Archinect - News

Marina Tabassum is the 2021 Soane Medalist

2021-11-17T14:18:00-05:00

Marina Tabassum has been named the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Soane Medal honoring her lifework and innovation in the field. The Marina Tabassum Architects founder is the fourth recipient of the medal joining Denise Scott Brown, Rafael Moneo, and Kenneth Frampton on a list of past winners.

Widely admired for her attempts to move away from for-profit architecture and towards a more just and humane application of the profession, Tabassum has been lauded as a trailblazer for female architects, as well as women of color, and was recently among several architects and urban planners named as Academy of American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award winners.

Tabassum referred to past medal winners in a lecture delivered at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London on Tuesday.

“I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on,” she began.

Related on Archinect: Marina Tabassum, Justin Garrett Moore amo...

Meet Henry Wilcots, the overlooked African-American architect who completed Louis Kahn's Dhaka National Assembly

2017-08-14T13:59:00-04:00

It would be the decisive moment in Wilcots’ life. By saying yes, he ended up devoting more than 20 years to helping Kahn build the new capital...The meetings would cause him to move to Philadelphia, a place that at the time seemed to him far less welcoming to African Americans than Dhaka. When Kahn suffered a fatal heart attack in 1974...Wilcots would assume the awesome task of finishing a Louis Kahn masterpiece.

This article sheds light on the story of Henry Wilcots (now 89 years old), the much overlooked architect who was responsible for completing Louis Kahn's Dhaka National Assembly masterpiece. Dubbed as the “Kahn whisperer” by fellow colleagues, the calm-and-collected Wilcots was able to have a smooth working relationship with Kahn, the article says.

A vast urban pathology

2016-10-23T22:52:00-04:00

But it is traffic that has sealed Dhaka’s reputation among academics and development specialists as the great symbol of 21st-century urban dysfunction, the world’s most broken city. It has made Dhaka a surreal place, a town that is both frenetic and paralyzed, and has altered the rhythms of daily life for its 17.5 million-plus residents.

Jody Rosen writes about Dhaka's legendary traffic congestion.

For more check out; more incredible photos by Nicolas Chorier and get LIVE: Traffic updates for Dhaka city via The Daily Star. Or read about how the UNDP-designed Bus Finder Feature and Transport Pioneers program is trying to solve the problem.

41 people charged for murder in 2013 Bangladeshi factory collapse

2015-06-02T09:19:00-04:00

The police in Bangladesh filed formal murder charges on Monday against 41 people accused of involvement in the 2013 collapse of a building that housed several clothing factories, leaving more than 1,100 people dead in the worst disaster in garment industry history.

How concrete floors can prevent child deaths in Bangladesh

"The trauma of rebuilding": After Kathmandu's earthquake, what can architects do? We talk with a Nepalese architect on the ground for Archinect Sessions #27

L.A. Mayor Calls for Mandatory Earthquake Retrofitting

China Quake Renews Worries Over Construction Practices

Waterworld: Koen Olthuis' floating structures, from slums to stadiums

2013-08-29T14:17:00-04:00

[It] is the same technology as we use in Holland. It’s made up of concrete caisson, boxes, a shoebox of concrete. We fill them with styrofoam. So with [these] you get unthinkable floating foundations [...] The house itself is the same as a normal house, the same material. Then you want to figure out how to get water and electricity and remove sewage and use the same technology as cruise ships." - Koen Olthuis

Dutch architect Koen Olthuis sees the future of architecture floating out to sea -- quite literally. Responding to undeniable ecological shifts of rising sea levels and seasonal flooding, Olthuis has proposed floatable-projects all along the social spectrum, designing prefabricated multi-use units for waterfront slums in Dhaka, "amphibious" housing in Holland and Columbia, private island-villas for the "stupidly rich", and foldable Olympic stadiums.

See projects from Olthius' Waterstudio.NL, in the tradition of floating architecture inspired by Dutch history and worldwide realities.

JET, JCI, and Terraplan to Build Eco Community Development in Bangladesh

2012-01-09T18:22:00-05:00

The collaboration of three Toronto-based firms, JET Architecture, JCI Architects, and Terraplan Landscape Architects, has won the commission to build the "Shobuj Pata" (Green Leaf) Eco Community Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh.