Maruf-gong Apartment

Maruf-Gong Apartment
Simplex Multi-Apartment · Basundhara R/A, Block-N, Dhaka · 2024

When a group of colleagues decides to build together, the brief that emerges is rarely just about square footage and floor counts. It carries within it an implicit social contract, a shared understanding of how a group of people who already know each other want to live alongside each other, how they will share the entrance, the ground, and the sky above. The Maruf-Gong Apartment at Block-N, Basundhara R/A was commissioned by exactly such a group: colleagues and young families building a G+6 building on a 4-katha site, people who came to the project not as anonymous investors but as neighbours who would watch each other's children grow up.

That context shaped the most significant planning decision in the project. On a 4-katha site producing 1,120 square metres of built area, the default resolution for car parking in Dhaka is to place it on the ground floor, consuming the entire ground-level area and leaving nothing for the residents who live above. At Maruf-Gong, 23/90 Architects reorganised the section to resist this default. By carefully integrating the car ramp, parking arrangement, and boundary wall into a coordinated ground-level plan, the architects freed a pocket of open space at the front of the site that is genuinely usable as a children's play area. On a plot of this size, in a neighbourhood this dense, that space does not come easily. It is the result of precise spatial accounting, every centimetre of ramp geometry and wall alignment contributing to the outcome.

The building's facade composition is built around a bold concrete frame that projects well beyond the main building volume, its tall vertical columns rising through the full height of the tower and connecting at the top in a rectangular portal that gives the building a distinctive silhouette against Basundhara's skyline. This frame does not enclose the building so much as announce it, creating a visual datum that the balconies, planters, and hanging vegetation inhabit. The balconies themselves are generously proportioned, each one finished in warm-toned timber-coloured decking and edged with planted troughs from which trailing greenery cascades down the facade, floor by floor. The east-facing side of the building, visible in the aerial view, features a different treatment: staggered concrete fins at the window edges create a textured, light-modulating surface that manages solar exposure on that elevation while maintaining the material consistency of the overall composition.

The rooftop is finished in terracotta tile, its warm colour visible in the aerial image and connecting the summit of the building to the warmer tones of the facade vegetation and balcony decking below. The result is a building that, despite its compact 4-katha site and modest scale, holds its presence in the block with confidence, and at ground level delivers something that the owners asked for and the neighbourhood rarely provides: space for a child to simply run.