Marina Tabassum

welcome I just want to say a few words to introduce the stars of the evening in particular the one of the brightest stars here at the school Kenneth Frampton this is the ninth lecture in this endowed lecture series and it's been just wonderful to have can choose every year a figure an architect a person whose body of work is contributing to both the discipline and the practice in in all the new ways there is always a sense of continuity the sense of what architecture can do to connect you know local and global to connect the history and new ways of thinking about the future about how we can live differently with the environment new ways to intersect architecture and the city and every speaker has been unbelievably inspiring of course we all know ken was global I wanna let discovering always gems of that and so the lecture series was founded in 2010 for a very young birthday that can hand that date and will continue with you know collaborating with Ken's thinking about who should speak and so I'm delighted to have this lecture continued please welcome Kenneth Hampton good evening it's a pleasure and honor to introduce marina stop Assam who graduated from a school in Dhaka and Bangladesh in 1995 and started an office soon after that with her 10 partnerships chartering and in 1997 they won the competition for independence monument and and museum war museum basically and it was built in a very well established and some well-known park in the center of Dhaka is its extraordinary building by by any standards by world standards it's a monument of amazing dimensions I mean there are the height of the light tower that there establishes the the point of the monument is in itself quite an elegant installing structure and and moreover the the way which the landscape and the park relates to museum the subterranean museum is beautifully handled and subsequent to that she has practiced independently and and built up very unique and carefully measured practice on the wall here you see the plan of the white roof mosque in Dhaka which is fairly recently completed and makes the absolutely economical and astonishing you use a brick and the bubble of course of light and she says since light is freely available we are obliged always to take the maximum opportunity for exploiting it so that is already a kind of canonical work in a career and to that we should see this evening other buildings up over a very wide range and I wanted just briefly to mention this extraordinary exhibition of which he has parked which bears the title Bengal stream and was organised by the Swiss architecture museum in Basel with Nicolas Grabbe who was at some point I think briefly here in Columbia who curated the entire exhibition and went to Bangladesh and numerable times it all together with astonishing photographs and and and one of the things that comes across most struggling I think and and I remember something I went to Bangladesh I think in the very early 90s and I was of course struck by their as as everyone must be this is the sort of non plus ultra monsoon climate which means that water and land are almost equally interchangeable and constantly being changed in fact by the effect of the monsoon and so the Bengal stream is I don't know who chose the title but it's very opposite in terms of the the important part played by water in the entire culture and so I think we shall hear some more about this evening at night which join me thank you for this wonderful invitation my first time in Columbia University but I'm really happy and glad to be here before I basically start my talk it would be I think important to mention a few things like when I probably my generation who went to architecture school in the 90s will probably remember the crisis of identity we all faced when there was this enormous boom in construction industry happened with the real estate development taking over the world and so this is what you used to see architecture as kind of a commodity being sold everywhere and in a way that was the crisis point and and you know these fast build of buildings glass and steel architecture out of a vending machine so you kind of start thinking which way should your architecture be what is your way and in many ways that's what I think in that summer of 1996 gauzy Holly - Ralph a very close colleague of ours introduced me to this critical regionalism sa by Kenneth Frampton and I don't think I would be saying anything more if I say that that was to me kind of a revelation you know very very prophetic the reason being you know when you grow up and live your life part of your life outside of the West I was just telling al-mal about it that you actually are influenced so much by the Western notion every component of your life is very much influenced by that that you grow up confused in many ways at times you tend to imitate what is of West and try to become one of them or you reject the entire thing and try to be the other and so critical regionalism for me was a kind of a mediation between both and that's what I think you know way many ways pave the path of the way I think and I see architecture it's I would say it gave me the option of exploring and extracting what is essential of my localness at the same time giving me the possibility of being one of the you know being a person of a universal or let's say a universal culture so I would say that you know since I'm here to give a talk Kenneth front an endowment lecture it is absolutely befitting if I pay my deepest respect and you know just say that it is an enormous contribution especially in my case as an architect so I share my pursuit of architecture and I think the best way to say is what are the most important ingredients with which I try to create architecture and the most the first most important thing is place seeking architecture actually begins by understanding the location the geography the climate which actually gives us our uniqueness the culture the identity of our own and then of course there is time time is a constantly changing element which is you know our socio-cultural political environment is is constantly transforming and so seeking relevance in architecture is also important to appropriate with time and the context obviously is a matrix of these two factors so to begin with location or the place I come from and if you see that's Bangladesh 2/3 of the Bangladeshi land is actually Delta and formed by three major rivers which are coming out of the Himalayas Ganges Brahmaputra and Meghna and all three rivers are flowing into the Bay of Bengal and while doing so creating this the largest Delta in the world and if you see here you can see all the intricate water patterns that's there so you really can't distinguish what is water and what is land and in many ways an errata matter and deal if the Kuna talks about this wetness the theory of wetness and I think this is the most befitting for the Bengal Delta because you cannot really distinguish between water and land and these are images that you can see from 1971 till 2019 and how the water bodies actually changes and courses over the period of time and while it looks from the satellite image almost like a flow of water when you go very close to it this is what you see on one side you see how the rotates the land and the other on the other side you see how it gives it back so that's Bangladesh that's the softness of it the impermanence and and the rivers are really mighty so that's a mosque being taken by the river and then on the other side you see how the new lands are going so this emergence in a way the emergence of land or accretion if you say it and the and the erosion that's what Bangladesh is all about in many ways especially the activity' part in terms of climate the Tropic of Cancer runs through Bangladesh so it makes it let me just show you here maybe so that's Bangladesh right there and the Tropic of Cancer cuts through it making it a subtropical climate which means we have a relatively wet monsoon season for half the year and half the year we have a very dry weather which is quite often very dusty but the monsoon time which is during the summer months it's the most it's hot and humid and as such rain is celebrated and whereas the dry season is cooler in temperature and much more dry and dusty in that sense and this is the kind of landscape you get during the monsoon season the water rises and the low-lying land gets more or less inundated so that's more of a water scape rather than landscape and that's when people start fishing and