Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Last weekend, sites across the city opened their doors to the public as part of Doors Open Toronto—an annual two-day event that invites people to visit sites of architectural, social, historical and cultural importance in the city that are typically not open to the public. And as we have every year since the start of this initiative way back in 2000, the TSA put together a roster of special programs that celebrated and explored our built environment through tours, talks, and other activities.
We were overwhelmed with the positive feedback to this year’s offerings, with over 11,600 attendees joining us in one of the TSA’s many activities throughout the weekend—that is a 45% increase from last year’s numbers! It is clear Torontonians want to learn more about their city!
With this year’s Doors Open theme of ‘play’ in mind, the weekend kicked off with a unique series of Playground Tours led by the designers behind these spaces. Throughout 5 tours, over 200 people learned about the serious ideas behind these playful spaces including accessibility, risky play, and the role of community engagement—and kids and adults alike had the opportunity to test some of the equipment! A special thank you to our tour leads Alex Waffle (Earthscape Play), Dylan Cassidy and Fung Lee (PMA Landscape Architects), James Roche (DTAH), Lisa Rapoport (PLANT Architect Inc.), and Richard Messina and Christine Bogert (Dr. Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study) for sharing the stories and answering the many questions of attendees.
As always, our Open Studio program was also a festival highlight with 12 studios—both new and returning—opening their doors to the public. Thousands of attendees were able to spend some time with the people helping shape our city and take a peek into the process of how buildings go from ideas to reality. Many of the studios organized talks, activations, and even kids’ activities, finding ways of sharing their passion for architecture with even the youngest of attendees. We want to give a big shout out to all of this year’s participating studios and their staff—Akb Architects, Architects Alliance, Brook McIlroy, DIALOG, DTAH, Gensler, HOK, People Design Co-Op, RAW Design, RevelHouse, RDH Architects, and Q4 Architects—for their time, hospitality, and infectious enthusiasm!
In addition to our studios, this year we were also again able to provide support to three other special related sites: the Ontario Association of Architects Headquarters, as well as the Department of Architectural Sciences at Toronto Metropolitan University and the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, who were exhibiting incredible student work as part of their year-end exhibitions. TMU DAS was also the host of a special partnership event with UrbanMinds’ 1UP Youth City Builders encouraging high school students to learn more about different career paths related to the built environment.
Of course, with this year’s theme of ‘play’, kids’ activities were also top of mind for the TSA team, and this year we were so excited to bring our popular Paper City activation right to the heart of Doors Open Toronto at Toronto City Hall. Throughout the weekend over 200 children, families, and even many curious adults, joined us in the Council Chamber where they were invited to design and contribute their own paper structures to an ever-growing metropolis. The resulting city is colourful, diverse and slightly chaotic—much like our own! And just over 1,000 onlookers came in just to watch the city taking shape.
Capping off this eventful weekend was one of our most popular forums: our Architects Talk, a yearly collaboration between the TSA and the City of Toronto reflecting on Doors Open Toronto’s annual theme, which this year we were proud to bring to the Daniels Building. Our speakers delved into the theme of play, examining how play is taking shape in different places and mediums across our city. Our hats off to our incredible speakers—Alex Waffle, Bill Gurney, Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik, Ilana Altman, and Elise Shelley, who delivered speedy yet insightful presentations, and to our moderator Shawn Micallef for leading such an engaging Q&A.
If you missed the talk, a recording of it is now available in our Past Lectures Library!
None of this weekend would have been possible without the tremendous support of over 120 enthusiastic TSA Volunteers who generously gave their time and skills to support TSA sites, tours, and Paper City — thank you all! We also want to give a shoutout to our volunteer Initiative Leads Laura Salamanca Moreno, Ria Al-Ameen, and Varsha Kumar for Open Studio, Heather Breeze and Kfir Gluzberg for our Architects Talk, and Heba Al Fayez, Pamela Bruneau, and Ramy Bakir for Paper City, for making this weekend such a success. And of course to our small but mighty staff team who have been working for months to bring our TSA Doors Open programming to life! Thank you as well to the City of Toronto staff who are always such allies in making all of these initiatives possible, with a special thank you to Kristine Williamson, City of Toronto’s Program Lead for Doors Open Toronto, for the many years of partnership and collaboration.
We’ll leave you with some pictures of this year’s event by our fabulous photographers Yianni Tong and Julia Bewcyk. Thank you again to all those who attended this year’s Doors Open Toronto! We hope this has further fueled your curiosity to explore, learn and share about our built environment.
About Doors Open Toronto
Each May, Doors Open Toronto invites the public to explore the city’s most-loved buildings and sites, free of charge. The event provides rare access to buildings not usually open to the public and free access to sites that would usually charge an admission fee. Since its inception in 2000, it has attracted more than two million visits to nearly 700 unique locations and remains the largest event of its kind in Canada.
The TSA has been an active partner of this city-wide initiative for the last 25 years, providing architecturally focused programs throughout the festival weekend.