The monograph defines how the role of the architect must change in our times
This is the first survey of Dhaka-based architecture practice URBANA’s 30-year output and 18 realised designs, which range from the Museum of Independence complex in Dhaka (completed in 2015), to Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park (opened 2025), via mosques, residential projects and corporate
HQs, all of which respond to the varied contexts of Bangladesh. Plans, sketches and project descriptions are accompanied by black-and-white images by Hélène Binet. Details of soil types, settings, altitude, average annual rainfall and temperatures, and flood risks accompany each project (as well as the usual information regarding design and construction teams, and client details). It’s architecture that places the need to adapt to our changing climate front and centre: a 2005 project for the Friendship NGO in the waterways of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River (the hydrography of which is directly affected by increased temperatures melting snow in the Himalayas) creates landforms that raise entire villages above the floodwater levels; a hospital in Shyamnagar, completed in 2018, uses harvested rainwater to establish zoning and to collect in lakes from which the local population can draw freshwater (a rise in sea levels has meant that the groundwater even 65km inland is now brackish). While you can marvel at the grace of URBANA’s architecture, as climate-change specialist Ainun Nishat notes in an essay, the work presented here also defines how the role of the architect must change in our times.
Meditations in Entropy: The Work of Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA Edited by Kashef Chowdhury Park Books, chf59 (hardcover)
From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.
