| bangladesh
ONE WHO DWELLS NEAR THE GROUND
Review by Rajat Ray
LA80 |
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| The insightful book connects modern architecture with Bengal through essays exploring “dwelling” and “place,” cultural identity, and Bangladesh’s architectural evolution, enriched by regional sensibilities and response to the fluvial geography in design and culture.
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In the book, The Mother Tongue of Architecture, architect writer Kazi Ashraf presents an authentic self, connecting modern architecture with Bangladesh, phenomenologically. His central concern is the idea of ‘dwelling’ and ‘place,’ the idea of ‘placing’ and placement, rather than worrying about the edifice and its consequent space. This is beautifully driven home in the ten essays in the second chapter with a rewarding diversity of content. In the first five of them in search of a place he moves up and down from, the authority of vastukala and sthapatya resonating with dwelling and placement, to the American high speeded ‘abandonment of locationality’ and rebellion against authority, then back to the ancient traditions of nature architecture intimacy, to place consciousness in human thought, then again, turning to the postmodern crisis of place or placeless-ness through a fascinating real-time story. The next five essays, in fact wonderfully problematize the idea of building in favour of the problem of locating one, through Buddha’s house of absence he moves to ‘the architecture of asceticism’ and then proceeds to the dystopias of destruction and exposes some contemporary anxieties; albeit after all that finally he recommends, taking up “the challenge of the assuredness of a finely built work. Such acts of building are deployed toward the obligations of habitation and well-being rather than a spectacular presence”. That no doubt is a sure sign of sanity in the riotous contemporary condition.
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