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. 

“Being born and brought up in the capital city of Dhaka, my connection to the villages were few and far between. The eternal beauty of the delta land revealed herself to me only in the last decade in various projects in the Ganges Delta. I found my ‘Desh’ there, through the interactions and connections I felt with rural Bengal, the soul of the delta land. There is inherent wisdom embedded in living symbiotically with nature.”

Tabassum went on to credit the post-university environment that she stepped into in Dhaka in the mid-90s as shaping her outlook and career trajectory. 

The icon-mania of the super-rich and stardom of architects brought about a crisis. It is a point of crisis when an architect must decide whether to indulge in easy excitement or to choose a path of resistance.

“Architecture has given me more than I had anticipated. A few choices made very early in my journey defined my practice over the years. When I graduated from architecture school in 1995, the affliction of consumer architecture had already infested the city of Dhaka. Architecture practices based in Bangladesh, as elsewhere in the world, were busy designing multi-tiered, residential, and commercial blocks ready for sale. A generation of fast-bred buildings, primarily focused on profitability, sprung up in the blink of an eye, and the sad cry of destruction from the older fabric of the city was overpowered by the cacophony of the arrival of the new.”

“The quest for my own identity — my ‘Desh’, that which I had sought since my childhood — seemed diluted within high-flying capitalist culture,” she explained. “The icon-mania of the super-rich and stardom of architects brought about a crisis. It is a point of crisis when an architect must decide whether to indulge in easy excitement or to choose a path of resistance.”

“I chose to resist,” she added, “to deny temptation and to search within; within the land I grew up in, the place and country I call home.”

The rest of Tabassum’s speech focused on her work with Kashef Chowdhury at award-winning practice URBANA over the next decade which culminated in her leaving to found MTA in 2005. Tabassum detailed projects like the Panigram Resort community as well as her philosophy of impermanence and the critical role that architects can play in avoiding global climate destruction. 

“Architecture adds to the narrative by building upon the ingredients sought out from these stories,” Tabassum concluded. “Therefore, before we ask the brick what it wants to be, the conversation must begin with the question: ‘Who are you, brick? What is your story?’”