then during the dry season when the water recedes that's the time for agriculture so the land actually has two to three different uses once it's a fishing ground the other time it's a much more of a landscape for architecture for agriculture so the temperature between the dry season and the wet season is very not very much so it's a kind of a very moderate temperature difference as such in terms of architecture I think the most basic form of the primordial form would be this where you only need a plinth to raise you above the ground so that you're not into the water so a raised plinth and then a roof on top and that's just about it that's all I could actually needs actually to be in that kind of climate and in that geographical location a roof and a plinth and that's what we've been trying to achieve all through my pursuit in architecture and quite often when it becomes much more complex then you add a veranda which is in a way the most lived space in a way people do not live in their rooms they're mostly outside or semi outside which is more like these verandas and and they from the colonial time the buildings that you see or even afterwards verandas were actually the most important space and the most lived space but after the real estate boom these verandas have completely disappeared you don't see them anymore in architecture and porosity is also very important to keep the building porous to let it breathe because of the hot humid climate the building's have to have air flow to ensure air flow you need to have a very porous wall so these are basically the elements that are very important in my view that you need a roof and just an openness or blurring the edges as much as possible keep it porous and so I think the most I would say this is actually the first piece of modern architecture in Bangladesh by masal Islam built in 1950s and this building actually has all these different elements that I just described it is a very pavilion like architecture which has porosity allows the nature to be in and out there is no in-and-out in that sense there is no hard boundary between the inside and outside and in one of our projects in the very early practice it is designed in 1996-97 built around that time this is a project where we tried the same idea of pavilion as a architecture form it's a small apartment on a six story building where we stood you apartment where we tried this idea that whether it is possible to open up a building or a space more to the outside and there is this courtyard as you can see which is an open space and then it opens up the entire building or the space to incorporate the inside and the outside and courtyard is again another very important element when you are living in the tropics because it ensures this air flow and this is a courtyard where I grew up as a child and I remember how important this courtyard used to be the entire life revolved around the courtyard and it also what it did was it conditioned the air that used to come into the rooms and also creating this draught and in a way that kind of stayed with me all my life and when we designed this building we created this high volume what it does is actually creates this low pressure and air from all sides come and you know creates this stack effect where the entire house becomes cool and it's breezy and there's enough draught of air to take away the humidity during the hot summer months so this seemed to be one of the most successful way of treating airflow or creating airflow and which I kind of used in many of my projects afterwards so that's the building actually the six story building and that's the apartment I'm talking about that's the courtyard from the top and so it's a small it's a 1,200 square feet of space but we we gave a small area which was open to sky only to be able to create this disconnection with nature and which is I think very important in that sense so another project of a small house which is a kind of a weekend house close to taka where we did the similar kind of an idea it's a nine square grid plan where this central space is actually a high volume court and then these are the spaces which people use and there are four courts on the four corners which actually allows the air to come in and create that draft so everything is about creating the climate and using the very local elements in many ways so that's the court in the middle of the house and if you see these are that courts on the corners and they these are the openings so the air flow basically takes place from here going into the shaft and then going out it's a building done in brick and basically these are the courts on the corner and on the upper level we have some pavilion like spaces where people can enjoy the brick wasn't of the best of quality so we used brick dust and lime and created a finish which was more of a homogeneous quality so that's again one kind of a court building and this is another one which I'm just sharing with you this is the site this is the US Embassy in Dhaka that's the Canadian embassy that's the Chinese embassy Thai Embassy so it's an embassy zone and this is site was for the French and German embassy so the French and the German decided to build an embassy together so which is I don't know how good that idea is but you know that's the United States of Europe so basically for that reason they gave the brief talked about having 25 meters setback from all sides so it gave us a very small footprint actually so there was no way of creating a French zone and a German zone it had to be one single building and it's a high-security area so the central building was here and we tried to put the visa section the other services on the edges which was allowed so the way we designed it is it was a competition and we won the competition actually so we created this central atrium and a courtyard the circulation is on the sides this is actually the building the main building and then this is the passport section cafeteria services this is where the car drop-off area so basically this is the central court or the atrium space and we cut the corners because since it's a building which was going rising up and people could look into the building that was not something desirable by the client so we decided to have the openings more in the corners and it was shifted in different directions so it created a certain kind of a architectural form but at the same time having these volumes so that's actually the sections as you can see they trim in the middle that's a school that already is existing and that's the building we actually came up with so you see that the corners are cut to allow light and ventilation though it was designed as a condition building but it could actually work as a non air-conditioned building as well so was always in our mind we won first prize but then it was given to a French architect to build so that happens talking about materials so actually this is one of the oldest Buddhist monasteries in Bangladesh if you there are quite a number of these Buddhist monasteries and the way I basically define architecture there are basically two types one is architecture of permanence the other is architecture of impermanence architecture of permanence is generally all about celebrating or continuity that aspires for continuity and in many ways architecture of power aspires continuity and for that reason you see temples or religious structures political structures they are the ones who require dis permanence and that's why brick was created in many ways in the Delta because you can take the earth bake it make it into brick and you could create architecture of lesser religious architecture or even the architecture of power in that sense and but for the vernacular the people architecture of people let's say which is much more non permanent it was always about mud and just building with mud so these are the two different kind of architecture but the possibility of Earth is so enormous you can see such beautiful intricate work only by using earth and baking it into some beautiful terracotta these are some of the temple architecture that you see in Bengal so brick is our material that's the only material we have actually there is no stone nothing available it's only Delta so mod is our material and we have good brick Masons the entire industry is run on brick and these are some of the Masons I work with so this guy here he's actually the Mason for the mosque project so in a way he's also a winner of the avocado award because the award actually celebrates the entire