BFDC Complex

BFDC Complex
Multipurpose Film & Commercial Complex · Tejgaon, Dhaka, Bangladesh · 2020

There is a particular kind of institutional building that understands its civic responsibility not as a formal gesture but as a spatial one, a building that gives something back to the city rather than simply occupying it. The 23/90 Architects' unbuilt concept for the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation at Tejgaon belongs to this category. On a 53-katha site at the edge of Hatirjheel, the architects chose not to fill the land but to hold it open, preserving the canal edge as a landscaped public realm and concentrating the 45,855-square-metre programme into two compact, architecturally distinct blocks that release the ground between them for people.

The two blocks are not versions of the same idea. They are deliberate opposites. The commercial mass to the left is composed of staggered, projecting floor plates dressed in warm vertical timber-toned fins, its surface active and textured, its massing stepping outward at alternating levels to create depth and shadow across the facade. It is a building that reads as urban, crafted, and inhabited. The film block to the right is something else entirely: a green vertical mass whose steel exoskeleton supports cascading planted terraces, trees growing at every level, vegetation trailing downward in curtains of living material. Seen together, the two blocks create a dialogue between the made and the grown, between the civic institution and the natural world, between Dhaka's industrial density and the canal's open green edge behind them.

The ground between and around these blocks is where the design earns its civic ambition. The common entry is conceived as a covered outdoor room rather than a lobby, its timber-slatted ceiling interrupted by a circular oculus through which a tree rises and daylight descends onto stepped amphitheater seating below. This is an arrival that pauses rather than passes, holding the visitor at a threshold between street and institution with the quality of a carefully designed public space. Beside it, an open lawn of substantial scale runs toward the Hatirjheel, its softness contrasting with the precision of the built edges around it and offering the kind of unscripted public ground that Dhaka's institutional buildings almost never provide.

The section of the complex is its most sophisticated spatial argument. Programme is distributed vertically with deliberate logic: production, archive, and museum at the base where they connect most easily to ground and street; hotel above, with a section dedicated to cinema-related guests who move directly between room and studio; and at the summit of the green block, a large swimming pool under a steel pergola and a circular rooftop amphitheater, both oriented to receive the panorama of Hatirjheel and Dhaka's skyline as their primary spatial experience. The roof of the production building, planted and level, is both an outdoor shooting location and a connection point to the adjacent flyover, turning infrastructure into threshold. The building rises from the ground as landscape, becomes architecture through its midsection, and dissolves back into open sky at its top.