Radical Hospitality at TMU: Architectural Education Through Collective Care
From January 5th to 8th 2026, the Department of Architectural Science at Toronto Metropolitan University hosted Radical Hospitality, a four-day Collaborative Exercise that reimagined architectural education through collective hosting, care, and lived experience.
Led by guest instructors Vlad Amiot, a University of Calgary PhD student, and Kristofer Kelly-Frère, City of Calgary Innovation Lab team lead, the workshop brought together over 180 students from across all year levels to participate in an intensive experiment that set aside conventional architectural deliverables. In place of drawings, models, and final critiques, students designed through wearable extensions, shared meals, movement, spatial transformation, and acts of hosting, treating architecture as a practice unfolding in real time through bodies, materials, and relationships.
Radical Hospitality formed part of TMU’s annual Collaborative Exercise (ASC205/605), an all-school charrette established in 2008 that brings together students from across the undergraduate program in vertically organized teams. While the format has long emphasized collaboration across year levels, the 2026 iteration embraced the scale of the exercise to test alternative pedagogical values centered on care, embodiment, and collective experience.
At the core of Radical Hospitality was a simple but provocative question: what if the party is the curriculum, and hosting is learning? Rather than framing design as a project realized at the end of a process, the workshop positioned architecture as an immanent, participatory practice in which students were simultaneously hosts and guests. Learning was embedded in everyday decisions, interactions, and shared responsibilities, with the project evolving continuously rather than culminating in a final moment of evaluation.
The workshop emerged from a critique of architectural education’s reliance on individual authorship, competition, and hierarchical structures. Drawing on feminist care ethics, queer pedagogies, and new materialist thought, Radical Hospitality foregrounded collective authorship, care labour as architectural work, and hospitality as a spatial and political practice. Theory was integrated directly into daily making and reflection, while materials and spatial arrangements were treated as active participants in shaping relations of responsibility and care.
Over four days, TMU’s Architecture Building was transformed into a temporary pedagogical commons. Studios and gallery spaces were continuously reconfigured as students – inhabiting “neighborhoods”, “markets” and “playgrounds” – moved furniture, constructed wearables, danced, prepared food, and hosted one another. The building itself became an active participant in the learning process, shaped through collective use.
The primary material outcome of the workshop was a series of large tablecloths and collage-murals installed in the gallery space. These “living tablecloths” functioned as shared journals and evolving archives, accumulating marks, food stains, drawings, notes, and reflections throughout the week. By the final day, eighteen tablecloths and three gigantic murals had emerged, each corresponding to a daily reflection on architectural myths and disciplinary assumptions. Messy, layered, and temporary, the tablecloths stood as a testament to design as an iterative and collective process.
Students worked in intentionally mixed, vertical teams that brought first-year students into close collaboration with senior cohorts. By disrupting cohort-based silos and familiar studio hierarchies, the exercise fostered mutual learning and shared responsibility across experience levels. Conventional studio outputs—drawings, portfolio artifacts, and final critiques—were deliberately absent, with value placed instead on emergence, participation, and care as a form of architectural labour.
Saroash Haider, a Master of Architecture student who helped facilitate the course as a Play Ambassador, shared how students learned to design differently: “While this unconventional collab came with challenges, students adapted fairly quickly, and the process was valuable. It helped everyone think outside the box and begin approaching architecture with a different mindset.”
The collaborative ethos of Radical Hospitality extended beyond the student teams. The workshop was developed through close collaboration between Vlad Amiot and Kristofer Kelly-Frère, active involvement of PhD students Pantea Eslami and Yaxin Jiang, and engagement of twelve MArch student Play Ambassadors and four Gallery team members. Together, everyone supported coordination, facilitation, spatial preparation, and documentation. From inception to execution, collaboration functioned as the governing method through which the project was conceived and realized.
DAS Chair, Lisa Landrum notes: “Collaboration is crucial to professional practice. So, too, is the capacity to welcome and adapt to new and unusual situations and experiences. Hospitality – to others, to alternative ideas, and to different ways of learning, working and making – is key to fostering inclusive built environments. It’s been illuminating to support Radical Hospitality’s unique experiment in collective making.”
The workshop concluded with an exhibition in the Paul H. Cooper Gallery, centered on an open table, and presenting the eighteen question-raising tablecloths, alongside collages and short videos documenting daily activities. Rather than serving as evidence of completion, the exhibition functioned as a form of careful witnessing, reflecting the relational and temporal nature of the work. By treating hospitality as a core architectural competency rather than a supplementary social gesture, Radical Hospitality offered a glimpse into how architectural education might be reimagined as a shared, lived practice in the present—one in which the architect’s role expands from maker of spaces to host of collective life.
Contributors:
Guest instructors: Vlad Amiot and Kristofer Kelly-Frère (Calgary), with the support of TMU PhD in Architecture students Pantea Eslami and Yaxin Jiang.
TMU Master of Architecture Students: Play Ambassadors – Chanel Wase, Roni Fraimovich, Saroash Haider, Dharma Capitao, Shumael Amir, Carolina Ramirez Tenorio, Aidan Chui, Vanessa Paningbatan-Cerezo, Annabel Fok, Aileen Alinsod, and Zhi Hui Chiang; and Gallery Artisans – Anahita Kawale, Kathlynn Hoang, Nava Mahouri Monfared, Roksolana Korol, Jade Branker
Thank you to bulthaup Toronto for support.
More on Radical Hospitality here.
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