Ever wondered what's inside 1 Spadina Crescent? Curious about the history of the revitalized neo-Gothic building at its centre? Whether you have always wanted to wander the halls or simply haven’t visited in a while, there is something for everyone to discover during Doors Open Toronto 2025. 

Each May, Doors Open Toronto invites the public to explore the city’s most-loved buildings and sites, and the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent will welcome visitors for tours May 24-25 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Plus, don’t miss a special lecture by the Toronto Society of Architects on Sunday, May 25 at 2:00 p.m.

Originally built as a prospect to the lake, the historic structure was the first site of Knox College in 1875, a military hospital during the First World War and the place where Connaught Laboratories manufactured insulin in the 1940s. Today it’s home to the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, which reimagined the complex for the 21st Century.

A striking contemporary addition, designed by NADAAA and completed in 2018, combines the Knox College structure with cutting-edge facilities, from versatile new studios to a digital fabrication lab. In addition to taking in the architectural splendours and storied history of the revitalized 1 Spadina hub, visitors will have plenty of current work to take in as well.

Here’s a glimpse at what will be on view:

End of Year Show 2024/2025 

The End of Year Show 2024/2025 presents a broad spectrum of student work from across the degree programs at the Daniels Faculty throughout the past academic year. Organized by Office In Search Of (OISO), an interdisciplinary design practice founded by Daniels Faculty lecturers Brandon Bergem and Jeffrey Garcia, this exhibition celebrates the creative accomplishments of our students and their commitment to reshaping the future. 

Eberhard Zeidler Library 

The library is open to the public, offering students, researchers, urban planners, design professionals, journalists and design aficionados access to art, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design collections unrivalled in Toronto.  

Admission to the Daniels Building and to all Doors Open venues is free. A dedicated brochure with map of the Daniels Building will be available for visitors.

Visit the Doors Open Toronto website for a full list of participating sites.

In the summer of 2021, when pandemic restrictions had most people working and studying remotely, Professor Pina Petricone began experimenting with a new model of experiential learning, putting together an intensive internship for 12 undergraduate students that departed from the traditional internship model.

Taking full advantage of the multidisciplinary nature of the Faculty’s BAAS program, her format replaced the usual pursuit of “practical experience” in a design office with one that encouraged students to contribute to and advance design research initiatives in everyday practice. 

One year later, this pilot course led to the official launch of the Design Research Internship Program (DRIP) in May of 2022, when Petricone invited 13 partnering practitioners to select one or two interns to undertake a defined design-research project over six weeks. 

Last summer, the program saw its biggest cohort to date, with some 30 internships offered by a host of top Canadian design firms. 

As DRIP 2025, which was available to all undergraduate Architectural Studies and Visual Studies students who had completed one credit of ARC courses at the 300 level, prepares to kick off, Petricone reflected on the first three years of the unique initiative, including the recipe for DRIP’s rapid success and also what comes next.

You have often talked about how the unique shape of DRIP is only possible within the rigorous context of Daniels’ BA in Architectural Studies program. What sets the Faculty’s DRIP program apart from other internships?

Unique across Canada, the pedagogical positioning of our BAAS program, which is firmly rooted in the liberal arts milieu, is what allows DRIP to define models of design research that advance lessons from design studios and course work into multivalent and sometimes interdisciplinary design research problems. 

Combined with the opportunity afforded by the concentration of some of the country’s most recognized design practitioners at the University of Toronto’s doorstep, DRIP finds itself in a new category within the long history of design internships. 

As an academic internship, DRIP moves freely beyond the mandate of “practical experience” or “readiness for the profession” of most architecture internships. At once unburdened by pre-professional obligations, DRIP exposes Daniels undergraduate students to architectural design as a form of research and in turn exposes the rich community of professional design practitioners to the unique talents of our students.

