This article was originally published on Common Edge.
In her Dhaka, Bangladesh–based practice, Marina Tabassum seeks to create a language of architecture that’s simultaneously contemporary yet rooted to its place. One of the first buildings she undertook after establishing her own practice in 2005—the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in her own city—won an Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which recognizes design that addresses the needs and aspirations of Muslim societies.
Bangladesh’s Museum of Independence, which she designed with her former partner, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury of the practice URBANA, has become a national landmark. But Tabassum also works at the intimate scale of housing, pursuing innovative modular space-frame designs constructed of bamboo. She’s taught at architecture schools around the globe. Recently, she was recognized with an award from the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum and identified by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people for 2024 for her work in sustainable, socially responsible design.
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I had a chance to talk with Tabassum about her work, her teaching, and her frustrations and satisfactions with being an architect.
MJC: Michael J. Crosbie
MT: Marina Tabassum
MJC: When was it that you knew that architecture was calling you?
MT: I don’t think I knew what I wanted to do until almost the last minute. I come from a family of doctors and engineers, and I wasn’t interested in either of those. But I was interested in drawing; my mind was always bursting with crazy imaginings. When the time came to make a decision about college, it was my father who suggested architecture. I didn’t know any architects, so it was completely new as a choice. In Bangladesh, at that time, there was only one school of architecture: the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. There were 50 openings for the entire country. There was an admission exam, with something like 4,000 students taking it. It was an intense journey, preparing for this exam, and this was when I realized that architecture resonated with me. I passed—in fact, I came in first. And people were saying: A girl came in first this time.
MJC: Whose or what works of architecture have been most important to you as models and directions in your own work? Why?
MT: I’ve taken so much from so many people. The school in Bangladesh was set up by Texas A&M, so it had a hard-core modernist curriculum and professors. The first year, they took us to Kahn’s Parliament Building in Bangladesh, to sort of set a benchmark. It was intimidating, but there are so many inspirational spaces—one of the highlights of my architecture journey. Mazharul Islam, the first modernist architect in Bangladesh, designed the first modern building here in 1953. It’s the beautiful Faculty of Fine Arts building at Shahbagh, a tropical modern design, very porous in response to climate. Islam tried to create a balance between modernism and response to place. That resonated with me. As students we looked at the work of the subcontinental elders—Doshi, Bawa, Correa—they set a tone for architecture in this region. But Kahn comes back every time, because of his geometry and light, and my affinity for that. I learned a lot about light from Kahn.
MJC: Your architecture seems empathetic in its response to a place and its people. What role does empathy play in your work? Does that come naturally?
MT: I think it’s just me. It’s not conscious. I design from a feeling. Obviously, there is a rational part, but I’m always trying to be in the space, and understand the experience of it. I am entering into my buildings before I even put a line on a piece of paper. I think about how people will use it—the tactility of the surfaces, the light, the entrance—and how to condition a person’s state of mind as they approach a space. I always keep in mind the journey of the person in the architecture.
MJC: I see a lot of connection between Kahn’s use of materials and your approach—architecture that you want to touch.
MT: Exactly. Materials play an important role in creating the mystery of a space, how the light creates an ambiance, washing across materials. Every surface has its own way of reacting to light. The feeling of a space dictates the materials you want the light to fall upon. Materials are essential in creating a certain atmosphere.
MJC: Many of your works, such as the Museum of Independence, in Dhaka, have a strong spiritual presence. As a designer, how do you summon this spirituality in your architecture, or does it summon you?
MT: That museum required a certain kind of silence. That building is about sadness, grief, the struggle of a people to create a nation. The birth of Bangladesh is a very sad event, in its own way. These spaces needed to be somber, contemplative, to call forth memory—that’s part of the reason it is subterranean. It needed a sense of silence. When I think about silence in architecture, it’s always about the quality of light that gives that contemplative feeling. And contemplation is related to spirituality. If you go to a mosque, for example, you seek to internalize a connection to the divine. It’s that spiritual connection that you seek. It’s always about silence, about being within. In many of my works I seek silence, probably because I live in a country that is very loud. [laughs] We have 170 million people, and we need that silence going into such a space. It’s a refuge.
MJ : The design and construction of the Bait Ur Rouf Jame Mosque was a personal journey for you.
MT: The mosque was commissioned in 2005, the year I started my own practice. It was commissioned by my grandmother. She owned land in the northern part of the city, in Dhaka, and she donated it to build a mosque. In 2002, I lost my mother suddenly, in an accident. This was very hard for me to deal with and for my grandmother; my mother was her first-born. Working on this commission was a process of healing for both my grandmother and me—a building commissioned by a woman, upon the death of another woman, designed by a third woman. It took a year to design it. There was a groundbreaking ceremony in September 2006, and my grandmother passed away four months after that. It became a promise to my grandmother to design, raise the funding, and build it. I became the client and the architect.
