https://shakura.ca shakura.ca Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:11:01 +0000 https://shakura.ca en https://shakura.ca/a-tower-for-cows Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:11:01 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/a-tower-for-cows a tower for cows Global Design Studio: Costa Rica July-Aug 2025During this travel studio in Costa Rica, I immersed myself in the landscape and vernacular agricultural forms and analysed from both a site of ecological challenge and cultural knowledge. Guanacaste, Costa Rica is defined by its cycles of drought and flooding, where water scarcity and sudden inundation are shaping how farmers work and produce food. Our work began with a process of discovery, travelling the land, observing the many ecologies, and documenting the vernacular logics embedded in local construction. One recurring typology we studied was the cattle pen (corral), a deceptively simple yet highly adaptive structure found throughout Costa Rica. Constructed from wood and steel, arranged in modular rhythms of posts and rails, these enclosures embody a vernacular response to both ecological and agricultural demands. Building on this discovery, my design intervention addressed the pressing issues of flooding and drought in Guanacaste, proposing an adaptive water infrastructure rooted in vernacular principles. I developed a system that combined terraced enclosures and modular timber frameworks, reinterpreting the logic of the cattle pen as a resilient architecture for water management. These structures functioned both as water-retention basins during the rainy season and as shade and soil-preservation devices during drought, supporting agricultural resilience while reactivating degraded landscapes. The project foregrounded how vernacular forms can be re-scaled and re-purposed to meet contemporary challenges of climate adaptation. Through detailed drawings, site-based observation, and material studies, I explored how the cultural intelligence embedded in rural building practices can serve as a foundation for sustainable and low-footprint interventions today. https://shakura.ca/playstations Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:02:00 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/playstations playstations Landscape Option Studio: Changing Tides Sept-Dec 2025 Play-stations traces a slow and deliberate journey across the varied landscapes of Martin Head, New Brunswick, inviting visitors to inhabit the tidal world through three distinct acts of looking, listening, and lingering. Rather than imposing form, each intervention draws itself from the character of its site: salt marsh, rocky cliff, and the temporal debris of people. Together, the three stations compose a loose, wandering observatory. They do not prescribe a route but offer nodes of intensity across the landscape, connected by existing trails and desire lines. Each calibrates the body differently to the tidal world: horizontal attention at the marsh, vertical confrontation at the cliff, interior stillness at the lighthouse. The sequence is an open invitation to sense and play with the sea’s presence and material force not as spectacle but as a companion and playmate. The Saltmarsh Platform rests just above the brackish edge where river, land, and ocean meet. Oriented along the tidal channel, its timber deck hovers at the threshold between freshwater and salt, dry ground and flood. Twice daily the marsh breathes—filling with the Bay’s immense tidal push, then draining to expose mud ribbons and spartina roots. The platform gathers these rhythms: the murmur of wind through cordgrass, the flicker of shorebirds probing the flats, the quiet pulse of water rising through the sedge. A simple crossing point, it carries visitors over the channel from the entrance road into the site’s interior, but it also invites pause. Benches face the marsh’s horizontal expanse. Here the act is listening—attending to the sonic texture of an ecosystem in constant exchange with the sea.The Lighthouse stands in the ruins of the original Martin Head light station. It borrows the familiar maritime silhouette, but as a sketch. This beacon guides not sailors but wanderers, drawing them along forest trails toward the headland’s heart. Inside, the circular room is quiet, contemplative. Light filters through the walls, shifting with sun and cloud. The act here is lingering, a space for rest and reflection after the sensory intensity of marsh and cliff. The lighthouse reorients the journey inward, toward memory and meaning. The Cliff Tower leans toward the Bay of Fundy from a basalt outcrop partway along the headland’s shore. It is a buoy of joy at the continent’s edge, both trembling and assured. Four steel columns anchor into the stone, lifting the viewing chamber above the spray zone while allowing wind to pass beneath. In strong weather the structure hums, vibrating at frequencies tuned to the gale. A wavering bridge carries the wanderer from the forest’s hush to this precipice, the crossing a small drama of exposure. Inside, the tower keeps vigil over the Bay’s vast inhale and exhale: tides swelling against the