About
Paige Wen, PhD, is a Toronto-based licensed OAA architect, urban researcher, and founder of Unfolding Works.
Her work explores the hidden histories, everyday buildings, and cultural layers that shape Toronto’s urban landscape. She is also the creator of Unfolding Toronto, a storytelling project that translates urban history and architecture into accessible narratives.
The Practice
Unfolding Works is grounded in a simple belief: cities make stories, and stories make us.
Bringing together architecture, research, and storytelling, the practice helps people understand the places they live and the histories they carry. These three branches share methods, inform one another, and reflect a single conviction: that rigorous spatial thinking and genuine cultural curiosity belong in the same practice.
Every project begins context-first. Research is not treated as a separate step in the process, but as its foundation. Storytelling is how that understanding becomes public.
Formation
Paige trained in Europe and Asia, developing a spatial sensibility shaped by Dutch urbanism, Chinese city-making, and Taiwanese neighbourhood culture before arriving in Toronto. That trajectory gave her something unusual: the analytical distance of an outsider, and the professional investment of someone who became licensed here, navigated local planning systems firsthand, and learned how this particular city works from the inside.
Her academic background includes a PhD in Architecture and a Master’s in Urban Design, but it informs practice rather than directing it. The goal has never been to theorize the city from a distance, but to understand it closely enough to work within it.
Toronto is not a backdrop for this work. It is the subject through which the practice takes shape. Its multicultural neighbourhoods, layered histories, and everyday urban fabric continue to inform how Unfolding Works approaches architecture, research, and storytelling alike.
Publications
Unfolding Toronto is an ongoing Substack publication that documents the city’s built environment, neighbourhood histories, and spatial culture. It is part of the practice’s public presence: a record of the urban curiosity and long-form thinking that runs through everything Unfolding Works does.