There was no mosque in that area, a very agrarian landscape. The city was growing quickly, the site was going through a transformation. I knew that the mosque would be a part of an urban neighborhood. My experience with mosques was next to none, because women in this culture don’t typically pray in mosques—it’s a male reserve. I think my lack of experience gave me a certain sense of liberty. I had no preconceived notions of what a mosque should be. So, I started my research, and as Kahn might, going back to the beginning asking the question: What is a mosque? You find that it was meant to be a space for congregation—people coming together not only to pray, but also for social, cultural, communal reasons. The earliest mosques were not symbolic—domes and minarets came much later with the Ottomans. I asked: What is more important, the symbolic role of the mosque or the spirituality of the place? I chose to focus on spirituality.
Some of the first mosques I visited were in Istanbul. I love the way the light is brought into the spaces. Hagia Sophia gave me that beautiful sense of light, washing down the dome and into the space. It was a magical feeling. Those were my inspirations, along with the old mosques of Bangladesh. I knew that this mosque would eventually be surrounded by other buildings, which might compromise the silence. So I introverted the mosque, turned it in on itself for contemplation. Bringing light in from above to wash the surfaces became the main element in the design.
MJC: The mosque has an almost seamless blend of the sacred and the secular. What does this reflect about the building’s location, its construction, the people who use it?
MT: Yes, I knew that there would be many secular, social, communal uses—another reason to make it more “non-mosque-like,” without overt symbolism. The community now would have a space to gather, to use in many ways. It’s a kind of refuge in its dense urban context. And the community was receptive to the idea of a woman designing this building. It wasn’t questioned.
MJC: How do you employ indigenous traditions in your architecture, in the ways that Doshi and others have been noted for?
MT: That would be my language: a building that couldn’t be designed for any other place. I was searching for an architectural language that I could call mine. I always look into materials that are local, sourcing those. I try to include local craftspeople. We build by hand, not with machinery. Even a 12-story building is built by hand, so handcraft is important. I take what is traditional or indigenous of the land, which gives a language to my architecture.
But I’m also an architect of a certain time. That time has to be present. So, how do you take traditional materials of a place and give a contemporary quality to them? That’s the balance. Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism plays a major role in the way I think and work: How can architecture be local but universal at the same time?
MJC: In the design process, when are material choices made: early, late, or do they arrive of their own accord?
MT: It’s different for every project. In some, the space and the feeling I want to create dictates the material, and in other cases the material dictates the form of the building. We designed a resort in the Bengal Delta, where we brought in the local community to build it with us. We employed mud as a material. And mud is a material you cannot dictate to. You have to listen to mud! The design and the construction techniques employing local people brought a traditional way of building. The material took the foreground, and the architecture followed. Whereas when designing the museum or the mosque, it’s the space that dictates the materials—their tactility, the way they receive light.
MJC: You teach a great deal, all over the world. What have your students taught you?
MT: So much! That’s the reason I teach. They keep you vibrant, passionate. I enjoy the process of talking to each other, and the questions they come up with. That also makes me think, reorient my views on things. You teach too, so you know as well. Students today are living in a different world than the one we grew up in. Even our existence is in crisis—we didn’t have that. We were focused on creating beautiful spaces in architecture. Today, students are focused on survival. My studios are about addressing aspects of climate and displacement. I find my students so inspirational. I bring them to Bangladesh because we have so many forms of displacement. Coming here they get a completely new understanding of a certain way of life. The conversations are thought-provoking.
MJC: What have been the greatest frustrations of your practice as an architect?
MT: [laughs] There are so many! Clients not paying their bills on time. And doing competitions and not getting selected—the dream not built. There are so many of those ghosts running around in my head, trying to manifest in different projects. But the biggest frustration is the commodification of architecture, seeing it as a product. You hesitate to call it architecture. Especially in Bangladesh. It has destroyed the city fabric. Often with certain clients it is hard to get much beyond the surface. The architecture is not very deep. Instead, they want it flashy and instantaneously gratifying. There is overproduction of buildings, but not for the people who really need them—the people who lack housing, or a dignified way of living in the city. Another frustration is glass in a hot, humid climate. You see a glass building and you know all the energy that it takes to just make it possible to occupy.
MJC: What have been your greatest satisfactions?
MT: When you design a building, you might have certain ideas in the back of your mind that you think might work, other things you might not even be able to envision. Once the building is built, and you go into a space for the first time, you see that it is working as you dreamed. There is no greater satisfaction than that. At times the architecture surprises you, with interesting elements that you hadn’t imagined or even thought of. And when someone experiences the building and appreciates it, that’s a great satisfaction. As is our Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity, which now builds houses for marginalized people and communities displaced by climate change. We’ve designed modular homes, Khudi Bari (tiny houses), to meet those needs. It’s a 10-foot-square space—a basic house for a small family, and you can scale it up. Everybody has a right to good design. Even when you are addressing issues so basic and socially responsible, the quintessential elements of form and space and light should never escape an architect’s attention.
