Iramohol

Iramohol
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Basundhora R/A, Block-M, Dhaka · 2022

A north-facing plot in Dhaka's residential fabric presents a particular environmental problem that most apartment buildings simply accept as given: the prevailing south wind does not arrive at the primary facade. It arrives at the back. For a building of ten floors on a 10-katha site in Block-M of Basundhora R/A, where the owner's interest in herbal gardening and horticulture made the quality of outdoor space and natural ventilation a genuine priority rather than a regulatory checkbox, accepting this condition was not an option.

23/90 Architects responded with a plan of deliberate spatial intelligence. The building's footprint is compressed into an L-shaped configuration, pulling the built mass toward the north and west of the site and leaving a substantial open court at the north-east corner. This court is the project's spatial and environmental engine. At ground level it provides the gardening and children's play space that the client's herbal interests required, a genuinely usable outdoor zone that would be impossible on a fully built-out plot. Above ground, it performs an environmental function of equal importance: as the east wind arrives across Basundhora's blocks, it encounters this open court, is directed inward and collected within the L-shaped enclosure, and is then distributed through the building's apartments via a carefully managed system of positive and negative pressure differentials. The court collects the wind that the north-facing facade cannot receive, and the building's plan uses it.

The arc-shaped concrete walls that are the building's most visually arresting exterior feature are not decorative elements applied to a resolved building. They are the spatial instruments of this ventilation strategy. Curving inward along the building's eastern edge, their geometry is calibrated to deflect incoming east wind into the interior of the L-shaped plan, maximising the capture area of the court and guiding airflow into the apartments beyond. The curves are structural and environmental simultaneously, and the fact that they produce a building silhouette of considerable presence from the street is a consequence of their performance rather than a concession to it. Rising the full height of the building as continuous pale concrete planes, their swept profiles give the building a sculptural character that is rare in Basundhora's residential landscape, their surface texture catching oblique light with a richness that changes throughout the day.

Between and behind the arc walls, staggered balconies at every floor carry the owner's herbal planting, their vegetation cascading downward in a continuous green curtain that connects the building's outdoor spaces from ground court to rooftop. The building is, in every sense of the word, a garden building: one that has organised its plan, shaped its walls, and distributed its mass around the requirements of plants, wind, and the particular kind of domestic life that belongs to someone for whom growing things is not a hobby but a way of inhabiting the world.