NowDhaka

Architecture

Architecture in Dhaka

Dhaka builds on the delta in brick and concrete, and its best architecture answers the heat and the flood rather than a style. Louis Kahn's parliament set a standard the city's own architects have been answering since.

• Gulshan Society Mosque

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  Completed 2017

  Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury

  A mosque in the Gulshan business district, stacked five storeys on a tight urban plot to hold a congregation the old low mosques could not. Chowdhury built it in exposed concrete and brick and opened the section vertically, so daylight falls down through the stacked prayer halls and the structure carries the load without columns breaking the floors. Thousands come for Friday prayer. The mosque goes up where the city has no room to spread, and makes the climb part of the approach.

• Bait ur Rouf Mosque

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  Completed 2012

  Marina Tabassum

  A neighbourhood mosque in the north of the city, raised on a plinth above the flood line. Tabassum left out the dome and the minaret and worked in brick, turning the prayer hall inside a cylinder set within a square so the walls never quite touch and light enters through the gaps. Random perforations scatter points of sun across the floor through the day. It won the Aga Khan Award as a mosque that finds the sacred in daylight rather than ornament.

• Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban

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  Completed 1982

  Louis Kahn

  The seat of Bangladesh's parliament, and the last major work Kahn left, finished eight years after his death. He set a ring of hostels and offices around an octagonal assembly chamber, then cut vast circles, triangles and rectangles clean through the outer concrete to shade the rooms behind them and pull daylight deep inside. A moat surrounds the whole complex. It was drawn for a poor new country and built over twenty-three years, which is why it reads as a ruin and a monument at once.

• Curzon Hall

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  Completed 1904

  British Raj

  A public hall in old Dhaka, begun as a town hall the year Lord Curzon laid its stone and finished as part of the university. The British builders wrapped a European plan in Mughal dress: red brick, horseshoe arches, wide verandas and domed pavilions sized for the heat rather than for London. It became the science faculty when Dhaka University opened in 1921 and has been student ground since. It is the clearest thing the Raj left in the city, and the students made it theirs.

• Ahsan Manzil

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  Completed 1872

  Nawab Abdul Ghani

  The riverside palace of the Nawabs of Dhaka, on the bank of the Buriganga, painted the deep pink that gives it its name. Abdul Ghani rebuilt an earlier house into a long two-storey block crowned by a broad dome over the stair, in the Indo-Saracenic manner that mixed Mughal arches with European planning. A triumphal stair runs down to the water, which was the front door when the river was the road. It is now the city's museum of its own nineteenth century.