Landscape KAKON

Landscape KAKON
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Jolshiri Abashon, Sector 12, Dhaka · 2024

Sector 12 of Jolshiri Abashon is one of the estate's more established blocks, its plots already surrounded by mature trees that line the roads and overhang the building setbacks with a canopy density that newer sectors have not yet achieved. Plot 001 on Road 409D sits within this green corridor, and the Landscape KAKON apartment building, designed by 23/90 Architects for Landscape Builders Ltd., takes its cue directly from this condition. The building does not compete with the trees in front of it. It settles into them, its facade reading through the foliage as a dark, textured vertical composition that becomes more fully visible only as one approaches the entrance.

The facade is composed in charcoal-toned brick, a material choice that distinguishes the building immediately from the pale concrete and light cladding that dominates Jolshiri's residential streetscape. The dark brick surface reads as dense and grounded, its texture catching light differently across the day and giving the building a visual weight that does not rely on scale to assert its presence. Against this dark field, the balconies at every floor project outward in a staggered alternating rhythm, their warm timber-toned soffits providing a material counterpoint that prevents the facade from reading as monolithic or severe. The balconies are planted, their trailing vegetation softening the brick edges and connecting the building's surface to the greenery of the street below.

The building's massing is divided into two vertical elements that read as separate but connected, their shared base and rooftop canopy binding them into a single composition while the gap between them introduces light and air into the floor plates. This division is visible clearly in the approach view: two vertical brick masses, slightly separated, rising together toward a projecting flat canopy that caps both elements simultaneously and gives the building a composed, horizontal crown. At the rooftop level, the canopy extends beyond the building's edge, creating a shaded terrace zone visible against the sky from the street.

The ground floor resolves the arrival with restraint. A covered lobby of timber-slatted ceiling and open concrete columns offers a shaded threshold between the street and the residential floors above, its proportions generous enough to function as a semi-public space without consuming the building's full ground-level footprint. At 2,325 square metres across a 5-katha site, Landscape KAKON is a building that earns its place in Sector 12 not through loudness but through the precision of its material choices and the confidence of its compositional restraint.