team so he also received a certificate and a portion of the prize money so he's a winner of the award so since talking about brick we do have a lot of brick kilns because it's our material and so at one point in time when this Huffman brick kilns were work in a way this idea of carbon emission was becoming much more strong from the brick kilns and concrete blocks were pushing their industry in the brick industry then tried something else which is a hybrid Hofmann brick kiln where you don't have the stack and it reduces the carbon emission so this is one of those Huff hybrid Hofmann brick kilns that does not have the stack and in a way this was a new technology and since it reduces carbon emission there the client of this brick kiln decided to build a small residence for the engineers who work on the site and and in a way we asked us to design it for them so we I decided to take this idea of creating this brick in which is beautiful they were making it when we were there and and it's a very simple technique of creating this vault and we decided to create something which is almost a brick kiln and you know we're capsule eating it so you see that's the form and basically the glass goes here and here so there is no curved glass and so this is this bed area this was the living area was just a very small project but the idea was to create that with brick so handcrafting when we do architecture basically in Bangladesh it's everything is handmade so every building everything is basically hand produced so imperfection is just part of the way we build quite often I see and many of my colleagues works they try to take the brick or the hand finish and try to make it look like machine finished which doesn't happen at the end of the day and just a lot of frustration and a lot of bad relationship with the workers who work there so it's always better to accept it because hand crafting has a certain quality and to just accept it as a as a perfection or imperfection of the material but what happens when you work with hand is that you create a certain kind of a connection with the people you work with so this is one of those people who actually does beautiful work with you know like turning this little fountain which is kind of a contribution from cons Kimball but we decided to make it at in a small scale so this is what I feel quite interesting when you work there these are people who has no knowledge of drawings they do not understand drawing so producing hundreds of drawings do not really make much sense so quite often it's about connecting with them and one-to-one basis creating samples trying to be on site and to talk to them and then to sort of work to their work with them as a as a team so that is also something that creates architecture and at times your working drawings look like these not really coming out of a printer but more on-site talking to people and then trying to create some sort of a detail out of that so those are actually the things that creates our language that's taka and the pink that you see is all the built-up areas and these are and basically taka has one River and the soft South which is the buriganga and on the North there is two rock and it's bounded on the sides by low-lying water bodies and if you see very closely that's our Parliament complex by Louie Khan and so the city actually grew very fast starting from the pre Mughal era now it has grown I think one of the fastest growing cities in the world at the moment it has 20 million people living in bong in taka city itself one of the densest cities in the world and you can see that two different kind of architecture two different kind of people living in two different atmospheres and so this is what taka looks like that's the that's how we live we don't have the luxury of living in houses we only have apartments and stacks of floors so basically the developer industry flourished because there was a need for housing and and they found it and absolutely you know a good market where they could actually sell their product and so quite often the sections look like that that's our every single office in taka city is drawing this section the stacks of floors of apartments and this is one of my sections sorry about that but but that's how this is one and my only one developer project that I did for the reason being that this was this came to me from the client so the way it works is there is the developer and the landowner comes to a deal where they share 5050 so if there would be 20 apartments in a building the developer takes ten and the ten goes to the landowner so the landowner actually came to me and said can you design this for me and I took the job because I liked the site which is on the spine of taka city in one of the major spine which is running north to south and and in in a way a very important street so that was the site that was given to us and you can see that's the development of the city every single plot is an apartment building of six storey now they allow 12 story up to 12 story buildings so if you look at it that's our site and the road actually comes from the north here going through that and then goes down all the way to the river so it remains quite busy all through the day and what we've done what we did is it's basically a very simple program with two apartments on two sides with the core in the middle the only thing with what we tried to do is open up the edges and the corners to allow ventilation and light so you you enter generally our wind flow is from the south so from the south you you get the air and then it goes out from the north so basically creating a sort of a draught of air and one thing we were sort of trying to do is create a facade which is more for the city because it's and the one the major spine of the city so and quite often as you can see there is a traffic jam people are sitting on the road but more than that I think what was important for me to show at least to the developers that you don't need to open up the entire building with openings and you can create a facade which is more for the city rather than for the 20 family who are living inside so for the family living inside there is already these days verandas and openings but the sides which is more facing to the to the street main artery of the city there it should be more of a you know for the people who live in the city so that's the building not a very easy building to the photograph and a new project which are now at the moment we are working on now gone to the approval stage which is here this is also a residential project but a1 single-family not a developer project it's a it's a family residence but not really single family but multiple family residents where the client of ours is a patron of art and music and he's been doing that for more than 30 years now so he has a good amount of art collection and so he wants to house his art collection in the lower floors and then half the upper floors more for the residential part so what we did is again creating that shaft which is important for the ventilation so we created ventilation shafts and then one thing I tried to add and which was in a way in his brief that he wanted a building to be very natural that there should be air flow and light and everything so we decided to bring in that idea of veranda back so what you see her here is a is a long veranda that goes around the building these are the courts here here and three courts on three sides and these are the main living spaces so here you probably see it better so this is the long veranda all around the building and these are the courtyards and more the ventilation shaft I would say so every floor has a certain quality of that and this is how the building actually turns out so these are the corners these are the long verandas running all around and that's the courtyard and so the building is now at the moment under approval process so soon we will be going into construction and one thing we do is since we have these two different climates one is the monsoon and the dry season during the dry season we construct and during the monsoon there is no construction so we only construct forces for half a year and half a year we design so that's the building and if you vegetate it it could also look like something of overgrown garden if built that way so as Professor Frampton was mentioning about the museum I'd like to show you the museum project so to start the museum project would be interesting to give you a little bit of a background of Bangladesh so in the 20th century Bangladesh went through three different administration it was in the colonial British Empire and then when the British Empire left the subcontinent based on these drawings as you see here the maps that was a consensus from the 1909 they divided the entire subcontinent into three parts so this became the Hindu dominated Indian and these became Muslim dominated Pakistan so this is the West Pakistan this was the East Pakistan and between East and West there is about 1700 kilometers of Indian land somebody's idea did not work as you can see this is one of the fastest mass forced migration that has ever happened in the history in the 20th century and in a way that divided Kashmir divided Punjab and also divided Bengal so my family comes from the Bengal and we used to live somewhere on here that was the family home which went into Indian part so the entire family had to move and so they moved and came to live in Dhaka here and it was done in a very short time it was riots going everywhere and so basically my my father who was at that time six years old with him brought this piece which is the base of a hookah I don't know why a six-year-old would bring a piece of hookah but he said that they had twenty one of these at their house so he just he wanted to bring all of those but my grandfather didn't let him so he brought one so this is the only Connection we have still so that's the partition his history for me 1947 to 1971 that was the time of West East Pakistan and at that time obviously as you can see there was language movement Bengal is fought for their language there was a lot of disparity inequity there was a lot of misunderstanding so in a way it ended in a war and in 1971 there was a revolution by the Bengalis and it triggered a war a nine-month long bloody war which started in march ended in December and huge amount of killing most importantly intellectual killing was one of the worst of this entire history so in 16th of December Bangladesh became a sovereign nation and in 1997 right into two years of our practice so I graduated in 95 and in 97 this competition was announced that the bank that the government wants to build a monument to independence and a museum of Independence so we participated as a young office and in a way we won the competition and in and that became one of our very important projects so if you see taka as I was showing you earlier yeah so that's Dhaka City as you can see densely built only a very few green areas left being one is the Parliament complex there is some water lake around here these are some of the water lakes so this shows the public accessible green spaces and the site we were given is this one which is a part a park within the city and it is one of the rare park areas where people have access to so to build a museum in a park just seem like quite a challenging job because then you actually take away a green from people so how do you deal with that that was one of the questions but at the same time this ground has a history which was also important this used to be a horse racing ground during the British time during the Pakistan period this was also a place where all the political activities and large gatherings used to take place this is also the same ground in December when the Pakistani forces surrendered to the Allied force of India and Bangladesh so it is historically very important but at the same time it's a park so what we did is we just created a small kind of a Plaza and keeping it to the minimum of footprint as possible and leaving the entire part for people to enjoy as as they would and so basically creating a road access and then this this is the main footprint that we've taken and we created an elliptical walkway around it and a small amphitheater added to that see if you look at the plans that's a existing children's park so that is our access and then people do basically walk and come to the plaza and that's the elliptical walkway so the idea was to keep it horizontal just creating a Plaza so it becomes a part of a park area and it's only five feet above the ground so your vision doesn't get blocked in any way and the idea was that it's just it's a it was conceived like a journey where you go up the steps and as you go up you encounter a small monument to the seventh March speech by our father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and in the middle there is this water body which is kind of a circular drawing water into its central little hole which goes into that and at the end we have the monument and there is this wall which takes you down to the museum so if you see look at the Khan different components that's how it is so the museum is actually below grade which is 24 feet below and our idea was that freedom dream aspiration has a preferred direction it goes upwards anything that relates to infinite generally takes an upward lip but memory sadness always urges the subterranean history or you know anything that you want to you basically keep within yourself and so that's why it is embedded into the earth that's the section and that's the project from distance the project actually will be one in 1997-98 but it we finished it in 2013 took us 16 years to complete the reason is that you know the political will it's a politically motivated project so the the the when we got the Commission after 20 2001 the government changed and the other government did not have any interest in this project so it was under lock and key for quite a long time and then after that it began again so it was off and on and this is basically the plan of the museum these are the ramps you come down this is an audio-visual room and then from there these are the main spaces and that's the water body on top and this is basically a chamber which is a contemplative space and then once you finish the display areas then you take the ramp and you go up again to the plaza so it's basically a very simple Loup nothing that's all so basically you go down here through the ramp you come to the lower level this is 24 feet below grade and as we found out while we were designing it that the government never made any initiative of collecting all the different documents for of the war and as such we were we didn't have anything in terms of objects to showcase instead there is a there is another Museum which is the liberation War Museum which is a privately trust private trust who actually made all the initiative of collecting the documents so the main documentation museum of the Bangladesh Liberation is actually a private museum and and it is a proper documentation museum so when we didn't have anything we decided to just have these different paper cuts posters all the different images that we had to just print them on glass and create a sort of a journey so it's I wouldn't say it's a documentation museum it's more of a museum of feeling I would say so you just walk through it and you see the different places and then you come here that's a black exhibit area we call it where we have all the different images of genocide and killing and that's where you enter into that contemplative space which is in the centre and the water that draws into the space it's from that water up above from the plaza creating a water column so there is no display and no light except for the light from the oculus and then you go through the different spaces and we try to break bring in light natural light as much as possible so that people don't feel that they are under 24 feet below grade so I have a small video to show you the spaces [Music] so the tower is basically space frame structure the idea was not to design with light not a design with glass but to design with light so light is actually the element of design so we took glass and we stacked them created a panel and then stuck and then and then it's placed on the Space Frame structure so what happens it refracts the light and so daylight gets refracted through the medium of glass creating a prismatic effect and so in a nice sunny day you get a very glowing light and in the evening it's lit from outside so to create a kind of a glowing tower or beacon of hope for a young nation so I would like to go with the mosque project I'm running late perhaps but maybe to show you a little bit about the mosque so that's my grandmother she's the client for my project of the mosque it was on a nice day she invited me for a cup of tea when I went there she was sitting with her drawings of the of the land that she had in the north of taka and she told me that I want to donate a piece of land to