Faculty of Design
Environmental Design - Interior Design Specialization
Alessandra Mercado
Bayanihan: Reimagining Community at OCAD U
Interior Design
2025
What if student housing could be more than a building? What if it could hold us, not just house us, through shared rituals, everyday care, and collective making?This thesis reimagines OCAD U’s role in Toronto/Tkaronto through the spirit of Bayanihan, the Filipino practice of mutual care and collective action. It transforms three overlooked fragments — St. Patrick’s Market, St. Patrick’s Square, and the Harrison Pool — into the OCAD U Market, Park, and Recreation Centre. Together with new student housing above, they form a living network that brings together students, neighbors, and the city into one shared fabric.The project unfolds as a linear greenway that connects Queen Street West to the main OCAD U campus. It opens a permeable strip for gathering, movement, and collaboration, creating not only a physical connection but a social one. Through adaptive reuse and spatial generosity, forgotten spaces become a living mosaic of public, communal, and private life. Rather than erase, the design reworks what already exists. It unravels the site’s facades, histories, and materials and stitches them into something new, allowing the city’s past to shape a more collective future.Rooted in Tkaronto, the thesis acknowledges the layered histories and caretakers of the land. Building on OCAD U's “Ideas Need Space” and “Ignite Imagination” campaigns, this project moves beyond space and imagination toward relationship, responsibility, and renewal.Bayanihan is not just a cultural reference. It is a call to imagine space as shared. To lift each other up. To shape with care. To design for interdependence. This is more than housing. This is a reimagined community. Welcome to Bayanihan: Reimagining Community at OCAD U.
Work by
Alessandra Mercado
“The goal of a designer is to listen, observe, understand, sympathize, empathize, synthesize,and glean insights that enable them to ‘make the invisible visible.’ - Hillman Curtis, filmmaker, author &...” [More]
Celebrate the work of OCAD U’s class of 2024/2025!