Six Waterloo Architecture alumni explore diaspora and home in A Room of One’s Home

Masterworks 2026: A Room of One’s Home gathered the graduate thesis work of six Waterloo Architecture alumni at the Riverside Gallery, Design at Riverside, and ran until October 1, 2026. Visitors move through rooms of drawings, counter-archival projects, artifacts and photography that explore identity, memory and architecture. The projects acknowledge displacement and cultural loss without reducing identity to nostalgia.

Ricardo Espinoza (Caribbean Sea) and Nidi Metaj (Albania) are joined by Angeline Reyes (Philippines), Giulia Simonetta (Italy), Zaven Titizian (Syria and Lebanon) and Hiba Z. (Indus River Basin), each tracing a link to a place of origin. Curator Bianca Weeko Martin (M’Arch ’22) says the show took a village, and she put much of it together from Toronto without a driver’s licence.

Martin is a writer and researcher. She wrote the Architectural Guide: Manila, and her piece Tita Tallulah was recently longlisted for the 2026 CBC Nonfiction Prize. Masterworks is Waterloo Architecture’s annual exhibition of graduate and alumni research, supported by Diamond Schmitt.