FDL: Majestic Iris

FDL: Majestic Iris
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Jolshiri Abashon, Sector 16, Dhaka · 2023

Most apartment buildings in Jolshiri Abashon treat their site as a container to be filled. FDL: Majestic Iris, designed by 23/90 Architects for Fortress Developments Ltd. on Plot 015 of Sector 16, begins from the opposite instinct: it reads its site as a set of views to be captured and a set of outdoor conditions to be drawn inward. The plot sits at a fortunate convergence. To the east lies a linear park, a continuous strip of green that runs along the sector road. To the south, a wide cul-de-sac opens up the street edge, giving the building more open sky, more setback depth, and more visual distance than a standard road frontage would allow. Together, these two conditions create a panoramic outdoor environment that the building is designed, explicitly, to inhabit.

The architectural response to this opportunity is the building's curved balconies, which wrap each floor in a continuous sweep of glass and planted edge. The curve is not gestural but purposeful: it is drawn to a radius that allows residents standing anywhere within the balcony to take in approximately 270 degrees of view, capturing both the eastern park and the southern cul-de-sac in a single unbroken sweep of glass. On a straight balcony, the same resident would have to walk to one end to see the park and the other to see the street. Here, the landscape enters from two directions simultaneously, framed by the curve of the balcony edge and the cascading vegetation that trails downward from each planted trough. The curved glass, rather than the wall behind it, becomes the primary surface of each apartment's relationship to the outside world.

The facade treatment reflects this emphasis on the horizontal. Deeply raked concrete bands run across the building's full width at every floor, their geometry angled to create shadow and depth on the surface, and to visually reinforce the sweeping horizontal movement of the curved balconies below them. The cladding is warm in tone, a sandy travertine-like surface that reads against the sky with a lightness that the building's height and mass would not otherwise suggest. On the south, where the cul-de-sac opens the site to its fullest extent, a wide family terrace extends at one of the upper levels, its generous proportions made possible by the open spatial conditions below and its planting giving the building's south face a lushness visible from the street.

At the rooftop, a large projecting canopy floats above the tower on slender columns, its slatted underside casting dappled light onto the terrace below and giving the building a strong, horizontal crown that completes the composition. At 2,322 square metres across a 5-katha site, FDL: Majestic Iris is a building that earned its ambition from its context, finding in a park edge and a cul-de-sac not merely a pleasant address but the precise source of its architectural idea.