Muzharul Islam, Kahn and architecture in Bangladesh
Kazi K Ashraf :
(After last week write-up)
However, the most poignant event would be to invite Louis Kahn to design the capital complex at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka. Kahn’s involvement at Dhaka is of epic proportions in itself. The Sher-e-Bangla Nagar project eludes categorical statements of economic and cultural impropriety often made by some critics; the project continues to provoke an inspirational dialogue on the very fundamental nature of architecture and of human institutions. The force of Kahn’s ensemble is not merely formal, but emotional too; its genesis has become inextricable linked with the recent national struggle of the Bengalis. And this is what many people outside the Bengali domain would fail to comprehend.
Of course, Kahn never intended this consciously, and whether the work of any other architect would have performed the same role is an open question, yet it is possible that Kahn’s special philosophical speculation about universal qualities in architecture to mediate between global and specific culture, ‘ancestral voice’ and contemporaneity, found in the Dhaka project a coincidental significance.
Although the planning of Shere Bangla Nagar is informed by Beaux Arts sensibilities and much of the architectonic character by a Roman aura, it nonetheless creates a communion with certain aspects of Mughal planning and even the architectural order in such monastic complexes as Nalanda (in Bihar, India) and Paharpur (in North Bangladesh). This gives meaning to a still open search for archetypal dimensions in human enterprises. In spite of the debatable issue of economy and those abrupt circular cut-outs, Kahn’s work for a long time will stir and elucidate, as well as inspire generations of architects, in Bangladesh and India, to take up architecture as a serious, spiritual mission-unlike the short-lived visual titillation in which so many architects today are engrossed in.
Monumental Muzharul Islam It is Muzharul Islam’s work, which, in addition to Kahn’s capital buildings, has dominated the early architectural scene in Bangladesh. His practice has been discontinuous in time, with periods of greater or lesser intensity of production, but it has always been multisided from the late 1950s and onwards. Muzharul Islam created the nascent architectural culture of Bangladesh, carrying out a struggle against government bureaucracy, against political domination by engineers, and against academic sterility.
Although Muzharul Islam’s notion of architecture, as ‘the creation and arrangement of physical objects in a total, natural and social design,’ aligned him with an untraditional, and progressivist ideology in architecture, represented by certain attitudes of modernism, his crucial contribution was a persistence in formulating a Bengali sense of identity that permeates more than just architecture. His essential point was that if the psyche has transcended the dilemmas and contradictions of identity, architecture will find its own natural expression. It was this concern, which, in the urgency of political and cultural consciousness of the 1960s, moved him gradually from a purely architectural performance to political activism as a more immediate role to confront social conditions. The Liberation War of 1971 created the first major discontinuity in his career that was to recur in the abnormal political and professional conditions of the post independence years.
Despite the discontinuities in his practice, the work of Muzharul Islam does reveal a progression of research from a clear reference to the language of certain contemporary Western masters towards a more personal formulation. His early projects from the late 1950s to works like NIPA and his own house constitute a first phase where, within his own experimentation, there is an unmistakable continuation of certain Corbusian and Rudolphian devices. They are evident in the innovation of climate control (the umbrella roof of his own house recalling Shodhan Villa); in the sculptural animation made by varying reliefs, deep shadows and juxtaposition of materials; in the spatial composition (again, as in the multi-leveled organization of his own house); and, finally, in the manner the artifacts confronted the setting, more as an assertive and a self-referential stance than a meditative one. In the late 1960s, with the commission of two university projects, involving large-scale organisation began his later phase. While the pervading order, as in Jahangirnagar University and the housing for Jaipurhat Limestone Factory, is an a priori geometry, the concern is to generate an ‘urban’ order by the formation of communal spatial enclosures, streets and continuous facades. The individual buildings are of exposed brickwork, where spaces and voids seem to be carved out of masonry solids, which, despite their often-curious geometrical purity and unlike the skeletal nature of his earlier projects, from a more earth-hugging ambience.
