Kashef Chowdhury’s Friendship Hospital named 2021 World’s Best New Building by RIBA

2022-01-25T19:47:00-05:00

One of designer Kashef Chowdhury and URBANA’s superlative recent works has received a huge honor from the UK’s oldest architectural organization. The Royal Institute of British Architects has today announced the firm’s Friendship Hospital project in Bangladesh as the winner of the 2021 International Prize for the World’s Best New Building.

The rural hospital is one of several firm projects in the country commissioned by a nonprofit group called Friendship that looks to empower underdeveloped communities in different regions of the country through hands-on social innovation and collaboration. The hospital provides the village of Satkhira, which has been heavily impacted by rising sea levels related to climate change. The village has particularly bad agricultural problems related to the rising waters, which the project was also able to address through the introduction of a new stormwater drainage system that simultaneously produces valuable drinking water and serves in the much-neede...

The Luxury of Light and Shadows

2013-02-12T19:09:00-05:00

Nestled in the flatlands of rural Bangladesh near the River Brahma-Jamuna, coursing down from Tibet, flush with the silts and melted snows of the Himalayas, the Friendship Centre is one of those new buildings which feels as though it may have been there for a very long time. Whilst the simple, graphic forms of its brick construction present a slightly archaic aspect, its enclosure by a bund or embankment lends the whole site an inward-looking inverted feel, almost like an excavation. T

Online publication, uncube, interviews Bangladeshi architect Kashef Chowdhury, discussing his recent project, the Friendship Centre, in Gaibandha.

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Kashef Chowdhury’s Friendship Hospital named 2021 World’s Best New Building by RIBA

The Luxury of Light and Shadows