cliffs, then retreating to reveal boulder fields and tidal pools. The act here is looking, an unobstructed confrontation with the sea’s scale and motion. https://shakura.ca/Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:55:06 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once https://shakura.ca/Berries-Cream Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:40:07 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/Berries-Cream &nbsp; &nbsp; berries &amp;&nbsp; cream M.Arch Design Studio 4Jan-Dec 2025with Francesca Mercurio *Berries &amp; Cream awarded Quadrangle Architects Tenth Anniversary Scholarship&nbsp; How do we achieve density without creating repetitious, uninspired architecture? How do we continue to produce vibrancy within the gestalt of Little Portugal? Simple – by fighting repetition, privileging colour and utilizing the single loaded corridor as collective space. Berries &amp; Cream is a building comprised of spatially and formally diverse elements that come together to create a tasty, collective spirit. The edifice wraps Dundas and Ossington’s northwest corner with sometimes varying volumetric forms and materiality that responds to the dynamism of a mixed-use, densifying neighbourhood. A conventional L-shape volume that has been tilted, punctured, pulled to create an unusually fun form. Inside the courtyard, pleated façade is clad by a grid of green balconies serving as the heart and soul of the project – the collective veranda. The veranda, with its comfortable 2.5 m width, becomes more than just a means of egress, its where residents convene, chit chat, maybe grow a tomato or two. The balconies are vertically connected by two core structures, semitransparent signals of circulation and communion. The pleats themselves are fenestrated by a series of window arrays rooted in whimsey but also relating to the domestic programming within – combating the scourge of repetition that plagues the language of densification in this city. Berries &amp; Cream is a love-letter to the human desire for delight, familiarity and colour. This building is enunciated vibrancy in an often grey city. https://shakura.ca/Site-Matter-Ecology Fri, 23 Feb 2024 02:25:20 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/Site-Matter-Ecology site, matter, &amp; ecology M.Arch Design Studio 2 Jan-April 2024&nbsp; My first points of reference is rooted in our site visit to Crawford Lake. I sought to bring the elements of stone &amp; tree into the building’s experiential qualities, both in the interior and exterior. This is seen in the stone retaining wall that stretches the entire length of the west side of the structure, joining the land that the building is cut into with the stone of the site and then the interior within. From the outside, the roof is clad in stone tiles further accentuating this relationship. The connection between the ecology of the site and building is put to the forefront with this material and structural system. The forest is represented in the verticality of the wood mullions forming the east glass façade. This material choice of glazing the entire east face of the building brings the edge of the forest into the structure. An important reference for the geometric form of the structure is a diagram from The Clay We Are Made Of : Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River that shows the societal spheres of Haudenosaunee culture. In my initial iterations for this project, I was imagining the building as a series of pavilions with determined programs that corresponded to social uses. I then further developed this to be more inclined to the concentric relationships seen in this diagram. The centers of the courtyards in building are representative of “fire/family” and “gardens/fields”. Moving out from that is a combination of “non-Haudenosaunee&nbsp; neighbours” in the gallery space and open museum spaces, as well as the periphery of the building representing the “edge of the woods” and then the forest itself at the edge of this being the “forest/hunting grounds”. The concentric circular forms of the structure form a referential concept of this diagram, and the programming of these spaces fills out the reality of this. The space is organized to be flexible and open to accommodate moving in and out artifacts and art in a way that allows interaction and open learning environments around the objects. From what I learned from our First Peoples Advisors, one of the most important aspects of indigenous peoples relationships to museums is access and flexibility to objects. They are not necessarily things to be behind glass and out of touch with the communities that they come from. They are things that need to be touched and experienced and that have lives and energy within them. The open organization of the space allows an increased degree of this concept.Hill, Susan M.The Clay We Are Made Of : Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017.