memorabilia.mp4 ~ Episode VIII: Jessica Villarasa

As an ongoing webseries, memorabilia.mp4 features artists, scholars, & nostalgia enthusiasts in 1 hour episodes — 20 min talk and 40 min Live Q&A! On December 10 2025, at 3:00PM EDT (GMT -4), join us in a conversation featuring designer, architect, and a Master's student at McGill University, Jessica Villarasa!

Amid Canada’s worsening housing crisis (supply shortages, rising rents, and a growing need for multigenerational living), Jessica’s thesis project named “KASAMA” (Filipino for “together,” “with”) turns to memory as a source of design knowledge. Rooted in Jessica’s upbringing in a Filipino-Italian fiveplex in Saint-Leonard, where rooms morphed and care flowed across units, the project uses drawings, interviews, and archival storytelling to trace how immigrant families remake home. Rather than framing nostalgia as backward-looking, KASAMA treats it as a generative method: a way to interpret the past to imagine housing that reflects cultural hybridity, interdependence, and the realities of contemporary family life, and to push against building more of the same.

Jessica Villarasa is a Montreal-born architectural designer and Master of Architecture candidate at McGill University. She has spent nearly eight years working at a small architecture firm, designing housing across scales, from single-family homes to multi-building projects. Her work bridges professional practice and research, focusing on how everyday life, memory, and care shape the spaces we inhabit.

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Edited by Richy Srirachanikorn