A million Rohingya refugees, crowded in and around the city of Cox’s Bazar in south-eastern Bangladesh, have created a very specific set of circumstances. These people are unacknowledged as refugees by a state wary of taking full responsibility for them. Unable to work, they are almost entirely reliant on UN food aid.
Architect Marina Tabassum is working with the Rohingya to design buildings that will be useful: housing, food distribution centres, hubs for women, and so on. But the client, the Bangladeshi government, has a demand: the architecture must not be beautiful and it must not be permanent. It wouldn’t want to suggest this might be a good place to stay.
It is a peculiar requirement for an architect whose best known work is the Baitur Rauf Mosque in Dhaka, a sublime, solid structure made of brick and light. It looks both contemporary and timeless, a little like the work of the US architect Louis Kahn, whose National Assembly building in Dhaka had a powerful effect on the consciousness of an emerging nation and on the young Tabassum herself.
Yet Tabassum seems as happy working with bamboo as with brick, with precarity as with plenty, adapting to local conditions, attempting to understand the needs of the users of the architecture.
She is in London to collect the Soane Medal, a relatively new award that she hadn’t previously heard of. “I thought it was a joke at first,” she tells me sheepishly. “I looked at the list [of previous winners]: Rafael Moneo, Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton . . . ” She looks at me, wide-eyed from under her black bob to express her disbelief. Yet here she is, the deserving fourth recipient.
Although born in Bangladesh, Tabassum herself has something of the immigrant experience. “My family were immigrants from Madda in India,” she says. “Being Muslims, they moved during partition to what was then East Pakistan, a migrant family in a new territory.
“It was a nice atmosphere in Dhaka then,” she says, “almost like a small town, where everybody knew their neighbours. It was a difficult situation but there was a sense of place and belonging.” Today, she says, “It’s a megacity of 20m. I sometimes feel like a stranger in my own city.”
Her father was a doctor and she grew up in relative comfort, attending a Catholic missionary school and going on to study architecture in Dhaka. I ask whether she faced any obstacles as a woman either studying or practising architecture and I get an almost imperceptible eye-roll in return. “Not at all,” she replies.
“We have a female prime minister in Bangladesh, a woman speaker, women in many top jobs. The garment industry, which is the biggest source of revenue, is all women. Women are expected to work and in my family there were high expectations too. I have honestly never faced discrimination. Rather, you might say, I had to groom myself to be in positions where I could claim my ground.”
The Baitur Rauf Mosque, the building that brought Tabassum to a more global audience, is fascinating: although it is clearly a sacred space it has none of the familiar motifs of Islamic architecture.
“It was a very conscious choice to avoid symbolism,” she says. “The mosque was commissioned in 2005-6 and it was a difficult period, after 9/11 and the wars and Islam was being questioned as an idea; there was an identity issue. I asked, is a dome or a minaret the only way of symbolising Islam?
“So my research went into the typology, the idea of the mosque. The first mosque was built by the Prophet. There were only minimal building materials available in the Arabian peninsula, date palm trunks, basically. It was a space for congregation but also for diplomatic and judicial uses, it was designed as a centre for communal and social activities. As Islam flourished, all these other elements were incorporated, the dome and the minaret from the Ottomans. When Islam was being questioned, it seemed important to focus on the idea of spirituality rather than these symbols.”
But, I suggest, communities take comfort in the familiar. “Symbols create division,” she replies. “They make buildings become more exclusive than inclusive.
“If you are not a Muslim and you see a building that is obviously a mosque, you keep away, but if you see an interesting space, you might go in. The idea was to make a building that contained ideas about being human, a refuge where people can focus on values rather than symbols.
Tabassum has managed to pursue a remarkably pure path: a few impressive public buildings as well as community centres for NGOs. But it can’t have been easy maintain a practice with this kind of work. “It was difficult,” she says. “I don’t see architecture as a product, a commodity, so I don’t work with developers.
“But we were lucky, we won a competition early on for the Museum of Independence [in Dhaka].” Images of that building show its central oculus and the water that pours from it giving the astonishing impression of a column of light constantly in motion, making the liquid appear solid.
“There was the mosque as well and these projects are not like, say a house, they last a long time, many, many years.”
Her most recent work, those ephemeral shelters, appear the diametric opposite of these monumental structures. “We were working with the cheapest and easiest materials, corrugated metal and bamboo, materials that could be moved if they needed to be. There are always floods in Bangladesh,” she explains, “and houses are being moved all the time, so there is a vernacular tradition of these [demountable] houses here.”
The brief might have been to avoid anything beautiful, but these temporary shelters have their own kind of elegance — somewhere between the vernacular and the archetype, an idea of shelter in a flood plain, elevated and elemental. “I was trying to think about how we could use impermanence as an opportunity.” Working with the refugees and with the low-income Bangladeshis who live nearby but who are excluded from the UN housing and food programmes, Tabassum has been slowly improving lives, “trying to foster a sense of ownership over these places which the residents can build themselves”.
“It’s strange isn’t it?” she says. “We are trained to think in terms of beauty and aesthetics and I’ve been talking all my life about timelessness and suddenly everything needs to be temporary.” As climate change drives ever more extreme weather, it might be the most fragile and seemingly impermanent of her designs that will have the biggest impact.
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