The House That Kahn Built: The National Assembly Building in Dhaka by Louis Kahn

Kashef Chowdhury’s fascination for Kahn’s parliamentary building in Dhaka inspired this volume of photo essays. Kahn’s design is characterized by an innovative architectural language that combines western and eastern traditions, forms and materials.

Working from his Urbana practice in Bangladesh, Kashef Chowdhury designs architecture that is rooted in the history and nature of its location - whereby the latter also relates to a spiritual and cultural level. This explains his fascination for Kahn’s parliamentary building in Dhaka, which inspired this volume of photo essays.

Kahn’s design is characterized by an innovative architectural language that combines western and eastern traditions, forms and materials. For instance, in view of the great importance of water in Bengali tradition, he placed the building complex by an artificial lake. Furthermore, although it is defined by strict geometrical forms, the parliamentary building reflects the transcendental nature of the National Assembly, defining the hopeful founding years of the independent state of Bangladesh.

Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1970 and has a degree in architecture from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. His work experiments with the expressive and technological potential of modernism in an era and a land that give it new meaning. His projects with Urbana, founded in Dhaka in 1995, show research on materials, attention for the climate, and the favoring of artistic content, something that is also found in his parallel practice of photography.