Year End Show 2025: “A table we can gather around”

About 170 people attended the Year End Show on April 30, including alumni, practitioners, community partners, donors, students, parents, Carleton colleagues, faculty, staff, and visitors.

The celebration featured some 100 projects from this past semester produced by students in all years, ranging from the first year of the Bachelor of Architectural Studies program to the final year of the Master of Architecture program.

“You see all of these projects that are embracing the full breadth of what it is that we do as designers and as architects,” Director Anne Bordeleau said in her welcoming remarks.

“It goes from construction and buildings to speculations, questions of identity and land dispossession, but also material explorations, space, sound, gender…who gets to experience a space and how does it feel to be in those spaces.”

Associate Professor Johan Voordouw coordinated the show, which took place at the Architecture Building in the Pit, the Lightroom Gallery, the Hub, the main-level Street, and Rooms 204 and 209.

“The possibility to hold space together is such a fundamental part of our ability to live well together, in all of our differences and aspirations, and architecture has a profound role to play in this,” said Dr. Bordeleau.

“Architecture, in a way, builds that table that we can gather around.”

Bordeleau noted the school was recently named the 2024 Community Organization of the Year by the Vanier Community Services Centre in recognition of the partnership and work led by Associate Professor Benjamin Gianni and Assistant Professor Menna Agha.

“We partner to work on better ways to share space,” said Bordeleau. “We establish long-lasting collaborations, and we engage in community-led design.”

She gave special recognition to Adjunct Professor Jim Mountain, who, after decades at the school, has taught his last undergraduate Conservation & Sustainability studio.

His students worked with the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation during the winter term to research and prepare conceptual designs for a planned new museum and cultural centre. Read the story here.

“He does things in a really good way,” said Bordeleau, noting the “amazing care and commitment that Jim puts in creating relationships, maintaining relationships, and bringing people together around projects.”

She also extended thanks to architecture firms Provencher_Roy, Stantec, and Parkin for studio sponsorship, and NEUF for sponsoring the Year End Show.

“I think that students come to Carleton and the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism for this great community that we form,” she added. “They build amazing bonds with one another, but also with faculty members, with the staff team, with everyone who supports them, and with all of you here.”