To close out Pride Month, an exhibition that won the 2026 DesignTO Festival Founder’s Award is revisited. The central theme of “To•Be•Longing: Portraits of Queer Living” was “What makes your home queer?”
Curated by architect and educator Quan Thai, the show was a follow-up to a previous edition held at the University of Waterloo’s Design at Riverside gallery. Both exhibitions invited visitors to step inside a living space that reimagined a typical residential floor plan, with Thai aiming to challenge traditional notions of home and family.
The exhibition used sheer curtains to create in-between areas that collapsed traditional boundaries, plus a modular furnishing system that allowed for fluid deconstructions — and reconstructions — of common domestic components like a bed and sofa. This system was designed to be flexible and adaptable, reflecting the diverse needs and experiences of the queer community.
Personal objects contributed by the queer community were layered into these environments in response to the show’s central theme, ranging from a Grand River Pride t-shirt and a rainbow-taped hockey stick to a pill bottle and a concrete butt plug, each one accompanied by a short text explaining its significance in its owner’s home and how it connected back to their queer identity, creating a rich and complex connection between home and identity.
The exhibition worked on two levels, posing conceptual ideas about queer space and architectural theory but also inviting people to reflect on rich personal narratives, with Thai and his collaborators being recognized with the festival’s Founder’s Award.
The exhibition used social media to share the prompt and had some folks at the 519 and other organizations share it as well, and some people knew what that question meant to them right away, while others initially said “I don’t have anything queer in my house,” but then thought about it more and still came back with something.
Later on, in some writing he did about the exhibition, Thai reflected on this idea of the inherently queer object versus the passive queer object.
Those categories came from analyzing the narratives that people supplied, and they provided a framework for understanding the diverse experiences and perspectives of the queer community, with the exhibition ultimately showcasing a wide range of voices and stories.
As part of the programming at the Ace Hotel, Thai also hosted a panel, Queeries and Cocktails, with interiors and product stylist Chad Burton, Bahar Ghaemi and design editor Sean Santiago, and they discussed how to shape queer space through their own work, considering the ways in which design can be used to create more inclusive and welcoming environments.
Thai won the DesignTO Founder’s award, which recognizes a project that brings people together to design a better future, and that recognition was fantastic, and a big part of what he found validating about it was that this exhibition was not just him coming in with an idea — ultimately, that on its own would not have been enough if it hadn’t been substantiated by all these community voices, and he believes that building a strong foundation is essential for creating successful and inclusive design projects.
They think that we shouldn’t really be making any decisions by ourselves, and it’s a very colonial approach to come in with presumptions of what should be, rather than truly understanding the needs of the community that you should be designing with, and not for, and everyone has something to contribute through their own experiences, and considering the cost and value of design projects, such as stump removal costs, is also important.
At the moment, having just done two physical exhibitions, Thai has been doing a lot of reading and writing to reflect about the process and the outcomes, and he would love to continue this exhibition theme by creating more spaces that showcase community voices, and bring people together to design a better future.
It is.