&nbsp; https://shakura.ca/space-for-tower-tarpaulin-by-rebecca-belmore Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:51:30 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/space-for-tower-tarpaulin-by-rebecca-belmore space for tower, tarpaulin by rebecca belmore M.Arch Design Studio 2 January 2024 with Francesca Mercurio As design students presenting an architecture studio project centered on Indigenous peoples, we recognize we are in a process of learning on land that has long been home to many Indigenous folks, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, Huron-Wendat, and the Seneca. We approach this exercise through material explorations and relational research, viewing our process as ritual. A prevalent ritual became our mold-making removal; we found immense joy in unpacking foam and tape parcels, excited to see how our casting trials ended up and gesturing wildly when the desired effects were achieved. When designing a space for Rebecca Belmore’s Tower, tarpaulin, it was essential that the environment treats the artwork’s subject—the Vancouver housing crisis—with the sensitivity it deserves. We envisioned a commanding space, void of unnecessary architectural elements, to amplify the art's message. The journey through this site is processional, guiding visitors through an emotive experience of discomfort and ease. Rejecting the terms "museum" or "gallery," we offer a space for knowledge-sharing and community. Visitors must first confront the "decay" of the crisis underscored by the art, housed in deteriorating concrete rooms that reference a settler city built on concrete condos and extortionate rent. These individual, insular experiences are guided by narrow passageways that force viewers to confront the sculptures one by one, intensified by decaying apertures that filter light into the space. To balance this challenging experience, the procession concludes in a garden designed for contemplation and exhaling. The open courtyard features a circular plan, referencing medicine wheels and connecting the visitor back to the land. Materially, it takes the form of a structure in its unfinished state, not necessarily offering a final solution but suggesting a feeling of hope and a framework to move forward from. https://shakura.ca/a-tenuous-dairy-timeline Wed, 03 Jan 2024 23:29:18 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/a-tenuous-dairy-timeline <img width="2087" height="1567" width_o="2087" height_o="1567" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c26b8ec6c10f9a08de1f03471fdf315aabc3a23a8cebaf12343f4e9a88edf598/cow1.png" data-mid="200682181" border="0" data-scale="83" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c26b8ec6c10f9a08de1f03471fdf315aabc3a23a8cebaf12343f4e9a88edf598/cow1.png" /> click the cow for pdf link&nbsp; https://shakura.ca/vaulted-gallery-of-whimsey Wed, 03 Jan 2024 15:36:56 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/vaulted-gallery-of-whimsey vaulted gallery of whimsey M.Arch Design Studio 1September-December 2023This project was part of Design Studio 1 for my ongoing Master of Architecture at U of T. The project brief for this assignment was to create a gallery/pavillion/studio/cafe/boathouse within the site of the existing Budweiser Stage (to be removed).&nbsp; This project is an elaboration on previous geometric and spatial explorations that I engaged with earlier in the semester.The building’s total covered roof area is 70 000 sq ft, with 20 000sq ft of covered roof area. There are two concrete cores with elevators and stairs, and a 3 level gallery space with mezzanine. The unenclosed but covered space forms the bulk of the middle of the project, with the vault modules forming a series of connected but meandering outdoor gallery spaces. https://shakura.ca/weaving-1 Wed, 04 Jan 2023 18:43:32 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/weaving-1 weaving: exploring a self-regulating system OCAD University Generative DesignSept-Dec 2021 Weaving is a natural algorithm characterized by the interlocking of two or more linear systems, providing strength through the structural solidarity of one another. A common incarnation of weaving is a sin curve being looped by adding various functions such as cos, or a z-axis function giving the weave three dimensions. This project explored weaving both in its occurence in nature, as well as digital and physical explorations, towards aparametric model of the weaving algorithm. I was interested in the often chaotic and disordered weaving seen in organic structures, and sought to mimic those forms. References: Craighead, John &amp; Mossman, Brooke &amp; Bradley, Bruce. (1980). Comparative Studies on the Cytotoxicity of Amphibole and Serpentine Asbestos. Environmental health perspectives. 34. 37-46. 10.2307/3428945. https://shakura.ca/BOWLS Wed, 07 Sep 2022 01:40:23 +0000 shakura.ca https://shakura.ca/BOWLS BOWLS 2018-2022 These are some samples of wood bowls that I produced on a lathe from 2018-now. They vary from walnut, to oak, to maple, to some experiements in plywood. I liberated the plywood from abandoned projects in the OCADU studio and laminated it into blocks I could then turn. I was very pleasantly suprised by how durable the plywood is I enjoy this very old craft very much. It requires patience but also a strong stomach to jab big knives into a spinning piece of wood. I still have all my fingers !