Kamrul Alam Apartment

Kamrul Alam Apartment
Simplex Apartment · Mirpur-1, Dhaka · 2008

Kamrul Alam Apartment was completed in 2008 on a 2.5-katha plot in Mirpur-1, one of 23/90 Architects' earliest built works, and one that already demonstrates the material preoccupations that would define the practice's subsequent work. The building is small by the standards of its neighbourhood, four floors on a compact site, but it carries the density of thinking of a much larger project.

The exterior is built almost entirely in exposed red brick, its warm surface aging well against the mature palms and dense greenery that surround the building. Projecting balconies at each level break the plane of the facade and cast deep shadows across the elevation, giving the building a three-dimensional relief that changes through the day as the sun moves across it. The brick is not used as infill or as cladding over a concealed frame. It is the building's primary tectonic expression, its coursing and bonding visible and deliberate throughout.

The interior photographs reveal a spatial intelligence that the exterior only hints at. Exposed brick continues inside as feature walls that bring the exterior material language into the living spaces, collapsing the boundary between inside and out. Horizontal louvre windows filter light into the rooms in fine-grained bands, their adjustable blades allowing the occupants to modulate ventilation and privacy without sacrificing the quality of natural light.

The most arresting interior move is a skylight positioned to throw a shaft of diagonal light directly onto an exposed brick wall, the geometry of the light beam shifting slowly across the surface through the day. It is a device of great economy, a single aperture that animates one of the building's most material surfaces and marks the passage of time within the domestic interior.