CEL Darul Lahzat

CEL Darul Lahzat
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Jolshiri Abashon, Sector 06, Dhaka · 2025

Most buildings in Jolshiri Abashon occupy plots aligned to an orthogonal street grid. Plot 047 on Road 405, Sector 06 is different. The site sits at 45 degrees to the conventional pattern, its front face angled toward the south-west, where the afternoon sun arrives at its most unforgiving, and the road bends sharply enough to bring neighbouring buildings unexpectedly close. To the south-east, however, the picture reverses: a public park opens up, bringing greenery, open sky, and the prevailing south wind arriving diagonally across an unobstructed green surface. CEL Darul Lahzat is a building of two distinct faces, each shaped by what its direction offers or withholds.

The south-western elevation is addressed through a system of large perforated concrete louvers running the full height of the building. Angled at 45 degrees to align with the diagonal geometry of the plot, these louvers intercept direct south-western sun at its harshest angles while simultaneously functioning as wind catchers, drawing the south wind inward at the same diagonal and distributing it through the apartment floor plates behind. The road's sharp curve brings adjacent buildings unexpectedly close to this face, and the louver depth provides visual privacy without sacrificing interior light. Behind the screen, balconies are designed with built-in flexibility: each can function as a single continuous outdoor room across an entire floor, or be subdivided by partition to serve two adjacent rooms independently.

The south-eastern face, looking toward the park, is handled in an entirely different spirit. The ground floor here is cut fully open toward the landscape, its boundary dissolved so that the park outside and the building's base become a single continuous environment. This opening is made possible by displacing the mezzanine level to one side of the plan, freeing a full 16-foot clear height at ground level that sweeps through the building from the park edge to the street beyond. The effect is of a building lifted off the ground, its residential mass hovering above an open, airy volume that belongs equally to the park and to the residents above. The gathering space and gym are accommodated within the mezzanine, positioned to benefit from this generous ground-level volume without consuming it.

Materials throughout are assembled in a considered palette. Light travertine-toned concrete cladding forms the primary surface, warm timber lines the balcony soffits and the underside of the canopy at street level, and bands of terracotta brick run as vertical accents between the balcony edges, grounding the composition in material warmth. At the rooftop, a pergola structure crowns the building, its open framework silhouetted against the sky and offering residents a shared outdoor terrace above the Sector 06 tree canopy. The building proposes a clear vertical sequence: open ground merging into park at 16 feet, communal life in the mezzanine above, private residential floors rising through the building's full height, and a shared sky terrace at the summit.