A Room of One’s Home

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Diasporic identity is not isolated to an individual. It is not an unchanging internal sense of knowing who you are in a moment. It moves through time, through geography. A connection to a place thousands of miles away, to a people living and moving in that space, to a history, tradition and culture. A physical presence that carries a spatial memory. Masterworks 2026: A Room of One’s Home, on display at Riverside Gallery, Design at Riverside, is a collection of graduate theses work of six Waterloo Architecture alumni exploring that connection of identity, memory, cultural diasporic knowledge and architecture.

The exhibition features work by six Waterloo Architecture alumni who each explore their connections to ‘back home’ by inviting visitors into a room shaped by drawings, counter-archival projects, artifacts, photography and their own thesis work. Curated by Bianca Weeko Martin (M'Arch ’22), the exhibition brings together, these works invite visitors into rooms where ‘home’ is not merely a static point but an ongoing spatial relationship carried across generations.

The exhibition features work by six Waterloo Architecture alumni; Ricardo Espinoza (Caribbean Sea), Nidi Metaj (Albania), Angeline Reyes (Philippines), Giulia Simonetta (Italy), Zaven Titizian (Syria/Lebanon), and Hiba Z. (Indus River Basin).

Martin recalled a passerby watching her team hauling exhibition materials into the gallery in preparation for installation comment that “it takes a village.” In her opening remarks she reflected on that moment and just how important connections, community, colleagues and those around her were to make this exhibit possible.

A Room of One's Home resists simply romanticizing diaspora. These projects acknowledge displacement, colonial violence, migration, environmental transformation and cultural loss without reducing identity to nostalgia alone. Instead, these theses works ask what remains after movement, what knowledge survives, what influences it has on generational diasporic individuals and how architecture might help them reconnect with histories that continue to shape their present.

Walking through the gallery feels less like moving between six separate thesis projects but more like entering six different rooms of a shared home. Where each room offers its own language, material, geography and history but all converge on the fact that belonging is rarely singular. It is layered, negotiated, inherited, and continually remade through relationships with people and place in the moment and the past. With migration, immigration, belonging and identity at the forefront of loud and sometimes contentious conversations across the globe at this moment, some are forced to ask themselves where exactly is home? This is where A Room of One's Home reminds us that home is both here and there. The exhibit exemplifies the fact that spaces we call home, where life unfolds, are not just buildings that are constructed, but they are the memories people inherit, the communities they sustain and the stories choose to carry forward across time and generations.

Masterworks 2026: A Room of One's Home, curated by Bianca Weeko Martin, is on display at Riverside Gallery, Design at Riverside until October 1st, 2026.

Bianca Weeko Martin is a writer and researcher weaving together architectural practice with theory and personal narrative. She is the author of the Architectural Guide: Manila and writes about art, space, and the Filipino diaspora for cultural institutions and publications like Azure. She recently made the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize longlist for her work Tita Tallulah.

Masterworks is Waterloo Architecture’s annual exhibition showcasing exemplary graduate and alumni research through a contemporary architectural theme. We are grateful to Diamond Schmitt for its continued support of Masterworks and for helping provide a platform for emerging designers and researchers.