Insheerah Mahmuda Villa

Insheerah Mahmuda Villa
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Shantinogor, Dhaka · 2019

Situated within the densely built residential quarter of Shantinogor, Dhaka, this seven-storied apartment building negotiates the familiar constraints of a 4.15 katha urban plot through a discipline of material honesty and spatial restraint. The project, commissioned by Insheerah Housing Ltd., proceeds from a single operative question: how does a building on a tight site assert an architectural presence without resorting to decorative excess?

The primary facade is organised around a vertical armature of board-formed exposed concrete, whose tectonic weight anchors the composition and sets the register for every subsequent decision. Projecting slabs and recessed floor lines articulate the elevation into horizontal bands, while the raw texture of the concrete surface absorbs and reflects light in ways that shift the building's character across the course of a day.

A distinctive move in the design is the treatment of the service volumes — the toilet cores positioned along the front facade. Rather than concealing these programmatically secondary elements behind a continuous skin, they are resolved as sculptural concrete masses that protrude from the building face, giving the elevation a three-dimensional relief and transforming a functional necessity into a compositional instrument. The result is a facade that reads as genuinely structural rather than applied.

At ground level, the entry sequence is framed by a water feature set against a textured stone wall, flanked by dense vertical greenery. This threshold space mediates between the public street and the private floors above, establishing a moment of pause and orientation before the building is entered.

Designed in 2019 and currently under construction, the project has a total construction area of 1,403 sqm. Design team: Minhal Ahmed and Khandoker Tariqul Islam.