To be continued…
(After last week write-up)
However, the most poignant event would be to invite Louis Kahn to design the capital complex at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka. Kahn’s involvement at Dhaka is of epic proportions in itself. The Sher-e-Bangla Nagar project eludes categorical statements of economic and cultural impropriety often made by some critics; the project continues to provoke an inspirational dialogue on the very fundamental nature of architecture and of human institutions. The force of Kahn’s ensemble is not merely formal, but emotional too; its genesis has become inextricable linked with the recent national struggle of the Bengalis. And this is what many people outside the Bengali domain would fail to comprehend.
Of course, Kahn never intended this consciously, and whether the work of any other architect would have performed the same role is an open question, yet it is possible that Kahn’s special philosophical speculation about universal qualities in architecture to mediate between global and specific culture, ‘ancestral voice’ and contemporaneity, found in the Dhaka project a coincidental significance.
Although the planning of Shere Bangla Nagar is informed by Beaux Arts sensibilities and much of the architectonic character by a Roman aura, it nonetheless creates a communion with certain aspects of Mughal planning and even the architectural order in such monastic complexes as Nalanda (in Bihar, India) and Paharpur (in North Bangladesh). This gives meaning to a still open search for archetypal dimensions in human enterprises. In spite of the debatable issue of economy and those abrupt circular cut-outs, Kahn’s work for a long time will stir and elucidate, as well as inspire generations of architects, in Bangladesh and India, to take up architecture as a serious, spiritual mission-unlike the short-lived visual titillation in which so many architects today are engrossed in.
Monumental Muzharul Islam It is Muzharul Islam’s work, which, in addition to Kahn’s capital buildings, has dominated the early architectural scene in Bangladesh. His practice has been discontinuous in time, with periods of greater or lesser intensity of production, but it has always been multisided from the late 1950s and onwards. Muzharul Islam created the nascent architectural culture of Bangladesh, carrying out a struggle against government bureaucracy, against political domination by engineers, and against academic sterility.
Although Muzharul Islam’s notion of architecture, as ‘the creation and arrangement of physical objects in a total, natural and social design,’ aligned him with an untraditional, and progressivist ideology in architecture, represented by certain attitudes of modernism, his crucial contribution was a persistence in formulating a Bengali sense of identity that permeates more than just architecture. His essential point was that if the psyche has transcended the dilemmas and contradictions of identity, architecture will find its own natural expression. It was this concern, which, in the urgency of political and cultural consciousness of the 1960s, moved him gradually from a purely architectural performance to political activism as a more immediate role to confront social conditions. The Liberation War of 1971 created the first major discontinuity in his career that was to recur in the abnormal political and professional conditions of the post independence years.
Despite the discontinuities in his practice, the work of Muzharul Islam does reveal a progression of research from a clear reference to the language of certain contemporary Western masters towards a more personal formulation. His early projects from the late 1950s to works like NIPA and his own house constitute a first phase where, within his own experimentation, there is an unmistakable continuation of certain Corbusian and Rudolphian devices. They are evident in the innovation of climate control (the umbrella roof of his own house recalling Shodhan Villa); in the sculptural animation made by varying reliefs, deep shadows and juxtaposition of materials; in the spatial composition (again, as in the multi-leveled organization of his own house); and, finally, in the manner the artifacts confronted the setting, more as an assertive and a self-referential stance than a meditative one. In the late 1960s, with the commission of two university projects, involving large-scale organisation began his later phase. While the pervading order, as in Jahangirnagar University and the housing for Jaipurhat Limestone Factory, is an a priori geometry, the concern is to generate an ‘urban’ order by the formation of communal spatial enclosures, streets and continuous facades. The individual buildings are of exposed brickwork, where spaces and voids seem to be carved out of masonry solids, which, despite their often-curious geometrical purity and unlike the skeletal nature of his earlier projects, from a more earth-hugging ambience.
To be continued…
