Exotica Haque

Exotica Haque
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Jolshiri Abashon, Sector 16, Dhaka · 2024

Architecture is almost always designed to be read slowly, at the pace of a person on foot, moving close enough to register surface, texture, and detail. At Plot 002 on Road 507 of Jolshiri Abashon's Sector 16, 23/90 Architects were faced with a building that would primarily be experienced at thirty kilometres per hour. The plot sits at the junction of Jolshiri's 120-foot primary arterial road to the east and two 60-foot roads to the south and west, a corner condition that places the building's southern facade in the direct sightline of every vehicle entering and leaving the estate at speed. For that moving audience, detail does not exist. What exists is silhouette, proportion, and the single impression a facade makes in the two or three seconds it takes to pass.

The architectural response is a building that does not try to be perceived in parts. The south elevation is conceived as a single compositional field, a large concrete frame of precise proportion that encompasses the full height and width of the facade within a projecting border, enclosing the building's surface the way a painting is enclosed within its frame. Inside this frame, vertical fins establish a controlled rhythm, but they are subordinate to the frame itself. From the moving road, what the eye catches is not the fins or the balconies or the glass. It is the frame, and within it, the building, reading as a unified object, a complete picture presented to the city in a single glance.

This is, in essence, architecture designed around duration of perception. The slower pedestrian on the south road reads the building in layers: the frame, the fins, the balconies, the planted edges. The driver on the 120-foot road reads only the frame, and that is enough, because the frame is the building, and the building is the frame.

The corner, where all three roads converge, demanded a different strategy. The setback regulations for a plot bounded by roads on three sides require substantial curved clearances at the junction, leaving a corner condition that conventional rectangular balconies cannot occupy without waste. The architects resolved this with a continuous sweep of curved balconies, their rounded profile following the arc of the setback and converting what would otherwise be lost area into a cylindrical stack of outdoor rooms that rises the full height of the building. Where the south facade is planar and frontal, the corner is round and sensuous, its dark-toned curved profiles and warm timber soffits introducing a material warmth and sculptural quality that reveals itself only to those who turn the corner on foot.

At 2,320 square metres across a 5-katha site, Exotica Haque proposes a clear distinction between architecture seen and architecture experienced, understanding that a building at a major road junction must perform at two scales simultaneously, and designing for both without confusing either.