Left: ERA Architects DRIP intern Thea Freer analyzed and documented the historical, present-day and future attributes of Allan Gardens in Toronto. Middle: WZMH DRIP intern Alyssa Tao created a resource for the firm’s approach to building with timber. Right: Denegri Bessai DRIP intern Kaede Sato developed model-making techniques that tested spatial arrangements in ongoing residential projects.

DRIP understands that design research is an integral part of professional practice. Student interns tap into this activity and contribute to advancing applied research projects defined by their host firms. What range of research and findings have emerged in these first years of DRIP delivery?

It has been super-interesting to trace the patterns of research projects undertaken by DRIP interns in these first three years. Each internship relies on a practitioner-defined design-research project, born from exigencies of firm-specific past, present and/or future professional projects. The list of partnering firms is curated for diversity of practice models and value-driven enterprise, and no two projects are alike.

Both prospective interns and partnering practitioners declare their DRIP areas of practice, such as Urbanism, Landscape, Building Tectonics, Building Details, Public Space, Infrastructure, Digital Fabrication, Heritage, Energy Performance, Interdisciplinary, Housing, Public Policy, Community Engagement, Exhibition, Publication, etc., as well as their DRIP research methods, such as Conceptual Drawing, Mapping, Model Making, Technical Drawing, Archival Research, Historical Research, Photo Documentation, Rendering, Computation, Diagramming, Fieldwork or Spatial Analysis.

Common areas of focus, however, still lead to a wide range of research questions and outcomes.

Using various research methods in a number of practice areas, some of the prevalent design research that has emerged in DRIP’s first three years includes Typological Diagramming, Archival Documentation, Envelope Performance, Site Analysis, Critical Cataloguing, Proof of Concept by Modeling, Historical Tracing, Iterative Tracing by Rendering and Testing Tools such as comparing AI Platforms to advance digital practices in the design and documentation phases.

Left: Hariri Pontarini Architects DRIP intern Luca Patrick created a comparative archive that explores the unifying function of the exploded axonometric across several building types. Middle: ERA Architects DRIP intern Camilla Hoang traced lost heritage of seven 19th-century Black churches in Toronto via an interactive site model. Right: ZAS Architects DRIP intern John Wu created a catalogue of effective learning spaces for the firm’s innovative educational projects.  

Your ambitions to evolve and refine DRIP as a far-reaching experiential learning model are already underway. Now that it’s entering its fourth year, what do you imagine for DRIP’s future?

I believe one of the greatest assets of DRIP is how the program embraces the opportunity to educate senior BAAS students not only with academic and technical skills but also with an understanding of the broader societal impact of their work. Our students and partnering practitioners are passionate about doing meaningful work and we are making strides to build-in a diversity of practice best matched with a diversity of students in all streams of our undergraduate program.

A big part of this is slowly but surely increase engagement of interdisciplinary design practitioners and active agencies to partner with us and expand our roster to in turn invite their own collaborators to inform not only the DRIP experience but also the research project. Critical to this growth is directed feedback each year from both students and partnering practitioners, which has proved invaluable to the development of DRIP as a more far-reaching program and we’re working on two specific fronts. 

We are now exploring DRIP grouped initiatives where the strengths and interests of graduating students are assembled to work with a partnering practitioner that invites a collaborator(s) to amplify the six-week project. This is a great opportunity for out-of-province or out-of-country practitioners to engage in DRIP without the impairing logistics of students having to travel. 

At the same time, we are investigating how we might engage international partnering practitioners via our international (and national) students that might be already relocating for the summer. I’m excited by the possibilities!

This year’s DRIP begins on May 5 and runs until June 16.

Banner image: Collage of work produced by DRIP students during each of the program’s first three years. 

Homepage image: Collage of DRIP pilot work led by Pina Petricone at her design practice, Giannone Petricone Architects, with 12 BAAS students in 2021.

Three exhibitions coming up this spring at the Daniels Faculty will highlight the diverse academic and artistic research that students across our graduate and undergraduate programs have undertaken this year. 

