Confessing in Canada: MVRDV’s Carbon Confessions opens in Toronto for its first major North American showing

As the world faces an increasingly urgent climate crisis, there is growing pressure for the construction industry to reduce its carbon emissions, prompting a rethink of the way buildings are developed. Carbon Confessions, MVRDV's travelling exhibition, reveals what that looks like in practice. The exhibition offers a candid look at the ideas, ideals, everyday actions – and yes, the missteps and missed opportunities – of MVRDV’s quest for carbon reductions. Following previous editions in Munich, Berlin, Paris, Taipei, Charlottesville, and the firm’s hometown Rotterdam, the exhibition is now presented at Toronto’s Urbanspace Gallery from 9 May to 22 August 2026, marking its first major North American showing.

Drawing on more than three decades of work of MVRDV, Carbon Confessions shares lessons from realised projects, research, experiments, and missed opportunities, revealing how sustainable ambitions evolve in practice. Rather than presenting a fixed set of solutions, the exhibition approaches sustainability as an ongoing process of testing, learning, adaptation, and negotiation. It opens with MVRDV’s “Carbon Storyline” tracing the office’s early advocacy for a sustainable living environment through green densification and improved mobility, all the way to their current focus on embodied carbon. A recurring “character” in the story is MVRDV NEXT, a team of in-house specialists in technology and sustainability, which MVRDV established after years of overreliance on external sustainability consultants with inscrutable working methods.

After the Carbon Storyline, visitors can learn more about MVRDV’s transformation projects. After all, renovating an existing building rather than demolishing and rebuilding is one of the most effective ways to reduce carbon emissions. This is followed by 18 anecdotes about MVRDV’s attempts to achieve carbon reductions, and six “Carbon Cases”, in which the embodied carbon emissions of MVRDV projects are calculated using CarbonSpace – an online tool that MVRDV has made freely available to the public, allowing everyone to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions of their building designs from the very first sketch.

As cities increasingly connect climate ambitions to the way they build, questions of carbon have become questions of architecture, which is why Carbon Confessions adapts in each city to its local context and audience through specially tailored features. In Toronto, this conversation is closely tied to the Toronto Green Standard, which since its introduction in 2010 has shaped the environmental performance of both public and private developments across the city. The exhibition situates this framework alongside a selection of MVRDV projects, showing how carbon considerations influence decisions about construction, reuse, energy use, resilience, and the lifespan of buildings.

The exhibition also incorporates MVRDV’s projects and research initiatives in Canada, such as the Myron and Berna Garron Health Sciences Complex, Sea2City, the Sea Level Rise Catalogue, and the Temerty Building. These point to a variety of design responses influenced by carbon, whether through flexibility, retrofit, structural reuse, renewable energy, or forms of resilience that work across buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure.

In the exhibition space, visitors will also find models, materials, and a video projection exploring different sustainability aspects of MVRDV projects, presented in a classroom-like setting that invites visitors to study the content and engage with the topic in depth. The exhibition design reflects many of the ideas presented within it, with a focus on reuse, demountability, and resourcefulness. Where possible, exhibition elements were borrowed from Urbanspace Gallery and other partners, while demountable frames assembled without glue allow materials to be disassembled and reused again. Wood and other circular materials are used throughout, and all panels are printed on 100 percent biodegradable material.

The exhibition itself is designed to easily shift between a display and an event space, making room for an active public program of talks and discussions over the course of its run. These events will bring together MVRDV with local voices to reflect on the future of sustainable urban development. Highlights include a keynote conversation on 4 June with Nathalie de Vries, Founding Partner at MVRDV, and Sanne van den Burgh, Head of MVRDV NEXT, moderated by architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. To attend the keynote, register here.

Carbon Confessions is on show from 9 May to 22 August 2026 at Urbanspace Gallery (401 Richmond Street West, Toronto).
Opening hours are Monday to Saturday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. Admission is free.
More information on the public programme will be made available on the MVRDV website in due course.