We know too little. Even if you ask architects who have travelled a long way, most of them cannot give you two names of important architects from Ghana or Bangladesh. This is no better in other disciplines, for example in literature, and therefore it is a happy coincidence that the Scottish-Ghanaian architect Lesley Lokko is not only the director of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens in May, but also the author of several acclaimed bestsellers. In addition to her work as an architect, she writes romantic novels.
Niklas Maak
Editor in the arts section.
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The exhibition "Indigo Waves – Navigating the Afrasian Sea" in Berlin's Gropiusbau, which opens in two weeks, aims to explore the cultural space between Africa and the countries bordering the Indian Ocean. What is currently being built on the Bay of Bengal, on the northern edge of the Indian Ocean, what solutions can be found there for building in times of climate crisis and growing social conflicts, can now be seen in Munich. The local architecture museum shows the work of the architect Marina Tabassum, born in Dhaka in 1968, who became known among other things for her designs of houses for the floodplain of the Ganges delta, each of which may cost only 2000 euros.
A life-size apartment in the museum
With almost 1100 inhabitants per square kilometre, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated states in the world. A large part of the country is still very flat. If the sea level rises above one meter, a good fifth of the country would be flooded and more than 30 million people would become homeless. Even today, floods are frequent, harvests fail, and rural populations seek refuge in overcrowded cities such as Dhaka, which exacerbates conflicts there. In addition, there have been more than one million refugees from Myanmar since 2017.
In response to this influx, Tabassum has designed infrastructure structures that can be easily and quickly set up – for example, two-storey collection centres made of bamboo, where a market can take place at the bottom and work can be carried out at the top. Since 2020, Tabassums Khudi Bari have also been built from the local building material bamboo – modular stilt houses whose elevated living and sleeping levels are located on the first floor and thus offer protection against flooding. They should soon be needed in all coastal regions of the world.
What is beautiful and extraordinary about this exhibition, curated by Simone Bader, is that it shows Tabassum's houses and apartments, some of them in original size; You can go into a replica apartment and experience the spatial and material effect, a life-size Khudi Bari stands in the museum. Outside the museum, you can enter one of the models for Tabassum's quickly assembleable and dismantled architecture. For the exhibition, a typical Vernacular Bengali prefabricated house consisting of a wooden frame and corrugated iron was bought at the local market in Dohar and now stands in Munich under the monumental concrete steles of the Pinakothek der Moderne like a child lost in the large cement forest of Western industrial modernism. If the grounds of a village are destroyed by the masses of water, the inhabitants simply dismantle these prefabricated houses and rebuild them elsewhere. As a result, entire villages are constantly moving to new places.
But what you also learn in Munich is that architecture in the Bay of Bengal is not just poverty management. Bangladesh is also an example of the progress of a global modernity. While in 1960 almost a third of all children died before they turned five, today it is still a good thirty out of a thousand; Since the turn of the millennium, the number of undernourished people has halved, and the country is on its way to becoming a "middle income country".
Tabassum, such as the AR Tower, is also building an eight-storey office building with louvres that provide shade and keep the heat away from the house without air conditioning. The bricks of the buildings come from centuries-old houses that have been demolished, this recycling not only reduces the ecological footprint of the new buildings, but also gives the façade together with the formwork rough concrete a lively surface and patina. Also in Dhaka, Tabassum's Hamidur Rahman Community Center was built, three monolithic brick cubes with a library and conference rooms designed to serve as a meeting place and educational space for a disadvantaged neighborhood.
Tabassum, who comes from a wealthy family, has built – partly on behalf of her grandmother – some mosques that break away from classical mosque iconography and instead stage the effects of light and shadow. Their Baitur-Rauf-Jame mosque is also a school, playground and collective living room for a run-down neighborhood on the periphery of Dhaka. But what role do such mosques, which serve as public squares, play in a society that is deeply divided over religious issues? Are they spaces where Muslim and secular residents can meet – or do they extend the power of Islam into everyday life?
All these questions arise in Munich, and that, too, is interesting about this exhibition: that it is not only about architecture, but about the great ecological, economic and religious conflicts of the present. The Munich show is something like a telescope in which the problems of the planet become visible in a not too distant future. But luckily also some pretty good solutions.