build a mosque and I want you to design and build it so that was the brief that was my client and that became a project and this here you can see on our groundbreaking ceremony she's sitting there and under the jackfruit tree we had a prayer and it was decided that she will be donating this land to build a mosque and if you see the surrounding it is an absolute village like atmosphere in the 2006 which eventually became much more faster growing city so that's the blue dot here that's the site and that's the city of taka so which is absolutely in the northern fringe of the city and if you see from 2004 slowly its started getting built up the entire place is taka as I was mentioning it's one of the fastest growing cities so it it became it was kind of a transformation on a place under transformation so these are the different points that I had to understand and note that what is a mosque first of all that's the question coming from the Indian subcontinent we don't have a we don't have the culture of women going to the mosque so my memory of being in a mosque was as a six-year-old child going to learn the Arabic words had never been to a mosque after that so what is a mosque in a way that kind of liberated me from actually thinking of a normal how the mosque should be and then there is searching for the Bengal legacy or the connection to mosque architecture addressing the location of the settlement as I was showing that it was a village which was sort of going into a transformation spirituality as the main element of design using light as a source engaging the community and keeping the basic element of architecture bare and minimal so to go to the first point what is a mosque so I went back into the history to find out how mosque came into being and if you see here that's actually showing how the mosque came about so the Genesis or the genes of a mosque lies in a house form so in the Arabian Peninsula basically taking a house form along gating it and creating a mosque that's how it started the prophet's mosque was made out of the same pattern with date palm tree trunk and leaf and then generally all the arabian peninsula this is what you get even till date they never had any any of the elements that we identify mosque with so all the symbolic aspect that was later added when mosque traveled with Islam to different locations to the north to the east and to the west of the Arabian Peninsula you see all different kind of mosque architecture that's the Grand Mosque of Cordoba mosque and mali mosque in tunisia inside the subcontinent in in India in China in Turkey so it has taken different adapted to the local culture the local climate the local building technology and in Bengal this is the kind of mosques that we found which are the first mosque forms during the Sultanate period so these are the most authentic mosque forms that you see that you can actually find and this is the state of mosque at the moment in the city of Dhaka stacks of floors and then new floor adding up and there is no quality of space no quality of Prayer and this is what has happened to the symbols so do you really need that that was my question and in 2006 when Islam and our identity everything was being questioned in many different ways what is it that you really want to do in terms of a mosque so I decided to turn to more of light as the spiritual element or the element that can create that spirituality and if you see here in the mosque of Cordoba the light is beautiful the infinite nosov space aya Sophia which is Basilica turned into a mosque but that was not my interest my interest was in the light and the quality of it and the beauty of it so this is what actually came about in my drawing my first sketch or one of the first sketches and that's the mosque site here so the site actually creates a kind of a squarish site 75 by 75 but the prayer hall which is generally turning towards Mecca created a 13 degree shift so that's what I struggled with in the beginning to put a square within a square that's the prayer hall then adding this circular drum to facilitate this rotation which actually helps because once you enter if you have something like that you create these corners the moment you add a circle these these deeds orientation or this this doesn't happen anymore so that really helped so these are some of the sections and coming from the older architecture this is what became our I would say the first conceptual drawing so some of the models and so you see here that these are the corners these are these are open to sky which allows the ventilation which is absolute importance in any of my works that it needs to breathe and then this outer facade I mean I generally would say that this central space which is in a way a pavilion with a roof and a plinth and then the brickwork that surrounds it is actually giving the facilities but at the same time creates this porosity and a wrap in a way so that's the plan the final plan which you've already seen so this is where you enter that's the colonnade and I didn't want people to go straight into the mosque that would have been easy but I wanted them to take a few bends because you know everybody I mean the Muslims go to mosque five times a day and in different times of the day you're in different mental state so when you enter you need to have a few bends to condition your brain to focus on the act of praying and that's why it was intentional that people would take these bends and then enter into the space more conditioned much more focused towards the act of praying these are the different drawings and sections so you see that the South facade where then actually we have the airflow from that is entirely porous and then these are the open courts and that's the main volume so this is what it looks like in its own context as you see what used to be a village now is filled with buildings coming up more buildings are coming up every day and unplanned in a way because this part of the city was not part of the city corporation area so all the buildings that came up are mostly unplanned and that's why in a way this building is also giving a kind of an order in a chaos and the other thing I was thinking that since nothing is under control there is no option of looking outside or looking outward it was more looking within in a way so it was more within than without and the project is a low-budget project it was built in hundred and fifty thousand dollars u.s. dollars and for that reason it my grandmother as I mentioned gave donated the land but and she passed away in 2006 end of 2006 so she she wasn't able to see the project but it became a very you know like a promise I made to her so it became very important for me to finish it so I raised the fund from different sources I became the Builder so I am NOT just the architect I'm the Builder I'm the fundraiser the manager everything everything for this project so in a way was within my control but since we had to source fund from all different sources also from the community it I had to I was answerable to a lot of other people so here I think it's important to see that you see that's the daylight and that's what you see into the space so the light can be conditioned and created interestingly you know into a much more nicer atmosphere that's or even [Music] so being low-budget it is very basic very bare simple but the only ornament in this space is actually light and you can see that the light plays quite interestingly there is you know all through the day and even all through the year it has a different way of experiencing light so if you go during the summer months when the Sun is up you see those beautiful dots but if you go in November you don't see that anymore so that's also another way of understanding how light behaves I'll show you a small video which was taken by but done by the victory Albert Museum where we had an exhibition for the Jameel prize we won Jamel price for this mosque too and so but it starts quite abruptly it was an interview and the interviewer was asking me why do I live in Dhaka because my entire family doesn't so his question was why do you live in Bangladesh so it starts with the answer so just in case if you think what is it all about can we have a bit of a sound you can see the rain I'm very passionate about what I do I know that if I want to do something of architecture this is where it should be light for me is a beautiful material to work with if you can use it properly how you bring in the light the openings and apertures I think it can make it