Search results

Kazi Khaleed Ashraf Back to top

A Flow of Life

In her installation at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, instead of showcasing her own work of a metropolitan verve or demonstrating a capability for abstract confabulation that most other architects posed, Marina Tabassum made a distilled presentation of a Bengali rural household in clay. The opening lines in the accompanying catalogue begin with a description of the first monsoon rain in an anonymous courtyard: 

“First drops of monsoon rain, as they touch the earth vanish at the blink of an eye leaving a faint trace… The courtyard has been thirsty for a good rain. It hasn’t rained for five long months. The most blessed fragrance comes from the earth with the first shower of monsoon. An event of celebration in the Bengal Delta. As women rush to secure drying clothes hanging on the liner, children of the village run wild embracing the shower. It’s a happy rain.”

Such vivid attention to the delicate way of living in the Delta is a provocation for a new horizon.

The installation at the Biennale is a poetic homage to life in a village in Jessore, southern Bangladesh where Marina is developing a project called Panigram. Drawn from that project and its villages, the installation depicted the minimalist beauty of the clay courtyard (uthaan) of a house with various devices and agricultural tools that make for the theatre of life in the lush rural landscape. It’s perhaps a fine segue from the epic cinematic representation of the uthaan in Satyajit Ray’s classic film Panther Panchali. 

Like the first drop of rain, leaving only a trace of its presence on earth, the house at the Biennale is a haunting extract from the Bengali landscape, reminding architects, if one were to listen, of the ethos of treading lightly. The everyday of a mundane house and its accoutrements was neatly turned extraordinary in the installation, revealing Tabassum’s studied exploration of village life as well as a deep connection with the people in the village. Tenuous as it is, the house is deeply connected to the landscape in its material, spatial and lived reality, which perhaps made it uncanny in the robust atmosphere at Venice. While the Baitur Rauf Mosque may be a condensation of her practices in an urban milieu – a beautifully crafted piece – and justifies a description of her as the elegant metropolitan architect, Marina Tabassum literally turns a new leaf with Panigram. It can be a great moralising and humbling lesson for architects, especially the urbane types, that architecture is not a one-off thing but embedded in the flow of life.

Kazi Khaleed Ashraf is a Bangladeshi architect, urbanist and architectural historian. He directs the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Artspace Back to top

Artspace is our programme for people living with dementia and their carers. The programme offers a convivial space for participants to get to know each other through discovering history and art, with plenty of time for sharing their own stories over tea and biscuits. Our goal is to promote lifelong learning and to enhance the wellbeing of participants through this work.

If you are interested in coming along to our next Artspace as a group or as an individual, email education@soane.org.uk.

Rana Begum Back to top

Truthfulness in Materials

In 2018, I was lucky enough to visit the Baitur Rauf Mosque during a visit to the Dhaka Art Summit. Marina’s use of light and material took my breath away. I felt an immediate connection to the space. I spent hours just observing, meditating, taking in the sense of calm.

Above all, Marina’s work really resonated with me and my own practice as an artist. I loved her emphasis on material, allowing it to speak for itself and not to be disguised or embellished. There is a truthfulness in this that speaks to me. Materiality is at the core of my work. I love the variability in texture, functionality and the way light is absorbed, refracted or reflected.

After this visit, Marina and I were both invited by the Whitechapel Gallery to participate in the Is This Tomorrow? exhibition of 2019. The gallery invited ten groups of artists and architects to collaborate and explore their visions of the future. Marina and I met up, talked, discussed, played around with materials in the studio. At the time, the political and social landscapes were turbulent. There was a lot of disconnect, an increase in barriers and isolation. However, Marina and I had a shared vision for the future: one of spaces that brought people together and allowed room for dialogue. For the exhibition, we felt there was a real need to create a meditative space – allowing the changing natural light to flood in was integral to this. When the space was realised, the next challenge was emphasising the light even more, to fully engage the viewer’s senses. We did this through the surface application.  

After the Whitechapel exhibition, the work toured to Concrete, Dubai. At Concrete it was shown outside, which Marina and I agreed brought an additional layer to the work. The location allowed viewers to develop a different relationship with the work, one closely connected to natural elements. 

Marina is an architect making buildings for people to live and work in. My work deals with space, colour and light. It requires material/medium to be manipulated to create experiences. I often think about my work as being architectural in nature, but ultimately most of the things that I make do not have a real function. The thing that we share is the wish to make spaces that are sensorially stimulating, and it is in this area that our collaborations have been most rich. 

