Tabassum born and based in Dhaka, she has developed prolific in her country since the mid-1990s, when she set up her eponymous practice there, It is crucial in the Bangladeshi architect’s approach.
She creates work that feels in tune with its context – in environmental ways, but also socially – is crucial in the Bangladeshi architect’s approach. Critical examples include the mesmerising minimalist architecture of the 2012 Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka; and ongoing work at Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, in south-east Bangladesh. She considers the design for Dhaka’s Independence Monument and Liberation War Museum as her breakthrough work.
She creates work that feels in tune with its context – in environmental ways, but also socially – is crucial in the Bangladeshi architect’s approach. Critical examples include the mesmerising minimalist architecture of the 2012 Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka; and ongoing work at Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, in south-east Bangladesh. She considers the design for Dhaka’s Independence Monument and Liberation War Museum as her breakthrough work.
‘I consciously moved away from real estate – and profit-driven work – in my practice,’ says Tabassum. ‘We are a local, very “Dhaka” practice. There is so much to do in Bangladesh.’
Marina Tabassum statement Nov 16th, 2021:
"I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on. The anxiousness of many years has evaporated with my turning fifty: choices made, roads taken; all leading me to a point of no return. This is not the time to reminisce on a past that could slow me down. This is the time to pour out all that was gathered over time, through relentless search, to contribute to the pursuit of architecture. The search never ends – it leads us to places, encounters, acquaintances and expanded horizons: sometimes to failures and realisations – but one must never arrive, arrival stops growth. There is still so much to learn, to realise, to develop.
I am in the middle of my journey. It is not time yet to look back and pick up the pieces to tell my tale. My stories and encounters are being collected and archived in my memory for the future. Someday, when I’m sitting on the porch of my farmhouse, which I’m yet to build, up in the north in Rohanpur, looking across the mango orchard and into the horizon, I will reminisce upon days gone by. I might then go back to the earliest memory of my life, to the sounds of destruction amidst Bangladesh’s liberation war in 1971. My story begins there, with my two-year-old self still holding on to the sadness of my grandfather’s passing in the middle of the war, watching from my grandparents’ house in Shantinagar as the police barrack in Rajar Bagh blazed with fire. The sirens and subsequent blackouts of air raids are still unsettling memories. I was introduced to death and destruction before I was enrolled in elementary school.
Growing up in the 70s – in a war-ravaged, fledgling nation of 70 million, full of uncertainties and minimal means – the children of my generation matured somewhat faster than usual. There were no toys to play with; and so we invented new games for ourselves. My childhood-self witnessed a country in a famine in 1974. Children of opulence will never know the power of imagination that can turn a rice ball into a boiled egg. I realised very early in life that limited means cannot limit dreams; these limits instead open the window of innovation. This lesson from my modest upbringing informs my work thus far." .../...
