Bengal The Vibrant Stream Architecture Scene of Bangladesh 2 3 12 13 The Vibrant Architecture Scene of Bangladesh Andreas Ruby The fact that the Swiss Architecture Museum is had studied architecture at Yale in the US in the ’50s producing the first major exhibition on contempo­ and ’60s with Paul Rudolph among his professors. rary architecture from Bangladesh ever shown out­ Coming back to East Pakistan (which was to become side the country begs a question or two. Such as: Bangladesh only in 1971), he re­read the traditional Why Bangladesh, of all places? And what makes ar­ Bengal building culture through the lens of West­ chitecture from Bangladesh particularly relevant ern modernism and construed a unique blend of to be shown in Switzerland, or in the Western world both Eastern and Western approaches to space. in general? When Dacca needed a new Assembly Building in A lot, actually. Bangladesh is not as far away 1962, he would have been ideally placed to design as it seems. You may even wear a piece of clothing it. Committed to enhancing the process of cultur­ produced in Bangladesh as you read this, since Ban­ al cross­proliferation, he however proposed to ap­ gladesh is the world’s second largest exporter of proach an international architect of renown to do Western clothing brands. But for a long time the the job. Kahn was elated to be chosen and immedi­ only moments we heard about architecture in Ban­ ately embraced the history of architecture of the gladesh was when one of its textile factories tragic­ Bengal region. Sensibly guided by the intellectual ally collapsed due to structural incapacities or fire company of Islam, Kahn unearthed many inspira­ incidents. It seems a cynical association, but it illus­ tions that have left clear traces in his design. He trates only too well how much our western view seized the Assembly Building as an opportunity to of Bangladesh is conditioned by references such as absorb the building culture of Bengal, appropriat­ poverty, precarious labour or natural catastrophes. ing local material and construction techniques to These phenomena are still real, but they also brand ground his own idiosyncratical architectural ap­ the global perception of the country in a stereotyp­ proach within the place he was invited to design. ical way and effectively obfuscate positive develop­ In that sense the Assembly Building became the ments that are under way as well. blueprint for a ‘horizontal’ type of cultural globali­ And architecture is one of them. Largely sation which considers all contexts as equally rel­ unbeknownst to the world, Bangladesh has devel­ evant, both worthy and able to inspire each other. oped a highly prolific contemporary architecture It marks a clear departure from the ‘vertical’, top­ scene in the course of few decades only. A stunning down colonial application of a Western model in body of work has emerged, which can easily stand a developing context. When the building was fin­ the comparison to the architectural production ished in 1982/83 – after two decades of development, in the West both in terms of its quality, versatility construction, and politically motivated delays – and originality. The fact that we hardly know any­ the emerging architects of Bangladesh promptly thing about it (myself included, until a year and a picked up on this model of horizontal cultural ex­ half ago) says something about the post­colonial change and grasped it as an opportunity to articu­ blindfolds of architectural discourse in the West. late their local architectural approach in relation Build ings from Bangladesh very rarely get pub­ to Western modernism. But instead of simply copy­ lished in Western architectural magazines or books, ing Kahn’s approach, they applied his technique of and even online it is difficult to find more than cultural absorption in reverse direction. Embrac­ piece­meal information. ing some of his construction methods and spatial The only exception to this rule is a build­ concepts in their own designs ultimately enabled ing by a Western architect: Louis Kahn’s Assembly them to modernise the rich architectural history of Building in Dhaka. The building is clearly one of the their own country, rather than uncritically replac­ great mythical masterpieces of 20th century mod­ ing their local tradition with mechanically applied ernism, world­famous and yet visited by only a few. formulas imported from the ‘New World’. But maybe at least as interesting as the build ing it­ This fascinating cultural dialectic has argu­ self is the cultural dialectics out of which it emerged ably empowered Bangladesh’s contemporary archi­ and how it eventually empowered the unfolding of tectural scene to unfold a highly distinctive archi­ contemporary Bangladeshi architecture. It is the tectural language of its own, which sensibly reso­ fruit of a most unlikely cultural dialogue that was nates with the agendas of global architecture. It is initiated by Muzharul