spiritual it can make it very contemplative all these different aspects are something to do with feelings if the space or the architecture is able to capture you to connect with you to create a dialogue with you that will stay with you forever modernity is everywhere but to make it of a place it's important to understand where you are that climate the people the culture history I get my ingredients for design from these elements when you have a humid climate like ours the most important thing is the air flow my buildings needs to breathe I like to work with a bridge it has a beautiful graceful way of aging and aging is important in architecture I wanted to bring back that idea of mosque as not just a space for praying but also more like a community they get enriched by it they get empowered by activities that are taking place within that space the parenting brings in that enormous feeling of spirituality that is to connect with whatever you want to connect with connect with God connect with nature connect with the Sun however you want to put it so it's that connection is there so since we're talking about light I think it would be interesting to show you one small project that I did in collaboration with an artist run a Bingham it was in Whitechapel Gallery so in 1956 there was this exhibition that happened in Whitechapel Gallery this is tomorrow it was a seminal exhibition where art you know it was a very important point in the history of art and in a way Whitechapel Gallery wanted to again ask this question is this tomorrow and for that they invited a few architects and artists to collaborate so I collaborated with Rana and our idea was you know the tomorrow that was at that time very promising all of a sudden doesn't seem as promising anymore so what we decided to do is we wanted to look at it as a hope we say we called it Phoenix will rise because it always does so we cannot live without as human beings we cannot live without hope so we created again another small kind of a pavilion within the Whitechapel Gallery and we called it again working with light so there is a small video it shows you the idea was that when you approach it it's absolutely blank you don't know what's behind it so it's just a blank facade and and you have your way to go into that space you don't know what to but then there is this element of surprise of this oculus which is sort of lit with color nothing's completely shut in so it's a space people can walk through and pause and take a moment and think since both of us are quite passionate about light we wanted to create something which brings in that light of hope it was important for us to create a space that was positive that allowed people to kind of come together you know feel that hope so I can end it there or there is one last project if we have time otherwise we could okay so this is outside of taka so I thought it would be interesting to show you what Bangladesh the true Bangladesh is like so this is in the south of Bangladesh and as you can see this is the southern part of Bangladesh which is the mangrove forest the Sunderbans which is at the moment you know with the climate change sea water rising this is probably under threat of becoming extinct in many ways but this is also the home of the Royal Bengal tigers so that's also something of a worry and you know this week UN there's so much happening in the city of New York I think it's befitting that we actually you know remember what we are almost about to lose so the site we have is here which is very close to this from the buns and that's the pani Graham resort it's a resort project that a client came to me saying that they wanted to create something of a eco resort which is eco meaning that it will be much more environment friendly so the idea was socially environmentally responsible project and that's actually the site right here and you can see how beautifully green the Delta is it's it's a it's an agricultural land and we get three crops a year which is actually very fertile in terms of Delta and everything around it is these are all farmland as you can see and these are the villages surrounding the site this is what this area looks like so once you're out of taka it's a beautiful country and in a way as I was mentioning about my family coming from the Indian part to the middle of taka city we I never had a village home everybody in Bangladesh has a village home but for me going to the village was I mean I grew up in taka grew up in a city so when I went to this site it was for me I was a foreigner in my own country so it was such a beautiful striking difference and going not just going I mean it's not like the first time I went to village but going and staying there for a longer period of time you you learn so much and you can see that you know so little and so that's the site here and that's the river which is a very it's a river called capo taco a very beautiful river and from the side that's the view you get there's a bridge over there and this is during the monsoon season when we have rice growing this is during the dry season when we have mustard plantations or mustard seeds as you can see the flowers are yellow there's still cow carts that's what people generally use cycles and cow carts and in the morning at 6 a.m. you see a traffic jam of cow carts everybody going to work in the fields so that's the kind of scenario that area is in the Delta so when you go there as an architect you know trained in a very modernistic modern in a way because I do my background from architecture school has a follow the curriculum from text so so you can imagine from that background going to a place like that what do I design I mean that became quite a challenge for me that am I really equipped or learned or knowledgeable enough to make something in a land like that so this is what my first reaction was that rural Bangladesh is uniquely beautiful the soul of the deltal and it felt like a crime to invade the silence with the rolling noise of architecture this project gives an opportunity to bring back the lost pride and belief in the wisdom of the land crafted over hundreds of years of dwelling in the Delta so idea was to look look into the land how people build how people live and instead of trying to design buildings try to design a process and that's why we started to learn and if you see that's if you very go closely this is how you see the entire fabric is the reason is that it's such a flat land to build something the people generally start by digging a pond so when you dig a pond you get some earth you fill it up and create a mound so immediately it creates a certain kind of a pattern because when it rains the water then goes into the ponds and your homestead remains dry and on the on this mound actually they start building their houses and that's what you see that's a pond that's the house so before so the act of building starts with digging a pond and as I was mentioning architecture of people it has always been mud impermanent and so we had all these different villages we went to the villages we tried to document everything that you see so in a homestead this is the program of a homestead there are rooms where people stay there are these different elements water cooking chicken cow pigeons small temple so all these different elements make up a household and they are generally around a courtyard surrounding a courtyard never really a very distinct demarcation but something very porous so it's a very communal kind of living people move from one corner to the other courtyard so everybody is living in a very harmonious social atmosphere creating the courtyards with the elements that I just showed you and that's how the villages are made so you see the villages this is a potters village and the potters village is unique because the courtyards are much more squarish because the potters need squarish space to dry their products and so that's their household that's new my pal and Jean kori Paul's house and this is a bamboo Weaver's village so the bamboo Weaver since they work with bamboo there Cote are just much more linear so you know the trade that they follow also creates the way the spaces are created and the drawings that I show you these are actually measured drawings that are created by the villagers that's also a part of our process where we engage the villagers to start mapping their own houses and the own location so they never had a map before now they have a proper map of their own households and so that's also part of the entire design process