Mashrafee Residence

Mashrafee Residence
Apartment cum Duplex Residence · Mirpur 11, Dhaka, Bangladesh · 2018

Mirpur 11 is one of Dhaka's most densely woven residential neighbourhoods, where streets narrow to twenty feet and buildings press against each other with barely a breath between them. Light is scarce, ventilation is a constant negotiation, and the ground level, swallowed by parking and boundary walls, rarely belongs to anyone. It was into this condition that 23/90 Architects was asked to design a residence for Mashrafe bin Mortaza, one of Bangladesh's most celebrated cricketers and a public figure whose daily life demands both openness and retreat. The resulting G+6 building on a 4.25-katha site is a careful study in how architecture can manufacture the conditions that the city withholds.

The most decisive move is the liberation of the ground. Parking is resolved entirely below grade through a car lift, freeing the ground plane to become a place of genuine inhabitation. Here, the architects introduce a body of water beneath a soaring vertical courtyard that rises through the full height of the building. As the south wind arrives at the street edge, it first passes through a dense layer of ground-level vegetation, filtering road dust and establishing a natural green buffer between the city and the interior. The cooled, cleaned air then travels over the water surface, dropping further in temperature before ascending through a double-height entry volume and up through the central courtyard, distributing fresh air to every level of the building. The system needs no machinery. It needs only the attentiveness of its designers.

The vertical courtyard is the building's social and visual spine. Framed in concrete and planted with trees that grow upward toward the sky, it connects every level of the programme to a shared centre, allowing residents above to look down into green space and borrowed sky even as the city outside presses in. On the ground floor, a flexible public space accommodates Mashrafe's political meetings and community gatherings, alongside a smaller rentable apartment. The middle floors hold two further rentable apartments. At the summit, a triplex residence unfolds across multiple terraced levels, crowned by a rooftop swimming pool that overlooks the Mirpur skyline.

The building negotiates, floor by floor, the tension between public life and private withdrawal that defines the existence of anyone who is both a citizen and an icon. The facade, layered with warm timber screens, deep balconies, and cascading greenery, gives nothing away from the street. But inside, the vertical courtyard opens everything up, binding the multiple lives the building contains into a single shared environment of light, air, and green.