My Kind of Town: John Pardey – ADC

Words and photographs by John Pardey

Dhaka is a mega-city of nearly 24 million people – all living in the most densely built-up area in the world. Arriving on a plane from Delhi, I was prepared for urban madness, but the taxi into the city centre was more like a hallucination – a Mad Max rally in slow motion on roads with no lane markings, with trucks, cars (only a 6% car ownership rate here, but hard to believe in reality), motor-bikes, rickshaws, men pushing carts and people on foot all jostling for advantage. And all accompanied by a symphony of horns (I soon realised this was not a sound of aggression, rather a reminder of being an inch away from the vehicle or person in front or to the side)…a pell-mell, anarchic, no-holds stampede inching forward, beep by beep.

Expanding out from the grid-patterned, bazaar-style Old Dhaka neighbourhood, the city has largely been occluded by uncontrolled development. There is no clearly defined centre and few parks or formal squares, so larger roads lined with street vendors are the only way to orientate. Living in this maelstrom are a mix of peoples and religions that generally get along well and are proud of their country, which emerged from the former East Pakistan.

Physically, Dhaka sits on the lower reaches of the Ganges delta, so it is a land of water, prone to flooding in the monsoon seasons and surrounded by mangroves and tidal flats.

With all this madness, why come to Dhaka? In my case it was to visit Louis Kahn’s oft quoted masterpiece, the National Assembly Building, completed in 1982. Years ago, I had convinced myself that his Kimbell Art Gallery in Fort Worth was the best modern building I had ever seen – not the most influential, or the most radical, far from it – but the most perfect, powerful and timeless building of the century. So expectations were high. It did not disappoint.

In 1960, the new government of East Pakistan decided to build a modern legislative complex, so sought advice from the Bengali master architect Muzharul Islam, who initially approached Alvar Aalto (who was ill) and Le Corbusier (who was unavailable) before turning to his former tutor at Yale; Louis Kahn. Despite his reputation, work in the States was far from paying the bills, so the opportunity to design on such a grand scale – and with his innate optimism in the virtues of architecture to define a nation – Kahn found the project compelling. He first arrived in Dhaka in February 1963 and was struck by the presence of water throughout the city, concluding that he must make an ‘architecture of the land’.

The complex was vast – over 200 acres of farmland north of Old Dhaka – and prone to flooding, so Khan decided to excavate an enormous lake and pile up the soil (‘dig and mound’) to form a platform for the buildings. He designed a centralised plan, like a monumental Roman building, with an Assembly Chamber at its core and surrounded this with a seven-storey high ‘street’ punctured by giant, geometric apertures revealing steps, ramps and walkways. Eight concentric separate buildings – offices and the like – cluster around the chamber like petals on a flower. Built in exposed concrete, every cubic metre was mixed and poured by hand in 1.5 metre-high shuttering (the maximum daily total) and day joints incised with a grid of marble resembling the white inlays in Mughal monuments. Enormous geometric cut-out openings also pick up on the local vernacular. It faced a public plaza to the south, with broad steps up to the edifice atop its plinth surrounded by the lake, like many Bengali mosques, temples and palaces.­­

Work was to stop for a while with a war of liberation that saw the formation of the new nation of Bangladesh in 1971, so the project transformed into a symbol of democracy and pride for the Bengali people.

Radiating out in a ‘V’ shape from the monumental Assembly building across the lake, Kahn arranged a series of cubic blocks built in local red brick for Members of Parliament, reflecting the design he had developed in his Indian Institute of Management (IIM) that he was working on from 1962. This again displayed his geometry of form, giant circular cut-outs, deep shadows and the articulation of arches, tied by concrete beams.

The whole complex is on an epic scale, still the largest legislative assembly in the world (built in what was, at the time, the poorest country). The Assembly building is some 30 metres high, and 180 metres across;  the wider complex extends to over a kilometer in length. It is majestic, monumental and yet poetic, inviting and beautiful.

In Kahn’s magnum opus, there are no columns – and this is the clue to his thinking – for he built using walls rather than a structural grid of columns, and this set him apart from the International Style that prevailed across the developed world. The walls also become screens, containers – that provided a way to control the ingress of light into the interior.

It was opened in 1982 after 22 years of work, the same time it took to complete the Taj Mahal over three centuries earlier.

Nearby, and goodness knows how, this Pennsylvanian-based architect found the energy to design a new hospital in Dhaka. But it remains there, poorly extended and maintained; another red brick building with wonderful intersected circular apertures shielding the inner walls.

Dhaka is challenging – the traffic is incessant and clamorous, everything is coated in a patina of grey, the streets are awash with filth and litter, the noise is bewildering – the city is like a wild animal in search of the next meal. Yet the people are diverse, accommodating, polite, and optimistic for a better future.

Old Dhaka, a city within a city, is a labyrinth of narrow lanes, each lined with narrow trading outlets. One street sells colourful fabrics, the next meat (slaughtered in front of you), the next jewellery – and all are thronging with humanity. Every now and then among the squalor you stumble upon a little jewel, like a perfect, white marble mosque, or a tiny pocket of green with kids playing.

In what can only be described as the inner-city slum of Faidabad, imagine finding a beautiful oasis in brick; the Baitur Rauf Mosque completed in 2012 and designed by Marina Tabassum, one of the few female architects in the country. It too evokes the spirit of Khan, with a cylinder set inside a square, red brick carapace, open light courts on each side and walls with open herringbone panels letting light and air through. There are no domes or minarets, rather a concrete roof pierced with hundreds of circular openings to create a space imbued with spirituality. It is a thing of great beauty; spiritual, yet humble.

Dhaka is intense, it is raw, it is utterly chaotic and an eye-opener for a pampered British traveller, but so worth it. Among this maelstrom, it was Kahn who created order in this new country. Let’s hope since the recent upheaval with their government, the people continue to find a common ground and continue Kahn’s search for order among chaos.

On the way home, I stopped in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s built vision of his ‘Ville Radieuse’ or ‘Radiant City’. The contrast with Dhaka could not be greater – to its residents it is called ‘The Beautiful City’. It is clean and full of tree-lined avenues, and the traffic moves. But it is a nightmare for pedestrians. Footpaths exist, but are flanked by the unrelenting backs of buildings,  so few people walk. It doesn’t have the streets and squares of the European city – just the grid.

At the north of Corbusier’s city ‘sectors’ (numbered 1 to 56, each a self-contained neighbourhood) stands his Assembly and High Court buildings, facing each other across an implausibly expansive public square, so large that the connection between the buildings is lost. Sat between the two is his sculptural monument ‘The Open Hand’, symbolising peace and prosperity and cleverly combining a hand and a dove. It is 26 metres high with the metal ‘hand’ (weighing 50 tons) allowed to rotate in the wind. He had been obsessed with this symbol since 1948. Despite having Nehru’s personal support, he was unable to get it funded during the build at Chandigarh, so it was not built until 1985, twenty years after his death. It is another little gem – somehow fusing his early cubic forms with his later sculptural expressions.

The Assembly building is Corbusier at his late best; sculptural, full of ‘Sacral Forms, Ancient Associations’ (to quote William Curtis). Comparison to Khan’s Assembly building is inevitable, and both are world class. But Kahn’s masterful National Assembly is for me, the real jewel in the crown.