Rana Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. She is the recipient of the Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture (2012) and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2017). Born in Bangladesh, she lives and works in London.

Peter Buchanan Back to top

Notes on the architecture of Marina Tabassum

To appreciate Marina Tabassum’s architecture you must have some feeling for the sodden and unstable land that is Bangladesh. So, typically Marina opens lectures on her work with aerial photographs of Bangladesh. My memory is of a few exceptionally beautiful ones taken from high-up, which show a slowly shifting tapestry braided from water channels and emerald land that constantly move and interchange positions. 

Then, coming into land at Dhaka, you see the river’s edges are lined with brick kilns and their tall smoke stacks, transforming soft grey mud into the pale red, fired brick necessary for stable construction. Although she used raw concrete for the Liberation War Museum and French German Embassy, her apartment blocks and towers are in this fairfaced and un-plastered brick – and exploit a stabilising and static four-square geometry as found in Islamic architecture. She continues to design in this fusion of abstract modernity and Islamic geometric discipline to invest her buildings with a calmly resonant dignity as found in the Baitur Rauf Mosque.

But Marina Tabassum is now also working with rural communities, adopting very pragmatic and contrasting formal and technical approaches to meet climatic and socio-economic challenges. The Khudi Bari project, for example, consists of a cheap, quickly assembled, modular and easily moved emergency relief dwellings for flood victims. Its triangulated bamboo frame can be clad in locally available materials, while its sheltered raised upper floor remains above flood levels. 

For the 2019 Sharjah Triennial, she exhibited an equally pragmatic approach to low-cost housing, one familiar in parts of Bangladesh where it is a vernacular of its own. She simply purchased a pair of wood-framed and corrugated steel homes that local craftsmen assemble to be sold at the local markets. This expansion of service from architecture to activism, seems both the common-sensical (if also rare) caring for one’s fellows she modestly claims it to be, and it also continues a family tradition of community service. The land for the aforementioned mosque was donated by her grandmother; and her oncologist father not only founded a number of hospitals but at 84 years of age still does voluntary work seeing low-income patients in one of these hospitals.

Another scheme, the Panigram Resort, reworks an older vernacular of mud walls below a shaggy roof thatched from local vegetation. This is a scheme of comforting emotional appeal, its shaggy humped roofs embracing the sensually plastic mud walls and the raised platform that is the outdoor living room and centre of domestic life. The resort and its architecture capture something of the spirit of rural village life that enchanted so many worldwide in Satyajit Ray films such as Pather Pachali.

As well as designing the buildings and coordinating their construction, Marina worked with local craftspeople to revivify their products and marketing, and even helped introduce a form of community-based micro-finance. So, the resort doesn’t just serve more affluent visitors but has led to the regeneration of the community and expanded its livelihoods.

What I particularly applaud about these three community projects is that Marina has boldly transcended the constraining conservatism of conventional architectural taste that prefers the spare and abstract and is scared to touch anything populist. But to do so may be a necessary first step if architects are to serve and save an underappreciated and overexploited planet and its disaffected peoples.

Peter Buchanan worked for a decade as architect and urbanist in various parts of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He then switched to writing about architecture and is a prolific author of articles and books. He also teaches the subject.

In the community Back to top

Our expert facilitators can provide a virtual experience of the Museum, bringing the Museum and its collection to life either through live streamed tours, or online presentations.

Online tours and presentations run on Tuesdays subject to availability. To find out more, or to book a session, email education@soane.org.uk.

Just Giving Back to top

The easiest way to give a donation is online, via our Just Giving page. Please remember to Gift-Aid your donation as it means we will receive an extra 25p for every £1 you give, at no extra cost to you.

Thank you so much for choosing to help the Museum. It’s only through the generosity of donors like you that we can continue our work.

Home Back to top

I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on. The anxiousness of many years has evaporated with my turning fifty: choices made, roads taken; all leading me to a point of no return. This is not the time to reminisce on a past that could slow me down. This is the time to pour out all that was gathered over time, through relentless search, to contribute to the pursuit of architecture. The search never ends – it leads us to places, encounters, acquaintances and expanded horizons: sometimes to failures and realisations – but one must never arrive, arrival stops growth. There is still so much to learn, to realise, to develop.

