The University of Waterloo School of Architecture is a leader in design education and research.
Offering a fully cooperative professional program, Waterloo Architecture is the only Canadian school of architecture to have a permanent international facility, which has operated since 1979 in Rome, Italy. The school attracts top students from across Canada and around the world and has been rated the greenest architecture curriculum in Canada.
Find out more about Waterloo Architecture.
News
Call for submissions, Masterworks Curator/Exhibitor
Alumni applications are now open for the 2026 Masterworks exhibition curator.
Waterloo Students work showcased at Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery
Material Syntax: 3D Printed Masonry Façade Systems is on view at the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery from January 16 – March 27, 2026
MSS Architects Strengthens Longstanding Partnership with Waterloo Architecture
For nearly two decades, MSS Architects has played a steady and influential role in supporting students at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture. Their commitment to hiring emerging talent has grown into a multifaceted partnership that continues to shape student experiences, professional pathways, and the culture of architectural education at Waterloo.
Events
Provisional Lives Opening Reception
Join us on March 5, from 6:00–8:00 PM, to celebrate the launch of this faculty research exhibition exploring architecture shaped by mobility, precarity, and resilience. Featuring work by Professors Robert Jan van Pelt and Anwar Jaber, the exhibition examines how temporary structures and institutions under occupation reveal urgent ethical and political questions.
Riverside Gallery
Waterloo School of Architecture
7 Melville Street South, Cambridge, ON
Film Screening: Thinking Beyond the Market: A film about genuinely affordable housing
Brian Doucet, University of Waterloo
Thinking Beyond the Market: A film about genuinely affordable housing takes you across Canada to learn about policies, programs and projects that are already happening and already having a positive impact on addressing the housing crisis. From using public land to build non-market housing in Kitchener and Whistler, and inspiring Indigenous-led projects in Vancouver, to strong tenant protections and rent control in British Columbia and Prince Edward Island, the examples featured in this film demonstrate how many important solutions are making a difference in communities big and small! The film features interviews with more than 30 planners, policymakers, politicians, developers, residents and housing advocates from coast to coast. The film inspires and challenges us to think about both the root causes of the housing crisis and transformative solutions.
Dilip da Cunha - The Invention of Land: Where Colonization begins by Design
Dilip da Cunha, Columbia University
We live in an all-consuming Ocean of Wetness, a wetness that is everywhere in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna, precipitating, evaporating, storming, seeping, soaking, transpiring, osmoting, freezing. We are wetness ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence. However, we do not learn that we live in an Ocean of Wetness. We learn instead that we live on an Earth surface called land that we take for granted as existent and place beyond all difference, assuming that all people experience it. In this talk, I present land as a product of design in an Ocean of Wetness that we fail to acknowledge. It is a design that deploys four design devices: the geometric surface, geometric line, hydrologic cycle, and language of landscape. Together they create and maintain an Earth surface that serves as the ground of observation and habitation. It also serves as the ground of a colonization that continues largely because this act of design passes unnoticed and unquestioned. What does it take to acknowledge land to be a product of design; to recognize that our real home is in an Ocean of Wetness that is everywhere rather than on an Earth surface with water somewhere? Does Ocean offer an appreciation of more fundamental difference in culture; and does it open fresh possibilities for design in the face of climate change that threatens land with destruction?