Sixty-four students from the undergraduate thesis cohorts in Visual Studies (BAVS) and Architectural Studies (BAAS) will present their work in Studio, Critical Practices, Design, History and Theory, and Technology in two exhibitions: As the Archive Dreams on view at Foy House (92 Isabella St.) from April 17 to April 19, and Scales of Inquiry on view in the Daniels Building from May 22 to June 27.

The BAVS exhibition, As the Archive Dreams, posits the archive as a living network—an assemblage of memories and stories and objects that transcends time. It tends to the roots of the archive not as a static repository, but as a dynamic apparatus of preservation and transformation. The works within the exhibition draw upon personal histories, cultural narratives, communal knowledges, and proverbial legacies to reinterpret processes of remembrance and renewal. Visitors are invited to engage in the archival process, witnessing and contributing to ever-evolving temporal narratives that situate the archive as both a keeper of the past and an active participant in the present and the future. Here, as the archive dreams, it stands as testimonial to action, transformation, and the enduring power of memory; it is imbued with life. Mark your calendar for the exhibition opening on Thursday, April 17, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. 

The BAAS exhibition, Scales of Inquiry, meditates on the foundational concept of scale within design disciplines. It questions why, despite this foundation, the idea of scale itself seems to fall to the background, often reemerging only in discussions of representation and scope. Drawn to the immediate legibility afforded by a scalar logic, this exhibition organizes itself around a diverse range of design and research projects, sidestepping the simplicity of unilateral sorting by considering diverging conceptualizations of scale and scalability. Working between ideas from Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic Powers of Ten and Anna Tsing’s meditations on nonscalability and real world frictions, Scales of Inquiry moves beyond normative notions of scale, aiming to reflect the confluence of existing rational systems while challenging those same systems through subtle deviation and strategic disruption. 

In tandem, these exhibitions ponder memory, mutability, and friction as they manifest in time and space. The presented works themselves embody these concepts, not only through their conceptual and technical focuses, but in their prescription as thesis projects that simultaneously cumulate the past and hold future potential. Collectively, the 2025 undergraduate thesis cohort presents an assortment of works that survey what exists and speculates on what could be, inviting and intuiting worlds beyond the one we inhabit. 

The End of Year Show 2024/2025 (May 23–June 27, 2025) showcases a broad spectrum of student work from across the degree programs at the Daniels Faculty throughout the past academic year. Organized by Office In Search Of (OISO), an interdisciplinary design practice founded by Daniels Faculty lecturers Brandon Bergem and Jeffrey Garcia, this exhibition celebrates the creative accomplishments of our students and their commitment to reshaping the future. Current students interested in submitting their work from the Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 terms can do so via the online form by May 4. 

Tuesday, April 8 – Wednesday, April 30
Daniels Building
1 Spadina Crescent

Whether you're a future student, an alum or a member of the public with an interest in architecture, landscape architecture or urban design—you're invited to join the Daniels Faculty for Winter 2025 Reviews taking place April 9-30.  

Throughout the month, students from across our graduate and undergraduate programs will present final projects to their instructors and guest critics from academia and the professional community. 

All reviews will take place in the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (unless otherwise stated). Follow @uoftdaniels on social media for updates and join the conversation using the hashtags #danielsreviews and #danielsreviews25. 

Please note that times and dates are subject to change. 

Tuesday, April 8 | Undergraduate 

Design + Engineering I (ARC112) 
Instructors: Jennifer Davis (Coordinator), Natalia Semenova, Mohammed Soroor 
Room: 200 

Wednesday, April 9 | Undergraduate 

9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
Drawing and Representation II (ARC200) 
Instructors: Michael Piper (Coordinator), Samantha Eby, Aziza Chaouni 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Design Studio I (JAV101) 
Instructors: Jeffrey Garcia (Coordinator), Phat Le, Francesco Valente-Gorjup, Mahsa Malek, Marcin Kedzior, Youssef el Helou, Scott Sorli, Mariano Martellacci, Harry Wei, Onah Jung, Danielle Whitley, Kara Verbeek 
Rooms: 215, 230, 240, 330, 340, PM: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Thursday, April 10 | Graduate 

