Monowara Apparels

Monowara Apparels
RMG Factory · Jhutpotti, Mirpur-10, Dhaka · 2013

The client's instruction for Monowara Apparels was simple and unusual: the building should not look like a factory. For a programme as functionally determined as a readymade garment production facility, this is not a cosmetic request but a genuinely architectural one. It asks the architect to reconsider what form industrial production can take when it is given the freedom to shed its typological conventions.

The response abandons the horizontal mass and repetitive fenestration that define most RMG buildings on the streets of Dhaka. In their place, the facade is composed as an angular, sculptural volume of white concrete planes that fold and intersect at oblique angles, their geometry more closely related to a civic institution or a cultural building than to the industrial sheds of Mirpur. The concrete surfaces are large and uninterrupted, their blankness broken only by the diagonal steel fin screens that run across the glazed sections of the facade, their gold tone catching the light and reading from the street as a surface of genuine material ambition.

The glazing itself is faceted rather than flat, its angled panes following the geometry of the concrete folds and introducing a prismatic quality to the building's middle section. At certain hours, the reflections on these surfaces dissolve the mass of the building into light and sky, the factory appearing less solid and more atmospheric than its programme would suggest.

At the base, a warm brick plinth grounds the composition and connects it to the street level, its horizontal coursing providing a tectonic counterweight to the angular restlessness of the concrete and glass above.