Mehedi Hasan Duplex Apartment

Mehedi Hasan Duplex Apartment
Duplex & Simplex Apartment · Jamtola, Narayanganj, Bangladesh · 2020

Not every site arrives as a gift. The plot at Jamtola, Narayanganj is narrow, elongated, and triangular, pressed against a busy highway on its southern edge and constrained on either side by existing buildings that leave almost no room to breathe. Viewed in elevation, the resulting building volume tapers toward one end like a wedge, its profile reading less like a conventional urban block and more like a slice cut from something larger, thin at the top and thickening toward the base. It is an unpromising condition that 23/90 Architects chose to treat not as a problem to be overcome but as the formal premise of the project.

The highway to the south is the building's most immediate environmental adversary. Road dust, traffic noise, and direct southern sun arrive continuously from that direction, making a conventional open facade toward the street both uncomfortable and impractical. The architects' response is a deep perforated brick screen that covers the southern elevation in its entirety, its pattern of open and closed brick creating a breathing surface that simultaneously filters the air coming in, attenuates the acoustic impact of the highway traffic, and controls the quality of light entering the apartments behind it. The screen is not a secondary layer applied to a completed building but its primary architectural statement. Warm terracotta in colour and richly textured in depth, it transforms what could have been a defensive wall into a facade of genuine character, its perforations allowing glimpses of green and glass within while presenting a confident, material face to the street.

The east and west elevations are kept largely solid, practical decisions that consolidate the building's thermal performance and provide the privacy that the narrow site and close neighbours demand. Against this solidity, the southern screen reads as the building's single expressive gesture, all the more powerful for the contrast. At the roofline, the parapet takes an unexpected turn, its top edge cut into a series of rounded and angular notches that break the building's silhouette against the sky, introducing a playfulness that the disciplined perforated surface below earns rather than simply claims.

At ground level, a series of arched openings lift the building's base off the street, creating a visual lightness beneath the heavy brick mass above and allowing parking and service functions to be resolved without closing the ground plane entirely. The 1,236 square metres of duplex and rentable simplex apartments above are stacked within the tapered volume, each floor working within the constraints of the triangular plan to produce liveable, correctly oriented spaces. The Mehedi Hasan Duplex Apartment is a building that takes the least promising of site conditions and finds in it, through material intelligence and formal discipline, a genuinely distinctive piece of urban architecture.