ELDORADO Glorious Garden

ELDORADO Glorious Garden
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Jolshiri Abashon, Sector 16, Dhaka · 2024

When Eldorado Developments approached 23/90 Architects for their first project in Jolshiri Abashon, the brief carried an ambition that went beyond the programme: the building had to be noticed. Not merely good, not simply functional, but genuinely arresting, the kind of building that stops people and makes them look. The site on Road 501, Sector 16 offered a particular opportunity. Though its formal entry faces east, the western elevation opens directly onto a 150-foot boulevard and the adjacent golf course, a civic edge from which Jolshiri's residents emerge every evening. The true face of the building, the architects understood, was not the entrance but the view.

The response was a system of vertical red concrete fins deployed across the building's facade in a composition that is at once a climatic device, a structural expression, and a carefully timed spectacle. These fins, smooth-surfaced and deeply saturated in terracotta red, perform three distinct roles. First, they intercept the low-angle morning and evening sun from the east and west, reducing direct glare and heat gain into the apartments without compromising the depth of the balconies behind them. Second, they are positioned and angled to function as vertical wind catchers, drawing the prevailing south wind inward and distributing it across the floor plates of the simplex and double units within. Third, and most deliberately, they are designed to catch the late-afternoon light as residents walk home from the golf course. As the western sun falls at its shallower evening angle, the smooth red surfaces of the fins catch and reflect it in a sequence that shifts as the viewer moves, creating a building that appears different with every step, its facade alive with changing light rather than static against the sky.

The ground floor resolves one of the more persistent problems of the Dhaka apartment building: the mezzanine that consumes the arrival experience. Here, the mezzanine level is displaced to one side of the plan, freeing a full 16-foot volume at ground level that opens through to both the eastern entry road and the western boulevard beyond. The result is a through-passage of space at street level, visually connecting both roads and giving the building a transparency at its base that its vertical density above makes all the more surprising. The arrival is generous, unobstructed, and genuinely urban.

Above the open ground, the 2,320 square metres of simplex and double apartments are threaded through by balconies at every level, each one planted and each one partially screened by the projecting fins, which give individual units their own visual privacy while maintaining the coherence of the overall facade composition. The ELDORADO Glorious Garden is a building designed to be lived in and looked at simultaneously, a rare combination in a city where most residential architecture chooses one or the other.