Landscape Design Studio 2 (LAN1012) 
Instructors: Liat Margolis (Coordinator), Terence Radford, Agata Mrozowski 
Rooms: 230, 330 

Urban Design Studio 2 (URD1012) 
Instructors: Carol Moukheiber, Kanwal Aftab 
Room: Main Hall (170B) 

Friday, April 11 | Undergraduate and Graduate 

9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
Design Studio II (ARC201) 
Instructors: Fiona Lim Tung (Coordinator), Anne Ma, Katy Chey, Maria Denegri, David Verbeek, Daniel Briker, Jennifer Kudlats, Lara Hassani, Kara Verbeek, Francesco Martire 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B, 170C), 215, 230, 240, 242, 315, 340 

Landscape Design Studio 4 (LAN2014) 
Instructors: Robert Wright (Coordinator), Todd Douglas 
Room: 330 

Monday, April 14 | Graduate 

Design Studio 2 (ARC1012) 
Instructors: Behnaz Assadi (Coordinator), Fiona Lim Tung, John Shnier, Mauricio Quiros Pacheco, Vivian Lee, Francesco Martire
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B, 170C), 230, 330 

Tuesday, April 15 | Graduate 

MLA Design Studio Thesis (LAN3017) 
Advisors: Elise Shelley (Coordinator), Fadi Masoud, Alissa North, Peter North, Liat Margolis, Francesco Martire, Robert Wright 
Room: 209, 215, 230, 240, 242, 330 

Wednesday, April 16 | Graduate 

MLA Design Studio Thesis (LAN3017) 
Advisors: Elise Shelley (Coordinator), Fadi Masoud, Alissa North, Peter North, Liat Margolis, Francesco Martire, Robert Wright 
Room: 209, 215, 230, 240, 242, 330 

MUD Urban Design Studio Thesis (URD2015) 
Advisors: Mason White (Coordinator), Michael Piper, Zahra Ebrahim 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B) 

Thursday, April 17 | Undergraduate and Graduate 

9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. 
Post-Professional Thesis (ALA4022) 
Advisors: Mason White (Coordinator), Christos Marcopolous, Carol Moukheiber, Miles Gertler, Noheir Elgendy 
Room: 209, 242, Second-Floor Hallway 

10:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. 
Comprehensive Studio III (ARC369) 
Instructors: Daniel Briker (Coordinator), Mauricio Quiros-Pachecho, Fiona Lim Tung 
Room: 230, 330 

9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. 
Landscape Architecture Studio IV (ARC364) 
Instructor: Peter North 
Room: 240 

Monday, April 21 | Graduate 

Architectural Design Studio 4 (ARC2014) 
Instructors: Sam Dufaux (Coordinator), Brigitte Shim, Jon Cummings, Daniel Chung 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B), 230, 330 

Tuesday, April 22 | Graduate 

Architectural Design Studio 4 (ARC2014) 
Instructors: Sam Dufaux (Coordinator), James Macgillivray, Maria Denegri, Christopher Cornecelli 
Room: Main Hall (170A, 170B), 230 

Wednesday, April 23 | Undergraduate 

Architecture Studio IV (ARC362) 
Instructors: Shane Williamson (Coordinator), Chloe Town, Mariana Leguia Alegria  
Room: Main Hall (170B), 230, 330 

Thursday, April 24 | Undergraduate 

9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
Design and Community-Engagement Capstone Project (ARC490) 
Instructor: Michael Piper 
Room: Main Hall (170C)  

Architecture Studio IV (ARC381) 
Instructors: Paul Howard Harrison, Suzan Ibrahim 
Room: 230 