Islam, who is considered to a very robust, simple, direct and sensual archi tec­ be the first modern architect in the region. Islam ture, that makes do with often very limited mate­- 14 15 ri al conditions, yet accomplishes exceptional re­ of us,’ he told me when we first met. Luckily for him sults. It is able for instance to accommodate the ex­ and us he then got introduced to a whole group of treme climatic conditions with very modest tech­ local architects and their buildings in and around nological equipment by using simple fans and ver­ Dhaka, which made him more hopeful again that nacular natural ventilation methods instead of ex­ there may be a life after Kahn after all. Their build­ tensive air­conditioning. It is quite the contrary to ings demonstrate how one could digest Kahn’s leg­ our Western culture of construction where build­ acy and construct a contemporary architectural ings deal with much more moderate climatic con­ thesis on its grounds. ditions through much more elaborate technologic­ After this initial visit he went back to Bang­ al systems. Additionally, architects in Bangladesh ladesh many times and developed a thorough un­ have only a few materials to build with. Since there derstanding of the local architectural scene. He are no resources of natural stone in the country, the brought his architecture students from Lucerne available material palette mostly consists of brick, University of Applied Sciences and Arts to Dhaka concrete, bamboo and mud – materials which can be and was later invited to be a visiting lecturer at locally sourced and manually applied by local work­ The Bengal Institute of Architecture, Landscape force. Because of this restrained access to technol­ and Settlements in Dhaka. Through years of contin­- ogy, architecture in Bangladesh has always placed uous curiosity and relentless research he has built more emphasis on sophisticated layouts of space up a unique knowledge base on contemporary ar­ and the smart use of natural resources such as light, chitecture from Bangladesh. He strongly feels that air, plants, and water. In that sense the con ditions his architecture friends in Bangladesh, building of building have changed less over time compared under often most precarious conditions, somehow to the West, where rapidly changing tech nological managed to dig deeper into the flesh of architec­ paradigms have often generated corresponding ture than architects in the West operating in much ‘­isms’, such as Californian case study architecture more advantageous circumstances. We agreed that of the 1950s that thrived on light airplane produc­ this paradox begs to be addressed critically, and af­ tion facilities, or the architecture of prefabricat­ ter he had shown me some photographs of crucial ed plastic modules from the 1960s made possi­ examples of recent architecture from Bangladesh, ble thanks to the easy availabili ty of oil, or British the idea of an exhibition at S AM was born. This was high­tech architecture from the 1980s. While it is in March 2016. If only one­and­a­half years later easy to date Western buildings from these periods the Swiss Architecture Museum can inaugurate based on their material and constructive specifici­ this exhibition and present the catalogue, then this ty, buildings built in East Pakistan and later Bangla­ is first and foremost thanks to Niklaus Graber’s un­ desh in the same period have a lot in common with wavering passion and energy to explore and dis­ each other conceptu ally and aesthetically because seminate this remarkable heritage of contempo­ they generally use the same construction process­ rary architecture, exposing the fact that Bangla­ es and materials. Thus, buildings from young ar­ desh is not a white spot on the world architectural chitects often do not ostensibly differ from build­ map, but in fact a highly cultivated and rich ter­ ings of older architects (and vice versa), which cre­ ritory from which we can learn a lot. We are also ates a notable absence of the fashion­based cycles grateful to the Bengal Institute of Architecture, of architectural expression which have become an Landscapes and Settlements for their valuable col­ increasingly recognisable phenomenon of Western laboration, which has been instrumental in the architecture during the past decades. production process of the project by adding their Interestingly enough, many of these quali­ resources, know­how and network. We feel this ex­ ties of Bangladesh’s contemporary architecture are hibition comes at a crucial moment, since architec­ increasingly sought after by young architects in ture from Bangladesh is getting more and more the Western hemisphere, too – particularly in Swit­ the international acknowledgement it deserves. In zerland – which in part answers the question why 2016, two of the six prestigious Aga Khan Awards it makes good sense to introduce this architecture for Architecture were given to two architects from to a Western audience.