Architects Take the Stage in Bangladesh

Political unrest and sporadic violence on highways and roads in Bangladesh provided the backdrop to a three-day architectural conference in the countrys capital, Dhaka, in mid-January. Organized by the Bengal Foundation, a private trust dedicated to promoting the arts in Bangladesh, the event brought together speakers such as Fumihiko Maki, William J.R. Curtis, and Ken Yeang to examine how notions of place and presence shape the built environment. Other participants included architects Hctor Fernndez Elorza from Spain, John Lin from Hong Kong, Anupama Kundoo from India, and Palinda Kannangara from Sri Lanka, and landscape architect Kongjian Yu from China, among others.

Photo Architectural Record

Crowded street in the old city Dhaka.

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Although the conference was not affected by the political turmoil, it took place while Bangladeshs top opposition leader was being held in virtual house arrest and opposition activists were trying to impose an embargo on deliveries to the capital city. In the first two weeks since the call for an embargo was made on January 5, at least 23 people had been killed, mostly by fire bombings of buses and vehicles on highways leading to Dhaka.

Undeterred, nearly 2,400 people each daymostly architects and studentsattended the free conference, called EngageDhaka. Architect Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, who runs the Dhaka firm Urbana, served as director of the event, which was the Bengal Foundations first major foray into architecture. The organization, which is headed by businessman and art collector Abul Khair, publishes magazines and books on the arts and runs an annual Indian classical music festival that draws up to 60,000 people. It hopes to mount the architecture conference on an annual basis too.

At EngageDhaka, Khair announced the establishment of the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes, and Settlements, a multidisciplinary program that will start in August and be directed by architect and educator Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, who comes from Bangladesh and is currently teaching at the University of Hawaii. We need a new kind of urbanism, said Ashraf about Dhaka, a mega-city of 15 million people that sits at the mouth of an enormous delta fed by the countrys 700 rivers. The challenge for designers will be to accommodate urban growth without harming the citys landscape and hydrology, said Ashraf. Form follows flow, he noted. Emphasizing the connection between the city and the countryside, Khair told the audience, As an architect, you must go out to the villages and be a villager.

In addition to the official topic of place and presence, a recurring theme of many of the 14 presentations was the impact of climate change, a critical issue in a country of nearly 160 million people living mostly at sea level and threatened by rising oceans. Kongjian Yu, who heads the Chinese landscape architecture firm Turenscape and will serve on the faculty of the new Bengal Institute, stated, Landscape architecture is about survival. Its about infrastructure, planning, food, water, and cultural identity. His point was underlined by a freak hailstorm the night before the last day of the conference, an almost unheard of weather event for Dhaka in the usually dry month of January.

Likening the built environment to a prosthetic attached to a host organismin this case, Earths biospherearchitect and ecologist Ken Yeang said architects job was to successfully integrate their projects with the natural systems that support the planet. He described the various strategies he has used in his buildings and planning projects to make this bio-integration happen. Good design must be functional and livable, but ultimately, it must make people happy, he said.

Anupama Kundoo, who practices in India and teaches in Madrid and Ithaca, NY, gave the most personal talk at the conference, which she titled Uprootedness and the Sense of Place. Though she was born in India, her family comes from Dhaka and moved to India before with the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The morning before her talk, Kundoo visited for the first time the house her grandparents had left seven decades ago. She showed an old black-and-white photograph of the imposing mansion in the 1930s and then a color shot of the ruined building today.

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Architects Take the Stage in Bangladesh