Sarinda Resort

Sarinda Resort
Mixed-Use Resort · Mymensingh, Bangladesh · 2019

Every site carries a history, and the wisest architecture begins by listening to it. The Sarinda Resort project in Mymensingh inherited a working site where an existing silo structure already stood, its cylindrical mass embedded in 4.3 acres of open green land scattered with several small ponds. Rather than clearing the slate, 23/90 Architects chose to absorb what was already there. The silo became the anchor around which a new programme was organised, extended and layered rather than replaced, and the fragmented ponds were consolidated into a single generous waterbody capable of supporting boating. At the centre of that water, a small island was formed. The masterplan did not impose a new geography onto the land. It revealed one that was latent.

The architectural proposal for the main building is the project's most arresting gesture. A dramatic parasol roof of bamboo and timber, its triangulated structural members fanning outward in a geometry that is simultaneously structural and ceremonial, floats over the building mass with the confidence of a form that knows exactly what it is doing. The roof draws from the material traditions of the Bengal delta while scaling them to the demands of a contemporary hospitality programme: it shades, it shelters, it announces arrival, and it ties the building to its landscape with an ease that no concrete canopy could achieve.

Within the building, the programme stacks pragmatically around a three-storey atrium that functions as the spatial heart of the complex. Convention hall, seminar rooms, restaurants, and swimming facilities occupy the lower two floors. Hotel rooms rise above, orienting toward the waterbody and the island. The atrium binds these separate programmes into a single coherent interior world, drawing light downward from above and offering visual connection between guests moving through different levels of the building.

The masterplan as a whole was organised around a single discipline: keep the ground open. By concentrating built programme within the extended existing footprint, the design preserves the majority of the 4.3-acre site as unbuilt landscape, allowing the waterbody, the island, the lawns, and the mature vegetation to remain the primary experience of the resort, with architecture as backdrop rather than centrepiece.