Undergraduate Thesis 

• Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) (ARC457) 
  Instructor: Simon Rabyniuk 
  Room: Main Hall (170A) 
   

• Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) (ARC462) 
  Instructor: Jeannie Kim  
  Room: Main Hall (170B/C) 
   

• Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) (ARC487) 
  Instructor: Nicholas Hoban  
  Room: 330 

Friday, April 25 | Undergraduate 

Undergraduate Thesis 

• Senior Seminar in History and Theory (Thesis) (ARC457) 
  Instructor: Simon Rabyniuk 
  Room: Main Hall (170A) 
   

• Senior Seminar in Design (Thesis) (ARC462) 
  Instructor: Jeannie Kim  
  Room: AM: 230, Main Hall (170B/170C)
   

• Senior Seminar in Technology (Thesis) (ARC487) 
  Instructor: Nicholas Hoban  
  Room: 330 

Monday, April 28 | Graduate 

MARC Thesis – Architectural Design Studio (ARC3021) 

• Making with Machines 
  Advisor: Maria Yablonina 
  Room: Main Hall (170A)  
   

• LUNAR HABITAT: Design for Extreme Environments as a Driver of Architectural Innovation 
  Advisor: Brady Peters 
  Room: Main Hall (170B)  
   

• Architecture and the Right to Housing: The Practical Case for Radicalism  
  Advisor: Karen Kubey 
  Room: Main Hall (170C), 209 
   

• Architecture and Health Equity in an Imperiled World 
  Advisor: Stephen Verderber 
  Room: 230 
   

• String Figures 
  Advisor: Jeannie Kim 
  Room: 330, Library, AM: First-Floor Hallway, Commons near East Entrance 

Tuesday, April 29 | Graduate 

MARC Thesis – Architectural Design Studio (ARC3021) 

• LOBSTER TALES and Other Architectures Between Land and Sea 
  Advisor: Richard Sommer 
  Room: Main Hall (170A), 242 (PM) 
   

• Rehearsing the Parade: Ephemeral Architectures and Persuasion on the Move  
  Advisor: Miles Gertler 
  Rooms: AM: Main Hall (170B), 209, 230, PM: 209, 240, 315 
   

• Politics Policy and Architecture 
  Advisor: Michael Piper 
  Room: Main Hall (170C) 
   

• The Certainty of Uncertain Forms, or in search of anexact typologies / The Stone Edition Advisor: Carol Moukheiber 
  Room: 242 (AM), 330 

Wednesday, April 30 | Undergraduate 

10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
Advanced Topics in Architecture: Tools for Close Observation (ARC465)
Instructor: Zac Mollica 
Room: 230 

2:00-6:00 p.m. 
Advanced Topics in the Technology of Architecture: Attributes of Aliveness: Human-Computer Interaction in Design (ARC480)
Instructor: Humbi Song 
Room: 209, 230, 242

The annual Thesis Booklets showcasing the final projects of graduate and undergraduate students at the Daniels Faculty are now available online. 

The Graduate Booklet features the work of Master of Architecture (MARC), Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA), Master of Urban Design (MUD), Master of Visual Studies (MVS) and Post-Professional Master of Architecture students at the Faculty, while the Undergraduate Booklet showcases the final thesis and capstone projects of students in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies (BAAS) and Bachelor of Arts in Visual Studies (BAVS) programs.

Thesis Booklets are a Daniels Faculty tradition, printed for and distributed to students, as well as thesis advisors, external reviewers and guests during the final reviews period.

Flip through the latest booklets below or download PDF versions (Graduate, Undergraduate).

Graduate Thesis Booklet:

Undergraduate Thesis Booklet:

The second iteration of the Solar Biennale, a roving biannual that focuses on design’s engagement with the sun, kicked off last month in Switzerland. Among the projects on view in its central exhibition, called Soleil-s, are two by members of the Daniels Faculty.

