(Un)folding the WSA Summer Show 2025

Our annual exhibition of student work has opened with a celebratory launch event.

Titled ‘(Un)Fold,’ the WSA Summer Show 2025 is now open to the public in the Bute Building exhibition space until 18 July. The exhibition showcases the exceptional work of students from all year groups based at the Welsh School of Architecture.

An annual event

The Show is an an annual event for the School. It is curated and designed by our students themselves, who devise a theme and create the graphics, organise the content, build the display structures, and design an exhibition catalogue. Throughout the process, they are  supported and advised by the head of school, the school’s exhibition leads, our operations team,  workshop, design tutors, programme leaders, and college communications team. It is developed throughout the academic year and though extra-curricular, constitutes a project of considerable scale and significance and forms an important part of students’ learning experience.

Un(fold)ing this year’s theme

The exhibition’s title ‘(un)fold' was chosen by this year’s student curators to refer to the research and design processes that lie at the heart of student work - processes through which ideas, strategies, understandings, creative approaches and reflections emerge and develop iteratively. Moving away from the tendency to use architectural degree shows to display the major ‘show pieces’ that mark the culmination of studies, students from across the School were invited to share work in progress – from site responses to early sketches and quick models, to developed pieces in a range of media.

As subtly suggesting by the bracketing of (un), they were also invited to contribute work relevant to the notion and action of folding in architecture – whether related to the literal folding of panels and surfaces, the enfolding of multiple elements within complex structures, the unfolding of elements in adaptable architecture, and/ or the philosophy and history of the fold in architectural discourse.

In our students' words:

Launching the 2025 exhibition

Every year the exhibition serves as an important showcase of student creativity to prospective employers, to the architectural and planning communities in Cardiff and Wales we are part of, and also to friends and loved ones.

This year we welcomed over 400 guests to the launch of the Summer Show. The evening was a joyous celebration of the hard work our students have put in over the past year. The WSA’s own band’s live music created the ambience for celebration and networking.

Our Head of School Juliet Davis opened the evening, saying: 'We encourage our students at all stages not just to recognise architecture and design as cultural and political - though we do that - but to take a stand themselves in relation to complex issues that shape and are embodied by the built environment. We want them - you - to be able to take a stand in relation to the process of design - to who is involved and how, to who is an expert and how forms of knowledge intersect within the materialities of everyday life… to how architecture unfolds indeed and could unfold more justly, more sustainably in the future.'

She introduced our guest speaker for the evening, Ibrahim Ibrahim. Ibrahim is managing director at Portland Design, recently joining the School as an Honorary Visiting Professor.