Installation view of The Zones (2025) by Emma Chen, Eda Sarac Sarac, and Claire Yuen, supervised by Humbi Song and Sadi Wali, presented as part of last year’s Design Build exhibit at Industrial Arts in Markham, July 26, 2025.

You’re invited to Responsive Architecture: From a Surface to System, a public exhibit of four architectural pavilions designed and built by students from the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, with instructor Humbi Song and teaching assistant Sadi Wali, as part of the 2026 Summer Design Build course.

Working in teams, students develop four pavilions, each beginning with a single architectural facade panel. Starting from hand sketches and developed through Grasshopper, generative AI tools and digital fabrication, each panel is shaped by a set of material operations – folding, pleating, creasing, joining – that push a single two-dimensional sheet of material into something as three-dimensional as possible, forming one wall chunk of a larger structure.

From there, each team asks what its architectural facade panel actually encodes. A facade is never just a surface: it is the result of flows of energy, material, labor, and information – from the  processes that fabricate it to the wider infrastructures of technology, ecology, and human-machine interaction it draws on. For example, one might trace the human-machine choreography of CNC cutting and folding; another links the computational tools and AI used in its own design to the energy, water, and land consumed by the data centres now rising in Markham’s Commerce Valley. Each pavilion turns that hidden system into something you can walk through and inhabit.

The result is a set of structures that treat technology as both a social and a spatial condition, and that make visible the infrastructure usually kept out of sight. Visitors are welcome to move through the work and talk with the students who made it.

Co-produced and co-presented by John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design and Markham Public Art, with the support of the Varley Art Gallery of Markham.