Have a Nice Day, a synthetic solar canopy that’s animated by motion sensors (pictured above), was designed by Common Accounts, the Toronto- and Madrid-based studio co-led by Assistant Professor Miles Gertler with Igor Bragado. 

“The installation considers the sun as a cosmic battery whose rays can increasingly be replicated and directed toward myriad purposes,” explains Gertler, citing cellular rehabilitation, anti-aging and enhanced fertility among them.

Adds Bragado: “The project troubles the psycho-social associations with the sun in the age of climate change and channels them into sensible, energetic encounters in the space of the gallery.” 

The museum staging Soleil-s, Lausanne’s Musée de Design et d’Arts Appliqués (mudac), has acquired Have a Nice Day (the assembly of which is pictured below) for its permanent collection. The piece was fabricated in Portugal by ArtWorks.

The creation of the installation was supported by research assistants Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland, Emilie Tamtik and Elizaveta Grishina. Houde-Hostland is currently a student in the Faculty’s Master of Architecture (MARC) program, while Tamtik graduated from the program in 2024.

According to Gertler, “the piece is part of a larger body of research from my studio that focuses on self-design’s capacity to manage the body’s relation to the planetary.” In addition, it “furthers research presented in the film program of Shaping Atmospheres,” an exhibition staged last fall in the Faculty’s Architecture + Design Gallery. 

Shaping Atmospheres was curated by Ala Roushan and Associate Professor Charles Stankievech, who also have work on view at mudac.

A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads, their film invoking ancient Persian history for an alternative way of engaging with the sun (a still is pictured below), asks probing questions about mankind’s apparent desire to control the environment, reflecting “our hubris or, worse, our inab­il­ity to conceive of a harmo­ni­ous coex­ist­ence with other living beings.”

“In seek­ing to master the sun,” the artists posit, “are we jeop­ard­izing subtle ecolo­gical balances that we barely under­stand?”

Through the ancient figure of Mithra, they suggest, the Persians “viewed celes­tial phenom­ena as forces to engage in dialogue, rather than manip­u­late. Thus, the film poses an essen­tial ques­tion: In the face of current climate crises, could human­ity not recon­nect with former, more sens­it­ive ways of under­stand­ing?”

Soleil-s, the show in which both Have a Nice Day and A Shroud Woven of Solar Threads appear, was curated by Scott Longfellow and Rafael Santianez. It runs at mudac until September 21. 

The Solar Bien­nale, which was launched in the Netherlands in 2022, will also take place on the EPFL campus in Lausanne, “with events, parties and activ­it­ies to explore the many facets of the sun, a univer­sal symbol and source of life.”

Project installation image: ©Bruno Lança—ArtWorks

Professor emeritus and former dean Larry Wayne Richards has penned a lengthy treatise on design’s digital futures in the April edition of Canadian Architect.

Entitled “What Now? Acceleration and Imagination in Digital Space,” the article in the magazine’s Insites section lays out Professor Richards’s views on “the convergence of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics” in architecture, which he characterizes as “both a real danger and great opportunity” for the field.

“The digital realm and the extended realities of architecture are changing at breakneck speed,” he writes. “There is a sense of something radically different now—an accelerating cyber-avalanche, generating previously unimagined spatial complexity.”

In the piece, Professor Richards (pictured below) buttresses his analysis by weaving in interviews with three leading architects and educators: Meaghan Lloyd of Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, Douglas MacLeod of Athabasca University and Sandra Manninger of the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology.

In one instance, MacLeod tells Richards: “We need legislation to ensure equal access to emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. A.I. is particularly important because, if unregulated, it will result in job losses across all disciplines, including architecture.”

“In the future,” he continues, “it will be possible for A.I. to produce a fully detailed and code-compliant building design without the need for an architect. We need to think carefully about how A.I. is deployed.”

To read Professor Richards’s article in full, click here.

Professor Richards was dean of the Daniels Faculty from 1997 to 2004. He continues to serve the Faculty as professor emeritus.

