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  • br Second capital in Dhaka Salk provided the point of

    2018-10-22


    Second capital in Dhaka Salk provided the point of departure for the approach to concrete Kahn took when he b catenin inhibitor began work on what was originally termed the Second Capital project in Dhaka, the linchpin of which was the National Assembly and is now known as Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban (Brownlee and De Long, 1991; Kreis et al., 2013; McCarter, 2005; Vale, 1992) (Figure 7). He initially sought to import the same high degree of finish, shorn of the warm wooden infill, into the very different building culture of East Pakistan. Forced to compromise, he developed a system that responded to Pakistani demands that he reference indigenous Islamic architecture as well as to the technical capacities of local construction workers. The result retained his commitment to the integrity of construction. The National Assembly’s heft, but not its dignity, was eroded by multi-storey geometrical cutouts on both the exterior facades and those of the major internal circulation space, while the central octagonal volume which serves as the parliamentary chamber, was eventually capped by an parasol-like structure that appears almost to float atop it. From the beginning the challenges for a relatively small office of building on an entirely new scale in South Asia were daunting (in addition to the Second Capital, Kahn was also at work from 1962 until his death in 1974 on the Indian Institute of Management; a project for Islamabad was terminated by his clients in 1966). He established a small site office, staffed with Americans, but communication between Dhaka and Philadelphia was slow, and architects in both cities had difficulty to adjusting to a workforce that was largely illiterate and thus also incapable of reading plans. A crisis tended to be addressed by a personal visit (he made 18 of them between 1962 and 1970) from Kahn, who would then promise to send drawings that might or might not materialize. Trust quickly broke down due to the profoundly different motivation of the various parties. The Pakistani government was trying to accommodate East Pakistan’s desire to have a say in the running of a country by providing at least a fraction of the new civic infrastructure being created in Islamabad, but the government remained dominated by people from West Pakistan. The Pakistani Department of Public Works presumed that in hiring a famous American, they were availing themselves of that country’s prowess in creating state of the art buildings; in fact they were dealing with an one famous for the remove at which he kept an approach to architecture, and more particularly to construction, that he felt lacked integrity (Ford, 1996). Moreover, many members of the Public Works Department were corrupt and looking for kickbacks from contractors. Kahn’s loyalty was to his design and not the money he might make from it. Nonetheless, from very early in the process unwillingness of his clients to reimburse him properly undercut his commitment to the project. At the same time he proved unwilling to walk away from an opportunity of this magnitude, even as he slid further and further into debt. Concrete was key to the sense of the integrity with which Kahn believed he endowed his designs. He came to Dhaka determined to improve a building culture that he deplored not because intron was pre-modern, but precisely because of its modernity (he would fare better in India, where at the insistence of his clients he built largely in brick) (Srivastava, 2009). The shift from a relatively low-tech version of concrete framing to an unusually careful one to exposed monolithic construction presented enormous challenges, but he refused to be discouraged. Although he realized from the beginning that “some deviation from construction practice in Dhaka” would be required “to achieve a high quality of workmanship”, he hoped to lead by example. He wrote in 1965, “All buildings within the reservation of the Second Capital [should] be considered semi-experimental for the sake of inducing better efforts on the part of architects and builders of Dacca.”