Marina Tabassum, a seasoned architect who won the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Jameel Prize for designing the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, talks to The Daily Star's Naznin Tithi about the future of housing in flood-prone and coastal regions as well as the importance of local knowledge for a sustainable solution to housing.
You have recently exhibited, at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, lightweight houses made from locally sourced materials that perch on stilts and can be moved when the waters rise. Tell us more about your research on such houses. Also, as these houses are easy to assemble and disassemble, can these be built at an affordable price for the coastal communities?
For the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, we were commissioned to research the rights of future generations in the dynamic landscape of the tide-dominated Ganges Delta. We focused on Haimchar in the lower Meghna where the delta is active. Our multidisciplinary team included architects, geographer, landscape architect and historian, and the objective was to have a holistic understanding of the phenomena of erosion and accretion. Our investigation also looked into Bengal Tenancy Act imposed by the British colonial rule on a dynamic riverine delta in order to collect revenue from the local inhabitants through a cadastral subdivision known as the CS map. This saw an imposition of a practice of dry culture on the wet culture of the Bengal Delta. We talked to local inhabitants and documented their stories, some of whom left Haimchar as landless migrants to Dhaka. We will see many such climate migrants moving to cities for opportunity in the years to come.
The houses that people built in these belts that follow the Brahmaputra trajectory originally followed a knock-down system. You can find houses that have moved seven times in the last 60 years and are handed down from one generation to the next. It's not something we invented but we highlighted and suggested a few simplified solutions to enable quick disassembly and assembly. The houses have frame structures with knockdown façades. The cost can vary according to the choice of materials.
In recent years, large furniture makers like IKEA came up with a flat pack system of houses that can be moved to different locations, which became news in architecture journals and magazines. Our vernacular architecture addressed mobility for over hundreds of years out of necessity of movement. This was also an underlying message to the world of architecture to look into local wisdom of building.
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