Cascade Park

Cascade Park
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Manikdi, Near Kalshi, Dhaka, Bangladesh · 2023

An L-shaped plot is one of architecture's more persistent puzzles. The irregular boundary resists the conventional logic of rectangular apartment planning, where units are stacked in clean repetition from one end of a floor plate to the other. At Manikdi, near Kalshi, the 9.22-katha site for Cascade Park bends at an angle that made its 27 co-owners' expectations particularly difficult to satisfy: each of them required an apartment of equal area and equivalent amenity, floor by floor, across a plan that the site geometry refused to make simple.

23/90 Architects resolved this problem at the planning stage by treating the L-shape not as a deficit but as an organising principle. The floor plate was divided and arranged so that three apartments per floor, despite sitting on an irregular plan, achieve equivalent areas and equivalent access to natural light, ventilation, and outdoor space. This is more precisely an act of geometric intelligence than it might appear: to produce three units of equal size within a shape that does not naturally want to be divided equally requires careful calibration of corridor widths, unit depths, and structural grids, none of which can be compromised without one owner receiving less than another. The equality of the 27 units is the building's primary architectural achievement, even if it is the least visible one from the street.

The multi-level basement parking resolves another constraint intrinsic to the site. A plot of 9.22 katha generating 5,100 square metres of residential area across ten floors and 27 units requires significant parking provision. The ramp connecting the basement levels to the ground is compressed to the shortest feasible length, a technical optimisation that recovers ground area for the building's landscaped entrance and planted setback rather than surrendering it to vehicle circulation.

From the street, the building presents as two distinct massing elements, their shared concrete frame giving them a unified identity while the slight separation between them introduces light and a visual joint into the otherwise continuous floor plates. The primary facade carries planted balconies at every residential level, with trailing vegetation providing a layered green surface against the pale board-marked concrete. The side elevation is treated with a vertical perforated screen element that runs the building's full height, filtering daylight into the service and circulation zones behind it while giving that face a considered architectural character rather than a bare wall. At the rooftop, an open terrace is planted with a tree that has already grown to a size visible in the renders, its canopy extending above the parapet and softening the building's summit against the Dhaka skyline.