166. Louis Kahn, National Assembly,

Dhaka, 1962-1974 (Bangladesh)

Originally trained in the tradition of Beaux-Arts classicism, Kahn spent many years as an urban planner in his native Philadelphia before emerging as one of the most original and visionary of modern architects. The scale and deceptive simplicity of his buildings has meant that he has sometimes been classified as a Brutalist, but Kahn’s ambition was in fact to reconcile contemporary technology, modernist abstraction and traditional monumentality. His success in this difficult task can be judged nowhere better than in his government buildings for the capital city of Bangladesh. Following the precedent of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Kahn’s great National Assembly, also known as the Jatiya Shangshad Bhaban complex, deploys sculptural forms on a colossal scale. Fortress-like in appearance, the Assembly’s rounded volumes are constructed of load-bearing brick walls with reinforced concrete inserts; pierced by huge geometric openings, these constitute a series of hollow shells sheltering a second, internal set of forms, a design strategy which was adopted both for climatic reasons and to suggest associations with great ruins of the past. Construction on the project began in earnest in 1973, only a year before Kahn’s death, and it was officially inaugurated only in 1982.