Rupsha Multi-Purpose Complex (Rmpc)

Rupsha Multi-Purpose Complex (RMPC)
Multi-Purpose Complex · Khulna, Bangladesh · 2017

The Rupsha Multi-Purpose Complex is a masterplan proposal for Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Corporation on a 2.3-acre site in Khulna, a port city whose civic identity is inseparable from its relationship with water and movement. The brief asked for a building that could hold together a corporate headquarters, a public market, rentable commercial and office floors, and a hotel, all within a single vertical structure, while accommodating a separate residential complex on the rear portion of the site. The challenge was not technical consolidation but architectural coherence: how does a building that serves so many different publics read as a single, legible institution?

The primary tower resolves this through a sectional strategy of differentiation. The lower floors are given over to the most publicly accessible uses, the market and commercial spaces opening onto the street through a landscaped forecourt with water features and stepped public terracing. Above, the office and hotel floors are expressed as a distinct glazed volume, its curtain wall facade marked by deep vertical fins that run the full height of the upper block, giving the building a monumental verticality appropriate to its institutional status. Two projecting concrete canopies crown the tower's twin volumes, their horizontal reach extending well beyond the building face and anchoring the composition against the Khulna skyline.

The interior courtyard, glimpsed between the main tower and the residential block behind, is organised as a landscaped passage, its timber-clad walls and planted corridors offering a moment of spatial respite between the public intensity of the street frontage and the quieter residential life at the rear. This threshold condition, where institution and dwelling negotiate their proximity, is where the masterplan's most considered spatial thinking is concentrated.

The rooftop of the main tower accommodates a helipad alongside recreational terracing and a rooftop pool, marking the building's upper reach with a programme that acknowledges Khulna's role as a hub of regional connectivity.

The project, designed in 2017, remains an unbuilt concept with a total construction area of 25,467 sqm.