Delta force
Modernist masters and new-generation architects in Dhaka
Under the shade of the mango trees, a group of students is sketching a staircase. Probably the most celebrated stairway in Dhaka, it is both graceful and complex, and connects two floors of the Faculty of Fine Arts, a venerated building created by the late architect Muzharul Islam. Since his death in 2012, Islam has been dubbed the founding father of Bangladeshi modernism, and the faculty, completed in 1955, was his first building. Impromptu sketching classes in this building are common; more than an act of homage, they also provide refuge from the sirens and relentless traffic that make up Dhaka’s jarring soundtrack.
Born in 1923 in what was then British India, Islam lived in turbulent times; he saw his homeland renamed East Pakistan in 1955, then Bangladesh in 1971, after a bloody war of independence from West Pakistan. On graduating as an architect in the US in 1952, Islam returned home and was dismayed by the crumbling colonial relics and drab buildings being built by NGOS. His young country needed a new type of architecture, one that evoked Bengali culture and climate.
So began a golden age of Bengali architecture, which was modernist at heart but infused with local influences such as the bagan bari (house in a garden) and ancient Buddhist temples, and materials such as teak, red brick and terracotta. Islam invited Americans he had met while studying – Paul Rudolph, Stanley Tigerman and Robert Boughey – and Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis to come to his country and build civic buildings and schools, campuses and homes. Richard Neutra came too, of his own accord. Their influence stretches to every chaotic corner of Dhaka, from a Memphismeets-miami petrol station on the edge of a six-lane highway, and a brutalist concrete fence, softened by lush vegetation, around a splendid Muslim cemetery, to Bait Ur Rouf, a minimalist mosque featuring patterned red brickwork and natural light in a dismal suburb near the airport.
In 1962, in what proved to be a masterstroke, Islam passed up the offer to design Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, the National Assembly building, and handed it to his pal Louis Kahn. Today it sits like a diamond in the
rough, a perfect micro city within a flawed megalopolis. Beyond police barricades, rickshaws and food carts, nine buildings rise out of a lake on 200 acres of gardens and manicured lawns. They house the Parliamentary Chamber, the prime minister’s headquarters, a library, a mosque and offices for more than 1,000 government officials. With its Presidential Plaza, huge geometric windows, light-filled atriums and criss-cross corridors, the monument was, claimed Kahn ‘like a many-faceted precious stone’, a symbol of pride that would encourage enlightened thinking in a young country. In the 20 years that it took to build, the country won a war of independence and Kahn died, unaware that history would hail the National Assembly his magnum opus and a global masterpiece.
These accolades do not appear to strike a chord with the building’s languid occupants, however. Inside, an air of bureaucratic torpor pervades; po-faced officials sleep at their desks and shuffle along ghostly corridors, seemingly immune to the many problems pressing against government gates and unaffected by the dynamic forces at work in other areas of Dhaka.
According to 2019 statistics from the World Bank, Bangladesh is the fastest-growing country in South Asia, itself the fastest-growing region in the world. Dhaka, a city of 20 million people, reinvents itself as often as it floods and none of its midcentury treasures is listed. Nurur Khan, a Dhaka-based architect who founded and runs the Muzharul Islam Archive, estimates that around 30 of Islam’s buildings are still standing. Among them is the (much-altered) house in which Islam lived and his National Library and Archives which, despite its sluice-like façade, looks defenceless against the crush of high-rise blocks stampeding towards it.
The British High Commission, an elegant complex designed by Foreign Office architect John Hopewell, was built in 1989 on ground raised by a metre to lift it above the highest forecast flood levels. It was a smart precaution. Since then, Dhaka has witnessed prolonged monsoons, rising water levels and increasingly violent floods and storms, which have washed away venerable old buildings and yet failed to deter the construction of new ones on saturated land.
Alarmed that such frenetic development is threatening Dhaka’s modernist legacy, this year’s annual Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is hosting the exhibition ‘On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention’ among its numerous events and contributions by some 500 artists, scholars and curators. Seventeen artists, among them London-based Rana Begum, Haroon Mirza and Shezad Dawood, have been invited to respond to Islam’s influence. Nadia Samdani, co-founder of DAS, explains: ‘Islam’s work went far beyond physical buildings; it incorporated teaching, ideology, activism and a whole architectural movement. We are trying to preserve his legacy by working with artists who approach it with fresh eyes.’
Dhaka is fertile ground for a young generation of architects who grew up around Islam and Kahn. Among them is Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, founder of Urbana. ‘I have been most influenced, I must admit, by those two,’ he says. ‘Islam was one of the first formally trained and practising architects in the Indian subcontinent. Whether conscious of this factor or not, he talked, built and lived like a true master, carefully creating an oeuvre without glitter but of unvarnished
‘Islam’s work went far beyond physical buildings; it incorporated teaching, ideology and activism’
worth.’ At Dhaka’s Museum of Independence, Chowdhury blends Kahn-like monumentalism with simplicity; at Srihatta, Samdani’s art museum and sculpture park opening in Sylhet in 2021, he mixes Islam’s modernist lines with third-century vernacular brick architecture to create exhibition spaces, a residency complex and a sculpture park. His approach is shared by a group of contemporaries – among them Marina Tabassum and Rafiq Azam of Shatotto – who are building all over Bangladesh.
Architect and DAS collaborator Huraera Jabeen recalls that Islam was her external examiner when she was a first-year student at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in the 1990s. ‘We were not introduced to him or his buildings,’ she says. ‘The focus was on international, not local, architects. Changes in attitudes towards the way we live, local materials and climate have brought attention back to his work. He is Bangladesh’s most influential architect. He set a distinctive trend.’ *
‘Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements’,
7-15 February 2020, dhakaartsummit.org