBuck, as the winner and oversaw its 5-month run at the museum. The Renwick is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum with a collection that focuses on American craft and decorative arts from the 19th century to the present.

Bechtel has served as an adjunct professor in the Design and Decorative Arts department at the Corcoran School of Art at George Washington University and on the editorial board of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston. She began her career in New York, NY and Washington, D.C., starting in the Curatorial Department of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA and then as an architect for Beyer Blinder Belle in New York, NY.

Bechtel earned a BA in Urban Studies and Civil Engineering from Stanford and a Masters in Architecture from Yale. At Yale she received the Gene Lewis Book Prize for excellence in residential architecture and was nominated for the Feldman Prize for her Advanced Studio work.

Bechtel currently lives and works in Washington, D.C.