Dhaka Architecture and Engineering

With a few notable exceptions such as the Parliment House and a couple of the 5 Staar hotels,, the design of buildings here in Dhaka leaves a lot to be desired. They try hard, and some of the new buildings do have a western flavour about them, but it's scary when you see what is under the facade (i.e., sub structure, and the building services). There is a major lack of skilled local trades, and so much of the workmanship is a long way from what we expect in the west. The following photos show various new and old buildings areound the area where I am living.

No building in Dhaka is truly ever finished, because they nearly always leave reo starter bars hanging out of the top, and the sides (just in case they want to extend sideways or upwards at a later date). They also never wait until a building is finished before moving into it i.e., you often see a multi storey building under construction, with upper floors being barely more than a shell, while the lower fllors are filled with offices or people living in them, The workers nearly always live on the site also, which means that by the time it is properly occupied it has been already well and truly lived in, and nothing looks new (remember the saga of the Delhi Olympic Athletes Village).

  This is a display village near where I am staying. It was built by BRAC (Bangladesh Rural Aid Cooperative), and is intended to show old shipping containers can be used as low cost and strong housing that can be built on stilts to protect against floods. It's actuallu pretty amazing.

This is a islamic style mansion built on the edge of a waste land, and beside a slum area (who knows why they chose to build here, although they probably already owned the land and couldn't afford to buy land elsewhere as land in Dhaka is both scarse and very expensive). The normal practice over here is for developers to go to land owners and offer to build on their land and in return they owners get a very handsome price, plus they will also usually get around half the units or fllors (in the case of an office building), including the top floor for their own apartment.

  This is one of the very few, what I would call modern design buildings in Dhaka. It even has proper scaffolding instead of bamboo, and the only tower crane that I have seen in Dhaka.

This is a cocktail bar just around the corner from my Guest House, the only problem is it doesn't have any alcohol. I was told that it was designed to look like a Swisss Chalet as the facade is made up of timber logs (it's amazing to see the difference between actual western or foreign design and what the Bangladeshi's view of what western design looks like). 

This believe it or not is the formwork for a new bridge that when finished will carry thousands of vehicles every day.