Salauddin Residence

Salauddin Residence
Private Triplex Residence · Nikunja, Dhaka, Bangladesh · 2017

Nikunja sits within the flight path of Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, and that proximity imposes a constraint on every building in the neighbourhood that cannot be negotiated away: a hard ceiling on how high a structure may rise. For a private residence on a 3-katha site requiring three floors of family living, this height restriction is not a minor inconvenience but a fundamental design problem. The available vertical distance must accommodate everything, and nothing can be wasted. The Salauddin Residence, an unbuilt concept by 23/90 Architects for Md. Salauddin Ahmed, is a study in how much spatial quality can be extracted from a strictly bounded section.

The response is a building that expands horizontally rather than vertically, its three levels organised with a compactness that is visible in the aerial view as a tight, precisely resolved plan within the 3-katha boundary. Each floor steps slightly back from the one below, producing a terraced profile that reads from the street as a series of receding planes rather than a single sheer facade. This stepping is not merely formal. It creates a generous open terrace at each level, so that despite the building's constrained height, every floor has access to an outdoor space of meaningful proportion, planted and shaded, extending the living area outward where it cannot extend upward.

The material palette is warm and deliberate. Light stone-toned concrete cladding forms the primary surface of the building's volumes, its restrained tone allowing the warmer elements to read clearly against it. Vertical golden timber screens are deployed at the upper terrace level and along the facade's second floor, their closely spaced fins filtering light and providing privacy without enclosing the view. At the entrance, a large ornamental jali screen of golden-toned metal introduces a decorative richness to the arrival face, its intricate pattern providing visual depth at the point where the building meets the street. A rooftop steel pergola crowns the composition, framing sky and providing shade to the uppermost terrace.

The section of 471 square metres across three floors resolves a brief that many designers would have approached with anxiety into a building of genuine spatial confidence. By accepting the airport's height restriction not as a defeat but as the precise set of terms within which the architecture would have to find its quality, the Salauddin Residence demonstrates that constraint, taken seriously, is often the most reliable source of architectural character.