This past December, I was finally able to see Louis Kahn’s greatest achievement, the parliament building and housing he designed in Dhaka. Originally envisioned for what was then East Pakistan in 1964, it opened in 1982, eight years after the architect’s death, to serve the independent state of Bangladesh. I went to the site on a pilgrimage to see how great architecture could embody and fix into form democracy. Given what I knew about the complex’s architecture, I believed that it would do so in a manner that would exhibit a country’s commitment to the central institutions of the state and exalt the act of coming together as a community. I was sorely disappointed. The Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, as the complex is officially called, is a huge shell echoing in emptiness as it sits forlorn behind security fences. It is an alien fortress of foreign forms gesticulating over grand amounts of space and signifying nothing.
The experience was especially depressing for me because I grew up in architecture at Yale in the presence of two of Kahn’s most beautiful buildings, the 1951 Yale Art Gallery and the 1975 Yale Center for British Art. I was also educated there by the architecture historian Vincent Scully, who thought of Kahn as the last, greatest, and most tragic architect of modernism. I loved the British Art Center so much that I got a job working as a guard there the summer of my sophomore year, reveling in my ability to stroke the wood and concrete as it bathed in the natural light all day long. Over the years, I tried to see every single one of Kahn’s built designs, including the early ones in Philadelphia and, most recently, what remains of the Olivetti factory outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (it is now a sad Verizon warehouse). Kahn’s architecture for me represented the ability of a building to reveal how it was made, but also why. It told you what was great about a library like the one at Philips Academy Exeter by showing you how its pieces came together in a central hall surrounded by books. Around that room (or Room, as Kahn would say), it invited you to caress its materials, revel in its structural bravura, and enjoy a cozy carol, a cocoon of wood lighted by your own private window, while a clerestory above washed the reading area around you.
Surely the buildings at Dhaka, where Kahn was given the chance to embody a new nation and its aspirations, would be the summation of his quest for erecting the monuments we needed in the modern age. In plans, its central space appeared as democracy’s answer to a king’s Great Chamber, translated into an octagonal place of gathering surrounded by eight towers. Those layered buttresses seem to buffer this sacred forum with offices and services, but also with oversized corridors and nooks where the real business of deliberation, negotiation, and discussion can take place. Around that castle, sitting in a lake reflecting its forms, Kahn created a planned community: rows of houses for the parliamentarians, each with its own courtyard, arranged in diagonals punctuated by larger structures for stores, a health clinic, and other community services. In photographs, the brick and concrete forms appear both as idealized ruins, empty and redolent of fundamental principles, and as modern abstractions echoing our attempt to establish pure and true principles in government and architecture.In reality, the complex is now a relic embodying little hope. The current government, having locked up or disabled almost all opposition, holds up the image of democracy, if not its practice. It has fittingly also locked up the whole of Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, so that only those who work there and a very few tours are allowed in. My hosts at VolumeZero Architects had to work assiduously to get me in on such a quick survey. Most of the architects who accompanied me remembered playing and picnicking on the vast lawn in front of the parliament building, but even that is no longer possible. The architecture of democracy does not function as such anymore. Instead, the complex is a large void in the middle of a city of more than twenty million people, visible only from a far distance through the gates patrolled by military with machine guns.
The second, non-intrinsic reason for the sad state of Kahn’s architecture is the way in which it has been abused and barely maintained. Over the years, electric conduits, air conditioning units, and haphazard collections of furniture have come to cling to the walls and ceilings or huddle in the vast spaces with little relation to the original designs. Although you can blame the ways of bureaucracy for this and point to many similar issues in other government buildings around the world, the problem is worse here both because of the grandeur of the surroundings and because Kahn had little concern, beyond vague and mystical ideas about natural ventilation and lighting, for human creature comforts –or even a desire to feel like you belong in such large spaces. Thus, everything that addresses those issues feels out of place.
Then there is the alien character of the architecture as a whole. Although Kahn claimed he was inspired by the delta landscape in which Dhaka is located, and wanted to use local building materials and techniques, it is difficult to find any relation whatsoever between what he designed and any local traditions or forms. Yes, there are brick buildings in Bangladesh, but few that use these blocks in the manner Kahn did. Yes, you can find circles and complex geometries in the religious and art traditions of the Indian subcontinent, as well as in Islamic art (Bangladesh is an Islamic country), but I found it difficult to find any connection to Kahn’s geometries, rooted in the unbroken traditions of the West that include Classicism, romantic reactions subsumed into the mainstream such as Gothic, Romanesque, and Romanticism, and the abstraction of those modes of building in modernism. The Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban is born more from the Tiber than the Padma and Brahmaputra rivers.
Then there is all that space. The complex is huge, its central tower rising to the equivalent of fifteen floors and the whole spreading out over two hundred acres. Expecting to find myself in awe, I felt myself dwarfed. Moreover, few of the spaces intersect or flow into each other in the manner that would represent the fluidity of deliberation proper to a parliament. The geometries assert themselves in the establishment of one after the other forecourt, court, atrium, stair hall, hall, and finally assembly hall, with the actual workings of the parliament tucked away in corners lost behind the curving brick walls and concrete spans. I thought the cutouts would give a sense of openness. Instead, they show nothing but more voids. Only the central octagonal chamber, bathed by light diffused by a “napkin dome,” has a sense of being a place appropriate for its function. Even there, the walls overwhelm the seating, rather than soaring above them.
Kahn’s buildings here and elsewhere in Dhaka (including, most notably, an even more badly mangled, but still fully operational women’s hospital) had an immense impact on Bangladesh. As I noted in my post on Dhaka, it is remarkable how this one architect’s forms and ways of designing have become the absolutely dominant mode for making modern architecture in the country. In some of the best of the work in this mode, including those designed by his collaborator Muzharul Islam, as well as in the best buildings created by VolumeZero, the geometries carried out in relationships between brick and concrete that modulate light in surprising ways come down to the scale of the human being to meet the intricacies of daily life. If Kahn was not able to accomplish that layering from monument to quotidian here, his followers, partially by reaching back to his other built work, have been able to do so.
The failure of the Jatiya Sandsad Bhaban, as I see it, has made me question my own evaluation of Kahn’s work. Over the years, I have come to realize that revelation is relative: it happens once in time and place, and then only to those susceptible to that sense of awe some of us find in architecture. It is an easy high whose cost in material and the suppression of functionality is usually also high. Then the building becomes a fact in which we have to work or that becomes part of the backdrop. If it is truly good, and much of Kahn’s designs are, it will keep reminding us of the beauty of order clearly exhibited. Exactly because Kahn’s buildings are so articulate, they leave little to be discovered, to delight or even bother us after that realization. There are the moments like the curving staircase, central atrium, and the carol at the Exeter library that work for the hand, the user, and the eye of the beholder, but they involve so much investment of concrete, brick, wood, and other materials that you have to wonder whether they are worth it.
I used to see Louis Kahn’s work as the very acme of modern architecture. Now I see it as its, sometimes beautiful, sometimes elegiac, and often just mute and yet grandiloquent, tomb.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
Read more: The latest from columnist Aaron Betsky includes reviews of: Dhaka | Marlon Blackwell's new mixed-use development | Eric Höweler’s social media posts,| Peter Braithwaite's architecture in Nova Scotia,| Powerhouse Arts, | the Mercer Museum, | and MoMA's Ed Ruscha exhibition.
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