The University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design has debuted a new 7,500-square-foot "experimental gallery" that seeks to have visitors lose themselves in "states of repose and reverie."

The new gallery, according to a news post issued by the school, includes an installation designed by New York-based designers Pillow Culture that is centered on having participants disconnect from their technological devices. The exhibition, titled New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking), asks visitors to leave their belongings in a separate area before becoming immersed in a "dream-like space specifically designed for relaxation, reflection, and repose."

“Architecture today is inextricably bound up in the urbanization of the planet, and it needs to pay as much attention to the marking of time, as it traditionally has to the shaping of space,” writes co-curator, Richard Sommer, Dean and Professor at the Daniels Faculty. Sommer adds, “With New Circadia, we are acknowledging architecture’s complicity in an increasingly stressful and zombie-like world by presenting an antidote to the over-mechanization of everyday life and our plugged-in, 24/7 culture. Might it be time to put architecture to sleep?”

The interactive installation features three discrete zones sculpted out of felt inspired by the 1938 Mammoth Cave Experiment, the first staging of a scientific study for understanding natural human sleep cycles, according to the exhibition designers. 

“We have transformed the new Architecture and Design Gallery into a soft utopia to conjure a greater sense of geological, mythical, mechanical, and biological time, and to explore how we might nurture a more sustained interior life by incubating dream-like states of rest, reflection, and reverie,” explain co-curators Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson of Pillow Culture.