Quan Thai’s Queer Home Exhibition Wins DesignTO Founder’s Award

Curator and architect Quan Thai’s exhibition “To•Be•Longing: Portraits of Queer Living” won the 2026 DesignTO Founder’s Award. The show, held in January 2026 at Ace Hotel Toronto during the DesignTO Festival, reimagined a one-bedroom condo using sheer curtains and modular furniture to blur traditional boundaries. It featured personal objects from the queer community, such as a rainbow-taped hockey stick and a concrete butt plug, each with a narrative. Thai, a faculty member at Lawrence Technological University, first staged the exhibition at the University of Waterloo’s Design at Riverside gallery. The Ace Hotel iteration occupied a suite, with curtains framing movement between existing spaces. A panel, “Queeries and Cocktails,” included Chad Burton, Bahar Ghaemi, and Sean Santiago. Thai plans to expand the project with more diverse voices, citing contributions to “Out in Architecture” volume 2.