Mamun Residence

Mamun Residence
Private Triplex Residence · Mymensingh, Bangladesh · 2017

There is a particular kind of luxury that does not announce itself through ornament or excess but through restraint: a handful of rooms, each one immense, each one designed as if it were the only room in the building. The Mamun Residence in Mymensingh operates within exactly this register. On a 45-katha site, 23/90 Architects chose not to fill the land but to reach across it, distributing a small number of generously proportioned spaces outward from a central core in a star-shaped plan whose arms extend like the fingers of an open hand. The strategy is one of deliberate sparseness. The site is vast; the programme is light. The architecture exists to frame the landscape, not to consume it.

The star plan is the project's central formal and spatial idea. Rather than consolidating the 2,573-square-metre programme into a single massed volume, the building unfolds in multiple directions, each wing oriented to a different aspect of the site and each one terminating in its own relationship with the surrounding lawn and mature vegetation. The result is a building that has no single dominant facade but reveals itself differently from each approach, its horizontal concrete volumes and warm brick bands stepping and sliding past each other as the viewer moves around the perimeter. The interplay of board-marked concrete and exposed brick gives the composition a material richness that reads as both contemporary and grounded in the traditions of the region.

On the ground floor, a library occupies one of the plan's wings, its position at the base of the building giving it a direct relationship with the landscape outside and a quality of light that a room higher up could not achieve. This is architecture that understands that a library is not simply a place to store books but a particular kind of space, one that rewards quietness, natural light from a controlled direction, and a sense of being simultaneously enclosed and connected to the world beyond the glass. The other ground-floor spaces flow outward toward the swimming pool and its surrounding terraces, shaded beneath the cantilevered slab above and edged with timber decking that brings warmth to the base of an otherwise abstract concrete composition.

Above the pool and terrace level, the building steps back floor by floor, each level receding to open up terraces that look across the lawns and tree canopy of the estate. The Mamun Residence belongs to a tradition of luxury private architecture that regards space itself, particularly the space between things, as the primary material of design. It is a house that earns its scale not by filling it but by knowing, very precisely, how little is needed.