Evoking the disorientation of rapid technological change, Some Acronyms, a graphic by Richards and Julie Fish, accompanies Professor Larry Wayne Richards’s article on design's digital futures in the April 2025 issue of Canadian Architect.

The Daniels Faculty will be well represented at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, running in the Italian city from May 10 to November 23.

In addition to lecturer and Applied Technologies Director Nicholas Hoban, who is on the creative team representing Canada at the 19th iteration of the event, a number of Faculty students and alumni are among the nearly two dozen recipients of Biennale Fellowships supported by Canada’s Council for the Arts.

The fellows, says the Council, which bestows the fellowships on architecture students and emerging arts practitioners from across the country, “will conduct independent research in Venice and serve as exhibition ambassadors at the Canada Pavilion, engaging with a global audience including architects, artists, designers, scholars and cultural leaders.”

“The Canada Council is delighted to support this year’s fellows as part of Canada’s long-standing engagement with the Venice Architecture Biennale,” Michelle Chawla, Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, said in a statement announcing 2025’s recipients.

“This is a diverse group of passionate, creative thinkers who will expand their independent research in an international context and enrich the Canada Pavilion. The fellows’ participation will deepen the conversation on how art and architecture meaningfully impact and strengthen society, in Canada and all over the world.”

Among the recipients associated with Daniels and U of T are:

Renée Powell-Hines
Master of Architecture student Powell-Hines is an artist and aspiring practitioner who views the field of architecture and design through the lens of equity, ethnography and sustainability. Her passion for technology focuses her master’s degree coursework on digital fabrication and robotics, with the goal of making contemporary fabrication methods more sustainable and accessible in the hopes of integrating this optimized making method into affordable housing.

Tanis Worme
Worme is a non-binary/gender fluid Plains Cree (nēhiyaw) student pursuing their MVS in Curatorial Studies degree at Daniels. While their education in architecture is rooted in Ontario, their design sensibilities are grounded in their lived experiences as an urban Indigenous person from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Their growing body of studio work considers notions of memory through blood and storytelling. Their design ethos builds on these themes, drawing from intellectual traditions to deconstruct inaccessible architecture and offer alternative narratives of compassionate spatial interventions.

Lane Johnson
MARC graduate Johnson is an architectural designer who works at the intersection of design, research and practice. His thesis at Daniels focused on bio-climatic architecture in the Caribbean. Johnson has worked on projects in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States.

Darian Razdar
Razdar is a writer, artist and independent scholar who acquired his Master of Science in Urban Planning at U of T. Razdar’s practice is embodied, ecological, collaborative and research-intensive, often working with the mediums of poetry, image, textile and print. His publications include Edge Theory (Silverfish, 2025), Morning Poems (San Press, 2023) and COUNTER-MAP: A Poetics of Place (Reflex Urbanism, 2022). His practice is currently based in Toronto and Mexico City.

Adrian Yu
Yu received his Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies degree at Daniels. He is currently an architectural designer and photographer at Toronto-based Office In Search Of. Yu is also a visual artist interested in designing composite images as a way to generate critical narratives on architecture and the built environment. Memory, culture and emotion have become areas of interest in his work and motivate the use of interdisciplinary techniques spanning photography, illustration, photogrammetry and digital rendering to study their implications on our experience of space.

This year, a total of 21 fellows will be travelling to Venice from Canada. For the full list of fellowship recipients, click here.

Powell-Hines portrait by Kodi Ume-Onyido. Worme portrait by Carmelle Martinez. Johnson portrait by Yugo Takahashi. Razdar portrait by Chellise Michael. Yu portrait by María Chen Liang.

A retrospective exhibition showcasing work that came out of the ROB|ARCH conference held simultaneously at the Daniels Faculty and at TMU last year is currently on view at InterAccess Gallery in Toronto.