the way we worked and that's also bamboo beavers family one thing we tried to do is this is a very unique roof form which was unique of Bengal it's called the Bangla roof and it was taken by the Mughals you also see that in the temple architecture so that roof you don't see anymore it is quite unique because it's a pitch but again it has a curved curved form of pitch the reason is it immediately water moves away it doesn't let water stay on the on the on the roof so the stature mains dry because we have so much rain and but you don't see that anymore it's just gone after the corrugated sheet and as you can see that the corrugated sheet roofing has become so popular because it doesn't require much maintenance people have stopped using this so we thought the you know being a resort you can always bring back what was already lost and in a way give work to the craftspeople there's only two teams left in the whole of that area who knows how to build with thatch and this is a very idyllic image of a village hommina every children's mind in Bangladesh there will be a river a room a band this is a banana tree a road and the Sun always going down at the back of the you know somewhere so this is something we have drawn as children so idyllic image of a village I thought that's also something we could think of bringing back all the different textures and the things that you see so the site actually is like that that you have water on both sides to reverse and then the road actually brought us here and so we put the back of house facilities here and the rest was for the guests and we decided that we could bring the people down here and then give them a boat ride to come to the to the site and initially what we started more of a architectonic things after our studies turned out to be something like that much more spread out in terms of planning and these are the different bungalows that we have all different kinds introducing that roof and these are thick mud walls so mud as our material taching and the form of you know wood and bamboo and a kind of touch which is found in the Sunderbans and obviously I don't know how to build this we had to employ the villagers the villagers came and actually built the entire project with their own knowledge and know-how so these are you know so you have a small courtyards and they connect with each other so as I was mentioning that we included the villagers what happens is young men like him he is one of our member of our team so young men like him who study in the villages always have the dream to go to the city and you know look for opportunity to work and quite often they end up being in a city like taka adding to these twenty million people you know starting at having the very poor living condition and all that so we decided we could keep them in their own land and he's a Potter's son but hasn't learned pottery because it's not something that you know brings enough money and so he decided to study and and and change his career in a way that's the household and there you can see all the Potteries around so that's the household that's his grandfather who has the knowledge and the skill of making pottery which was definitely not given to him and there he is working with our product designers so we brought in a product designer who designed different kind of products and we gave him the responsibility of delivering it so in that process he had to go to his grandfather and obviously he doesn't still know how to take it but at least the sense of pride in in a in a skill and and you know something of a craft like that is was you know was we were able to establish that and this is the construction process where the local construction technique with mud is actually there make the mud prepared the mud and then they stacked them on top of another for this large project it was not possible that we take that way of construction so we took bricks sun-dried mud bricks from brick kilns which is close by and before firing it or putting it in the kiln we took that and we used mud mortar and mud plaster and so it was easier to construct so that's where you see the wooden rafters so these are all the villagers who are coming in and working this is the team I was mentioning that there's only two teams left in the entire region who can make this kind of weaving with the thatch so so that's one thing we also have women coming into the site and working they do really beautiful plaster work because so all the plaster work is done by women and here you see women after work so I wouldn't say that I'm the architect in that sense making buildings but more kind of a facilitator process designer so this is actually the the Riverside facade as you can see where we have these huts people can go and stay there and during dry season the water goes down and during monsoon it again rises so there is all different kind of environment and change of landscape water escape so everything is built with these villages these are the pottery village products from there and so I mean we can discuss if it's architecture not but for me at that site in that point in time that seemed the right way of approaching it so what we did is we created something called Pawnee gram community initiative through which we do craft diversification workshops where we bring in product designers trying to learn different kind of product making so the idea is that when the resort is in operation the villagers can benefit from that so they can create new products we have we've created savings group where women save one dollar a week so together now they have they've been saving for more than two years now so they have substantial amount of money at the moment so they can actually loan themselves that money to make their own houses and we also have as I was showing you the maps so this is how the maps are created by the women and the children of that location so this is one of the projects but I one of the architects which is close by close to the site engine Ida and the same technique where they actually map then they create a house which is aspirational in a way and then from there building these houses with $1,500 so this $1,500 home projects which is by hasa buco be gave me the idea of creating a similar kind of technique for the $2,000 home projects in our site so when I was teaching at Harvard GSD this was our budget for the studio where the students had to design a $2,000 home and they had to actually give us a full calculation and my engineers and the architects actually made sure that it's possible to build with $2,000 so the students went to the site and they also visited this $1,500 home projects which are two-bedroom houses and here you see the students there they also went to the site of Pawnee gram and did some hands-on workshop understanding the materials so each group had different materials to work with they also met with the clients we had fixed five different clients that was also chosen by the community themselves whose house will be built first so these five clients the students actually sat with them made some designs drawings and you know what are their aspirations what are they looking at and here you see after the studio's work we made some panels and showed what the students had came up with so that they could choose which house they want to build and to tell you very frankly the distinction project was not chosen so that was something interesting to see also so that's another team of students talking to a group which was again another household and here she is with her studio work at the review so here are some of the different kind of works that came out of the studio where they tried to employ pottery in The Potter's village so different ways of addressing it brick is in a way an aspirational material therefore the villagers they don't want to build in mud anymore they want much more temporary more permanence in a way and also kind of a status brick the moment you have a brick house you have better you can marry your children better so there's all these different calculations that they make so like the boy I showed you on bicycles he wants a brick house because otherwise you won't get a good wife so there are all these different things that works in their mind so we cannot just push mud houses onto them if it's brick its brick so the idea was how you can take that material but give a by virtue of design design you can create nice spaces so the studios work then was made into a book two thousand dollar home co-creating in the Bingle Delta and