Bangladesh @ 50: ‘Architects are doing stunning buildings, but the city is going to hell’

Edited excerpts:

How did the late flowering of Islam affect the way architects at the time viewed the city and their future?

Appearance of Islam was quite confident in his lack of interest in unique and spectacular buildings. In the late 1960s, he was talking about the larger aspect of architecture, its social and urban dimensions. Architects of the time were mostly involved in commercial enterprises, and were not concerned with cityscapes or the future of societies. Islam reinforced the social role and nation building of architecture. Talk about the need for architects to participate in regional planning, or 3D physical planning, for short, to the need to deal with the larger scale. What I am doing today is inheriting Islam’s call for a greater role for architecture. I often say in the current context in Dhaka, architects are making amazing buildings, but the city is going to hell. There is a crack in how we do things, and I would like to remedy that by working with the city’s fabric.

Appearance of Islam, College of Fine Arts, Dhaka. Saif al-Haq (Image courtesy of The Bengal Institute of Architecture, Landscape and Settlements, Dhaka)

In the past, I’ve written about how Achyut Kanvinde and Islam in India operate roughly in parallel, in terms of their architecture’s values ​​as a nation-building exercise. Can it evolve?

Achyut Kanvindi and Islam’s concepts of modern architecture included social aspects and, in the context of the 1950s and 1960s, the demands and requirements of the new nation-state. Not just buildings to satisfy their aesthetic, but how they impacted society. Just as Kanvindi was sent by (India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal) Nehru to Harvard (University, US) to train, return and design various IITs, Islam was trained in Oregon (University) and later at Yale University. In the design of many institutions. With his friend, American architect Stanley Tigerman, he designed five polytechnics and created a historical guide to building in Bangladesh. We often forget that these architects were operating in a certain intellectual and motivational vacuum with regard to architecture. Therefore, beyond construction, their buildings contributed to the creation of a new culture of living, working and thinking.

Like Nehru, Islam also invited international architects such as Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph, among others, to come and work in Bangladesh. How did this affect the way architecture in the country? For example, in India, we still carry on the legacy of Le Corbusier in many ways.

Nehru invited Corbusier to India to hit the Indians on the head, as he himself said. It wasn’t quite the case in Bangladesh, or East Pakistan, then. Islam was just an architect, he did not invite Khan, Rudolph and others directly, but he was instrumental in bringing them to Bangladesh. This was not so much to hit the Bengalis in the head, but to build an international level of practice in an architecturally empty situation. It is also known that Islam was first approached to design the Parliament complex in Dhaka, but he proposed to acquire Khan. Now this is a sacrifice for nation building! With such activists working in Bangladesh, the start was already strong, and the discourse was already at a high level. Of course, then, and certainly now, you could criticize the work for progress in other directions, but death was casting a distinct architectural culture and language.

Anna Heringer and Ike Roswag Klein, METI Hand School, Rudrapur. Image source Anna Heringer office (courtesy of Bengal Institute of Architecture, Landscape and Settlements, Dhaka)

The Islam Public Library (now Dhaka University Library) and Dhaka College of Art were a definitive change at that time (from the Mughal era and the British era), even if it was during the Pakistani period. In these buildings, politics and aesthetics intersect in an interesting way. Can you talk about it?

Work In the fifties of the last century, the predicament of Islam was the basis that should be the basis of his work. Unreliable is the recent past, which essentially involved the stinging of colonial culture. Denouncing the stigma of colonialism and some of the darker aspects of what is considered a tradition. Modern architecture, in its clean, non-referential language, favored him to bypass this predicament. His architecture was not an aesthetic project, but a moral one in which a decent minimum of architecture was able to meet the diverse and emerging needs of a new nation. I stress the word “decent,” which is a term he uses often. What I think he meant was a kind of architecture devoid of glamor but respectful of the splendor and poise of Bengali life at the time.

Lately, architecture in Bangladesh appears to be burgeoning thanks to new energy, and buildings created by Kashef and others are making waves internationally. How is this different from the “new energy” of building a new country, 50 years ago?