In May 2024, some of the world’s top robotics researchers gathered at both schools to examine key currents in robotic art and architecture. Led by Maria Yablonina, Paul Howard Harrison, Nicholas Hoban, Zachary Mollica and Brady Peters of the Faculty and by Jonathon Anderson of Toronto Metropolitan University, the ROB|ARCH 2024 conference included, among its programming, eight hands-on robotics workshops run over three days. 

Work from each of those workshops is on view in the InterAccess show, which runs until April 5. Entitled Beyond Optimization: ROB|ARCH Retrospective, the exhibition has been led by Anderson, Hoban and Mollica.

On Wednesday, April 2, a closing reception will take place between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m. at InterAccess, which is located at 32 Lisgar Street. All are welcome to attend.

A free public event showing participants how to draw paper illustrations from digital designs using the Universal Collaborative (UR) robot arm is also being held on the last day of the exhibition. 

Collaborative Robot Drawing will take place between 2:00 and 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 5.

Participants may register here.

Students, donors, faculty and staff came together at the Faculty Club recently for the yearly breakfast gathering celebrating student award recipients and those who support them.

This year’s Student Awards Breakfast took place in the main room of the Club on the morning of February 26. 

A total of 216 students from across the Faculty’s disciplines were supported through 41 awards in 2024/25. Many were in attendance at the breakfast last month.

“In hosting this event today, we are very pleased to be bringing together our faculty, our many generous donors and our talented award recipients, the latter having distinguished themselves academically and as student leaders,” said Acting Dean Robert Levit, who introduced the proceedings.

“At the University of Toronto,” he continued, “awards have been a part of academic life for nearly 200 years, contributing immeasurably to U of T’s achievements and to its global reach. Today, as the funding of post-secondary institutions by government continues to decline, the support by donors of endowed scholarships, awards, prizes and bursaries at universities is crucial.”

Among the new awards singled out by Dean Levit (pictured below) was the Nelda Rodger Indigenous Student Award in Architecture and Design, a renewable award that provides financial support to full-time Canadian students of First Nations, Inuit and Métis heritage in the Faculty’s Architectural Studies program.

This award, he noted, is the first of its kind devoted to the study of architecture at U of T. 

Matthew Arnott, a third-year Master of Landscape Architecture student, was one of two award winners to address the breakfast gathering. The recipient of this year’s Claude Cormier Award in Landscape Architecture, he expressed how much the award, which was established by the acclaimed landscape architect and alumnus before he passed away in 2023, meant to him personally.

“Claude, being queer, Canadian and unapologetic in his design approach, has long served as a source of personal inspiration, blazing a trail for so many young designers like myself that previously did not exist,” Arnott said.

“To Claude and the folks at CCxA [Cormier’s Montreal-based practice], I’d like to express great thanks for establishing an award that makes graduate education so much more accessible and, more broadly, for their celebration of creativity, whimsy and humour in their approach to design.”

Olivia Carson, a student in the Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program, also addressed the breakfast. She is a recipient of a John and Myrna Daniels Foundation Opportunity Award.

“I have been fortunate to have my family, peers and professors as my greatest supporters and inspirations,” Carson said. “But even with that support, there are moments when external recognition is needed—a reminder that what we are doing [as students] matters.”

“These awards,” she continued, “do just that; they nurture curiosity, fuel ambition and enable students to embrace learning as more than just an academic pursuit, but as a lifelong endeavour. Their support reminds us that education is not just about meeting requirements but [also] about exploration, creativity and growth. I would like to express my gratitude to the John and Myrna Daniels Foundation for the award I have been granted and for their generous contributions to the Daniels Faculty.”

In concluding the event, Dean Levit thanked both Carson and Arnott for sharing their experiences.

“You have painted a touching picture of the importance of recognition by others,” he said, “and of the impact of the kind of financial support shared by all of the award recipients who have joined us this morning.”

As of this year, the Daniels Faculty administers more than 125 donor-supported funds, a large proportion of which are devoted to student aid and recognition.

All photos by Richard Ashman