Monowara Group Corporate Office

Monowara Group Corporate Office
Corporate Office · Mirpur-10, Dhaka · 2014

The Monowara Group Corporate Office is a proposal for a 7-storey office building on a 1.4-katha site in Mirpur-10, one of the smallest footprints 23/90 Architects has worked within, and a constraint that the design converts into a formal ambition. Where the site offers almost no horizontal room to manoeuvre, the building reaches upward and expresses itself entirely through the vertical surface it presents to the street.

The facade is a composition of angled timber fin panels that wrap each floor at a different orientation, their rotation shifting from storey to storey so that the building never reads the same from any two angles. Seen from straight ahead, the fins create a dense, overlapping screen of warm timber that almost entirely conceals the glazed office floors behind them. Seen from the side, the angled planes open up and the glazing becomes visible, the building's transparency revealed only in oblique view. The result is a facade that is simultaneously opaque and permeable, its character changing as the viewer moves past it.

The close detail of the fins reveals a further level of precision. Closely spaced vertical timber slats within each angled panel filter light through their gaps, casting fine diagonal shadow patterns across the glazing behind and preventing direct solar penetration without eliminating natural light. The shading and the material expression are resolved in a single element.

At the rooftop, the angled planes continue past the parapet, their projecting forms reading from a distance as a crown of overlapping fins against the sky, giving the slender tower an unmistakable silhouette in the Mirpur streetscape.

The project remains an unbuilt concept with a construction area of 586 sqm.