it's the same idea we took to the Venice Biennale for the free space where I was invited to be a part and we decided to showcase the wisdom of the land wisdom in our time when we are following each other don't know what we are following but we just follow blindly and there is so much of information and you know in one press of a button that at times we do not remember what is wisdom what is knowledge what is data and what is information so quite often tradition can be stripped off or for me this is much more what we should be doing where we take local way of doing things and then adding something which is much more Universal and cooking a better food and so idea was that from data to wisdom is a long process and wisdom is something we should not be losing and so basically we brought in all different kind of elements of a household idea was to create a courtyard because as free space the idea was that there was one thing that they mentioned that you know to to go beyond what is visible but to create something which is much more communal social so that's what we did we created a courtyard and we brought in different elements that are that you can see in the courtyard so these are these large size vessels where people generally keep their rice because it stays dry and this is the woman who actually made this so she gave one of hers and we brought it to Venice so basically what you see is all these different elements this one here is a grinder that's a bed day bed and these are the poetry village and so this is the space we were given that's the plan so we created a courtyard where we had the houses and the different elements and then we put the different elements into the space so the buildings became very much like a wireframe drawings architecture was not visible anymore but it was the wisdom that was more into focus so that's a courtyard so after the entire exhibition when you're exhausted you can come in and sit around and and and sort of enjoy these different little creations from the Bengal Delta so I will finish it here thank you for your patient hearing thank you the thing is when you make houses as more permanent structures definitely you need to have a certain measurement you don't want to build an honour someone else's land so that's why they need to have that they have a notion that this is my area but they do not have a measure drawing in that sense so when you do that in a way it helps I think because they're placing it let's say they're spending $2,000 that's a lot of money actually a lot of money for a villager to spend so you don't want to build on someone else's land and create dispute so it's always better to know and they know it but they don't have a proper drawing so when they have the drawing it's much more clearer and and in a way that could also help to create sort of a planning like where you want your roads where you want your houses and your kitchen and where how you can create these connections with one household with the other household so I think we've seen that it actually helps and in the village it's easier but when you go to a slum like let's say the one project that I showed in Geneva which is actually a slum where they didn't have a access to houses and especially when you have fire let's say or somebody's sick and you don't have a proper access to the houses that becomes quite difficult so when you have proper drawing measured drawings one is they know their land demarcations secondly you can then have a proper planning with access and all the different infrastructure facilities so it helps the trajectory of the lecture seem to go from urban to more rural and I was wondering if you thought about after working in the world is there any sort of models or lessons that could begin to address the crisis of the urban living condition I was struck by the it's almost like cohousing cohousing is now a trendy word and there you have it in this village have you thought about trying to take that project and project it into some kind of idealistic model for an urban situation yeah it's not that we haven't thought about it we did and we have such you know I've showed you in one image that there is this large slum area in Dhaka so this could really work in the slum areas but there's one problem land ownership in the villages people own their own land so then it's easier to it's you're building your house in your own land but in the city there these are all seen as encroachment on government land these are slums and people do invest but in a temporary structure they wouldn't build anything permanent on it so we've been thinking of some kind of model where we can work with the government and you know create some sort of a even if it's a leasing from the government part that government leases out because they are not definitely making any social housing anyway so if it could be possible to lease out land and then if even if you have a lease of let's say 30 years or 40 years or 50 years then loot probably would be much more easier to create this kind of a model in the city but it's definitely possible seems to me that also tries to in many instances bring greenery into thee I mean not only the veranda type but also very inventive taking the version of it but I think there are many architects doing yeah that's true I mean since I mean development industry has been there for more than two decades and a number of architects are working in the development sector where they have been able to create some interesting models Rafa chasm as you know is one who has built over 100 I think 300 400 developer projects where yes so and he has tried to create these sort of spaces but I think when you do a developer project it's it's only on the surface in many ways I mean of course you can create a nice roof garden or give a small space in the front of the building but it never goes into the into the planning in that sense so that's where I find that this needs to change in a way but I don't know how because it's a product and every square feet counts but I'm sure I mean there definitely aren't enough to be able to create that quality of space do you think that having a background was looking at my - in a fresh way or was it more is there like a couple of like maybe biases well I I was not educated in the u.s. or in the Western everywhere I was entirely educated in Bangladesh but that's Anisha I mean you are wherever you are you are always you know you have all these different influences there is no way of avoiding it and I'm not saying that these are bad influence anyway it's just influence and he it makes you who you are but when you are working in a place be it anywhere I think it's important to look into the place which I think is common and given to everybody wherever you are located so I think it's important to to analyze all the different influences that you go through in life to analyze and to find out what you should take as an influencer and what you should you know maybe reject so to keep an analytical eye and observe being observant and to have a non analytical position I think is important we're doing a project in Portugal at the moment so it's in comport ax which is south of Lisbon where the client wants something which has to be you know less I mean in any case there is not much that we can do in terms of we are thinking of if passive ways of addressing it but my take it would be that you know passive means are absolutely important in terms of a building to function on its own the moment I see air-conditioning and it feels like you put a building on life-support why would you do that so a building needs to work on its own it has to work on its own and the reason we do it is because you know we we don't have enough electricity in Bangladesh especially when we were young and there was days like in a day we would have like 3-4 hours of power cut there was no power so your building must be able to keep itself cool and comfortable for you know want to stay without electricity so that's why I think all through our architecture practice that's what we've been trying to do that building must operate on its own without being dependent on any artificial means [Laughter]

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

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Keywords: gsapp, columbia gsapp, columbia university, columbia, new york, architecture, marina tabassum, Marina Tabassum Architects, kenneth frampton lecture

Id: Vt4uPzOd750

Length: 94min 51sec (5691 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019