Dhaka does not have the means to reinvent its urban space in the radical ways as Baron Haussmann did for Paris in the 19th century or Shah Abbas for Isfahan before that. But space containing walls are minimal and yet powerful surgical interventions in amorphous cityscapes because their order and strict horizon transform the all too chaotic urban forms into picturesque backdrops. 

Though everyone today is aware of the need for change, the rising pile of statistics, reports, warnings and preaching does not seem to significantly shift private or public behaviour. Looking at history it seems that there are two key drivers of change: one is the intense experience of pain—which is unacceptable—and the other is the promise or experience of pleasure—a far better approach! It is the latter driver of change that we chose to instigate at a workshop held at the invitation of the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements in Dhaka in March 2019.

The two critical questions of this particular workshop were: what kind of public space in Dhaka would be for the benefit of all? And what kind of instruments do architects need in order to create good architecture? The second is crucial too, because the architecture of good intentions is not necessarily also good architecture. Bad architecture gets demolished, and is therefore a waste of resources.

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Within the “ghatscape” are numerous spaces of different character and atmosphere
Within the “ghatscape” are numerous spaces of different character and atmosphere - On the southern side ..., urban shelves are not an option because their front would be exposed to the north. Here another question became central: Should the borderline between water and land be fixed or blurred? Do we need hard or soft edges, slopes or steps, platforms or caves, basins or islands? We decided that we need them all. The Bengali form of the ghatserves as the motivic cell from which a landscape of discovery starts. The southern side will be a piece of playful and communicative landscape-architecture; it will be a new, unprecedented ghatscape. And this exuberant ghatscape finds its echo in the ground floor of the lakeside shelves. Here water enters the ground floor, plays around the columns, enters caves, the little waves licking the steps of the platforms. In between the columns of the west-wing the ghatscapeeven literally gets repeated in smaller scale, becoming a playground for the younger ones and inspiring them to cross the lake and discover space on their own. The dramatic culmination of this trialogue of water, land and space however is the cave in the apex of the triangle: a 15 m high waterfall—directly inspired by one of the collages mentioned before—dominates a mysterious space, nevertheless also having the mundane task of a sound-barrier between the noisy and the quiet wing and even sending its roar to the street. Altogether these structures turn the lake into a theatrical setting: the ghatscape becoming the audience, the lake the stage and the shelves the backdrop. They form a public space as intense in its interiority as the ones conceived by the Romans. © Bengal Institute/Shafayet Hossain