I am in the middle of my journey. It is not time yet to look back and pick up the pieces to tell my tale. My stories and encounters are being collected and archived in my memory for the future. Someday, when I’m sitting on the porch of my farmhouse, which I’m yet to build, up in the north in Rohanpur, looking across the mango orchard and into the horizon, I will reminisce upon days gone by. I might then go back to the earliest memory of my life, to the sounds of destruction amidst Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971. My story begins there, with my two-year-old self still holding on to the sadness of my grandfather’s passing in the middle of the war, watching from my grandparents’ house in Shantinagar as the police barrack in Rajar Bagh blazed with fire. The sirens and subsequent blackouts of air raids are still unsettling memories. I was introduced to death and destruction before I was enrolled in elementary school.

Growing up in the 70s – in a war-ravaged, fledgling nation of 70 million, full of uncertainties and minimal means – the children of my generation matured somewhat faster than usual. There were no toys to play with; and so we invented new games for ourselves. My childhood-self witnessed a country in a famine in 1974. Children of opulence will never know the power of imagination that can turn a rice ball into a boiled egg. I realised very early in life that limited means cannot limit dreams; these limits instead open the window of innovation. This lesson from my modest upbringing informs my work thus far. 

Walls have two sides Back to top

The walls in my childhood had two sides. On one side was my grandparents’ property; a two-storey courtyard house secured with high walls: on the other side of the wall was the rickshaw pullers’ slum. The life of a child was dictated by which side of the wall he or she was born. On one side there was privilege, opportunity, aspiration; and on the other was struggle, and more struggle. We, children, played together in the field, unaware of the differences between us and how our beginnings would, in turn, impact our futures.

They didn’t go to school. We did. I was aware of the privilege we were born into. Unlike many, my family had the means to provide my siblings and me with a good education and opportunities for growth. I grew up in an environment where there was no discrimination between boy and girl. Even more fortunate, our parents instilled in us the importance and value of giving. My father being the only doctor in the neighbourhood, each morning we would wake up to a long line of patients from the neighbouring slum; he would attend to each one of them before setting off to work. In many ways, I seek to repeat that compassion through my architecture by expanding beyond the architectural programme, moving past the site boundary to attend to the human condition and the local ecology of sustenance. In this pursuit, I am trying to establish a sense of social and environmental responsibility that transcends architecture’s quintessential agenda of space and form.

Being a doctor, my father’s presence in our daily lives was periodic. Whereas my mother, a homemaker, invested all her time and energy in our upbringing, education being her priority. As the eldest of four children, I was her most important project. I must succeed in order for the rest to follow. During my school career – from primary years to graduating with an architecture degree – my mother was relentless and ever-present; providing everything that was humanly possible. She was successful in her pursuit that resulted in a doctor, an engineer and an architect before her passing in 2002. 

Research Back to top

Our Research Library contains Soane’s collection of 30,000 architectural drawings and 10,000 books, along with a small working Library of modern books and information files on Soane, Robert Adam and other relevant architects. The Archive contains Soane’s business and personal papers. Students are welcome to consult this material by booking an appointment.

A Bengali, or a Bangladeshi? Back to top

Both my grandparents were immigrants. Their new life in Dhaka began after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

They were residents of Malda, a district now part of West Bengal. My father was ten years old when his family left home in the middle of the Hindu-Muslim riots. A base of a huka, intricately inlaid with silver, is the only physical memory that connects him to his home in Malda. He never found closure. He longed to go back home, but even though the nightmare of partition would end, he could not return to what was lost. Home became a longing, a story he would tell his grandchildren.

‘Desh’ refers to one’s origin, the village home. Locating ‘Desh’ is a shared quest, embedded in the culture of Bengalis. Throughout my growing years, I struggled with the answer.

For my family, and also for my generation, ‘Desh’ is no longer a place, but a story. A story of forceful uprooting, a story of leaving everything behind that our ancestors knew as home. A story of settling down and adjusting in a new territory. We, the third generation of an immigrant family, grew up with stories and mental constructs of a lost home that exists only in our imaginations.

Being born and brought up in the capital city of Dhaka, my connection to the villages were few and far between. The eternal beauty of the delta land revealed herself to me only in the last decade in various projects in the Ganges Delta. I found my ‘Desh’ there, through the interactions and connections I felt with rural Bengal, the soul of the delta land. There is inherent wisdom embedded in living symbiotically with nature. There, families do not aspire for their own dwellings to be different from their neighbours’; values are rooted in homogeneity and a communal way of life.