The new energy 50 years ago you speak of was expressed by many foreign architects and Muzharul Islam as the only Bengali figure. The new energy at the time literally included nation building, providing institutional facilities for societies entering a new economic world. The position was practical and mostly utilitarian. The new wave you’re talking about now represents new depth and content. Combining an ethic of the environment with a commitment to communities, these remarkable projects present a new approach to architectural practice that also ignores the selfish pretense associated with traditional practices. One quick point, in Bangladesh, includes the ethos of landscape ecology which, in turn, heralds immediately in the water. Architects in Bangladesh have to face the water, and this is shown in a number of innovative and experimental works.

Saif al-Haq, Arcadia School, South Kanarkur. Photo Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Sandro di Carlo Darsa (Image courtesy of Bengal Institute of Architecture, Landscape and Settlements, Dhaka)

Critic Kenneth Frampton’s idea of ​​architectural regionalism is widely held for its focus on the context and customs of the area. How is Bangladesh in this?

Frampton’s concept of critical regionalism has had a profound influence on the discourse and practice of architecture since the 1980s. Part of it influenced the topic of identity in architecture as well. We’ve moved on to new pressing matters now like sustainability and environmental planning, but the previous idea still haunts us. It has certainly established the site ethic in which the work of architecture can be evaluated and evaluated. I am very interested in site ethics in how an architectural work “happens” and evolves from or coincides with a site. More than ‘what is architecture’, I have always been interested in ‘where is architecture’. You see, no matter what, we’re always somewhere. You and I are even a building. What does it mean? In some of my writing, I have tried to theorize and use it to identify insightful work in Bangladesh. I might add that this is not entirely about cultural nationalism.

Khan called the Bengal Delta the geometry of the Earth. He manages to stand up to land and water well in his assembly design. In what ways do today’s architects live through this ground water system?

I would not use the term confrontation, but rather its opposite. Besides his impressively impressive buildings, Cannes’ collection showed how one works and lives with water, and how his work became a deeply poetic response to what it says: the terrestrial water system. He may have been the first modern architect to introduce water so deeply into the fabric of architecture, in fact, water was the turning point. What he identified in Bangladesh, very perceptively, is that in the Bengal Delta one needs to be an ‘Architect of the Land’, that is, even before formulating the shape of the building, one needs to consider the modification and rearrangement of the land. Any rearrangement of the earth immediately means work with water. What he came up with was now intuitively indicating a deep orientation in the landscape imagination. This is what is dealt with in some of the works of Kashif Mahboob Chaudhry, Saif al-Haq, (Khoundkir) Haseeb al-Kabeer and others.

Your 2017 exhibition, ‘Bengal Stream’, has traveled internationally and been very welcome. What are you most proud of and what are the new aspects of Bangladesh that the world has seen?

The fact that it has been well received and continues to gain attention is what delights us. The exhibition was organized by the Swiss Architecture Museum and The Bengal Institute. This was the first time Europeans had seen the new wave of architecture from Bangladesh, and learned about some architects’ passion in a variety of projects, from community work and landscaping, to boat restoration and amphibious architecture. For a small country, the diversity of work is incredible. But I’ll also repeat myself: Site ethics is a central theme in most of the work.

(Courtesy of the Bengal Institute of Architecture, Landscape and Settlements, Dhaka)

The Chetana, an architectural study group, initiated by Islam, was all about creating new ideas and identities for the country. The Bengal Institute, which she heads, has been instrumental in working in small towns. What are your new findings and how have people responded to your ideas?

Chitana began in the 1980s with the aim of restoring architecture from the circle of commerce to the core of culture, and establishing a fruitful relationship with history. If you are talking about the identity of the country, it is mainly rivers and deltas. The Bengal Institute is concerned with cities and settlements, from the capital to what you call it, the small. She is interested in their future, and interested in how they intersect with the landscape. In the Bengal Delta, such landscapes are landscapes. So, at the basis of it all – how should we dwell in the delta – the dynamics, flow and excess of water. We are trying to create a theory to live actively and harmoniously with this watery landscape.