Wednesday 27th September 2023 1pm Reilly Room
This is a Hybrid lecture which can be watched live on Zoom if you cannot join us, click here to register
Introduced by Ola Uduku, this lecture is part of the Celebrating Bangladesh Symposium, details available here
Please note, this talk will be recorded
Architecture as Freedom features the design of five regional offices across rural Bangladesh constructed for BRAC, the world’s largest non-governmental development organization. These offices are building prototypes that narrate how the language of architecture can symbolize the agency of poor communities and their pursuit of human dignity. A broader philosophical motivation undergirded the design: how do we create buildings that offer its primary clients—poor rural communities who come to BRAC offices to receive different services—an experience of hope and freedom? These projects highlight architecture’s ability to play transformative roles in spatializing freedom by ensuring people’s unobstructed accessibility and movement, thermal and social comfort, and by creating spaces in which their ability to co-design development solutions is enhanced.
Biography
Adnan Zillur Morshed is an architect, architectural historian and critic, urban theorist, and tenured professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. and Master’s in architecture from MIT and BArch from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, where he taught before coming to the USA. He also serves as the Founder-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism (Ci+AU) at BRAC University (Dhaka, Bangladesh) and a Fulbright Specialist (2021-2025). Morshed is the author of multiple books, including Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015), DAC: Dhaka in Twenty-Five Buildings (Altrim, 2017), and Dhaka Delirium (Altrim, 2023). He was featured in the acclaimed documentary, Louis Kahn’s Tiger City (2019), and was a TEDx speaker at George Washington University, Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. A practicing architect, Adnan Morshed’s design includes, among others, eight BRAC regional offices across Bangladesh, a farmhouse in North Carolina, and an ongoing multistoried office complex for BRAC in Cumilla, Bangladesh.
Image: BRAC Regional office Sujanagar pabna
Author of the image: S M Shafaiet Mahmud