Aquatecture – Shaakira Jassat

With drought increasing worldwide, how do we provide people in urban areas with sufficient water for local usage? Through smart designs, we can help to collect water in their own, local reservoirs. It helps them to be less dependent.

The recent Day Zero drought in her native South Africa led designer Shaakira Jassat to rethink how we can manage and experience water in our urban environment. She realized people needed a system that could help them collect water on a local level. This inspired her to the design of Aquatecture: a modular system to collect rain and condensation through a patterned relief, that collects it in a reservoir from which the water can be used directly. It can be installed as a façade panel on buildings making water harvesting an integrated building feature. It can also be used as free standing elements in landscapes, providing water-harvesting stations at various nodes throughout cities. Aquatecture encourages a more convenient and closer engagement between people and their daily water resources.

Shaakira Jassat brings together design and architecture in her ambition to improve the relationship between humans and nature. She is committed to more equal, social and sustainable distribution of natural resources. Her mission is to make water as a source of life accessible to all. Jassat was one of the speakers at the Design Indaba Conference in 2018, top 10 finalist of the Dopper Changemaker Challenge in 2019 and winner of the first Kazerne Design Award 2020.