Muzharul Islam. An architect in Bangladesh

Muzharul Islam. An Architect in Bangladesh.

After independence of Pakistan, Islam was the only formally trained architect working in Dhaka, with degrees from Calcutta University, Oregon University and Yale.
The 1950’s and 60’s were turbulent times, with the split of the country in East and West Pakistan, later on followed by the independence in 1971. It was the beginning of a search of self-identity and a significant era in the architectural realm. Despite the chaos, it was in this decade that formal architectural education was established and that important foreign architects like Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and Stanley Tigerman produced their works here. The involvement of these 3 architects was mainly due to Musharul Islam. Rudolph was invited in 1966 to prepare a Master Plan and to design buildings of the Agricultural University at Mymensingh. Interesting is the encounter between architectural ideology, mainly developed in the West, and conditions that are often totally different from their original milieu. In 1959 the decision was made to make Dhaka a ‘second’ capital with the National Parliament. Louis Kahn was invited to make the design of the capital.
Together with Kahn’s capital buildings it is Muzharul Islam’s work which has dominated the early architectural scene in Bangladesh. Islam created the nascent architectural culture of Bangladesh, and tried to fight against government bureaucracy, political domination by engineers and academic sterility. His crucial contribution was his continuous search to formulate a Bengali sense of identity, social needs and cultural imperatives were his focus. At the end of the 1960’s he even became more political active which he saw as a more immediate role to confront social conditions.
In the chaotic times of the 1970’s, after the Liberation war of 1971, there was a breach. Most of the active architects submitted totally to mere profit-making and disunited the building task from real social needs. Islam ended up in some sort of isolation and his aims to come to a new paradigm was not reached.
Even today there are a lot of issues presented to the Bangladeshi architects, and the question still remains how to take on the situation and what should the role of the architect be in order to confront this dilemma of housing and organization of the human environment.