Landscape Luciole

Landscape Luciole
Simplex & Duplex Multi-Apartment · Agrabad CDA, Chittagong, Bangladesh · 2023

Agrabad CDA is Chittagong's most established commercial and residential address, its blocks carrying a density and maturity that Dhaka's newer planned neighbourhoods are still working toward. House 247 on Road 05 sits within this fabric, a 4.49-katha site that presented 23/90 Architects with a familiar constraint in an unfamiliar context: how to fit a programme of duplex apartments within a floor area ratio that does not generate enough area per floor to make a single-level duplex liveable. The solution is a sectional one, worked out in the vertical organisation of the building rather than within any individual floor.

The bottom three floors of the building contain double apartments, each one occupying a full floor plate that the FAR permits at that level. Above them, the next two floors hold single apartments, using the same floor area within a more compact plan. At the top, two duplex apartments are stacked across the building's uppermost two floors, their combined footprint drawn from the remaining FAR allowance. Because a duplex requires two floors to achieve the spatial quality that justifies the type, the architects resolved the geometry by making the top two floors slightly larger than the floors below, redistributing floor area upward through the section to give the duplex units the room they need. The building's silhouette reflects this clearly: the upper floors project outward from the main volume in a cantilevered gesture that gives the tower its distinctive profile, its top heavier than its base in deliberate and calculated counterpoint to the structural expectation.

From the street at ground level, the building presents a composed facade of board-marked concrete panels and warm timber-coloured metal louvred screens. The golden-toned diagonal chevron screen on the lower floors, clearly detailed in the ground-floor render, gives the arrival a richness of surface and shadow that Chittagong's typically overworked commercial facades rarely achieve. The entry canopy projects over the street-level plinth, its underside detailed in matching metal panels of the same warm tone, giving the base of the building a hospitality-grade quality of arrival. The Landscape Luciole signage and address plate are integrated directly into the facade rather than mounted above it. The choice of metal over timber throughout is deliberate: Chittagong's heavy rainfall and coastal humidity demand materials that can withstand sustained exposure without warping or deteriorating, and the metal screens maintain their colour and precision across seasons that would compromise natural timber.

Above the residential floors, the building opens into a series of landscape terraces that are the project's most spatially generous spaces. The upper terrace is a fully planted outdoor room of exceptional quality: a continuous lawn surface edged by tall concrete planters and timber-coloured metal slatted screens, a sitting area with rattan furniture beneath a concrete pergola, and views across the Agrabad skyline visible through a carefully positioned opening in the parapet wall. Below this, a second terrace level is planted with established trees grown within planter boxes, their canopies already providing shade and scale to the outdoor space beneath an open steel pergola frame. These terraces are not rooftop afterthoughts but designed landscapes, taking the building's name seriously: Landscape Luciole is a building that grows upward into green.