Dhaka: The Latest Architecture and News

At the Bengal Foundation's conference, EngageDhaka 2015, ArchDaily learned of the newly launched Bengal Architecture and Design Institute. With a focus on the pursuit of innovation in the lived environment with a focus on human interactions, the forum will enable open dialogue on improving our environments through the lens of architecture, landscape, and settlement for better livability. Bringing together local and international professionals and educators, the Institute will provide a series of lectures, discussions, workshops, and exhibitions to better understand the possibilities within these areas, especially when unified.

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John McAslan + Partners (JMP) has won an international competition to design 16 elevated stations and a depot for Dhaka’s 20 kilometer metro line. The $3 billion, three-phased project will connect Dhaka’s residential district in the north to the business center in the south. It is part of a wider urban plan to decentralize urban growth from the center to satellite communities.

All stations are planned to open by 2022 and will serve an anticipated 505,000 passengers per day by 2025. 

Another image of a proposed JMP-designed Dhaka metro station, after the break. 

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Modernist architecture is traditionally understood to be utilitarian, sleek, and most of all without context, such that it can be placed in any context and still stay true to aesthetic principles and its functional requirements. However, Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building of Bangladesh in Dhaka is an extraordinary example of modern architecture being transcribed as a part of Bangali vernacular architecture. The National Assembly building, completed in 1982, stands as one of Kahn’s most prominent works, but also as a symbolic monument to the government of Bangladesh.