2025 thesis exhibitions and end of year show

As the Archive Dreams  
BA Visual Studies Thesis Exhibition  
April 17–19, 2025 
Exhibition Opening: April 17, 2025 
Foy House, 92 Isabella St, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 

Scales of Inquiry  
BA Architectural Studies Thesis Exhibition   
May 22–June 27, 2025 
Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 

End of Year Show 2024/2025  
May 23–June 9, 2025  
Daniels Building, 1 Spadina Crescent, Toronto, Ontario, Canada    

The John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto is excited to present three exhibitions this spring showcasing student work across graduate and undergraduate programs in architecture, landscape architecture, visual studies, urban design, and forestry. 

Sixty-four students from the undergraduate thesis cohorts in Visual Studies (BAVS) and Architectural Studies (BAAS) present their work in Studio, Critical Practices, Design, History and Theory, and Technology in two exhibitions: As the Archive Dreams (April 17–19, 2025) and Scales of Inquiry (May 22–June 27, 2025).  

“Time passes. We grow. Spaces shrink. Places once unfathomable become familiar, flattening into our palms, becoming paltry figments of memory. More time passes, we grow, spaces shrink and expand, and memories mutate, rubbing up against each other such that the precise location of the truth becomes obscured by time and obliterated by scale. Ubiquity is displaced by uncertainty; the past unfolds perpetually into the present.”  

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. 

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.  

For more information about upcoming exhibitions and to learn more about programs at the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty, visit daniels.utoronto.ca.