Sohel Residence

Sohel Residence
Private Residence cum Apartment · Pabna, Bangladesh · 2014

Pabna sits in the heart of the Bengal plains, where summer arrives without the coastal relief of a sea breeze and the air in the hottest months becomes heavy and still. It is a climate that demands architectural thinking of a particular kind, not the reactive kind that reaches for mechanical solutions, but the deliberate kind that embeds comfort into the structure of the building itself. The Sohel Residence, designed for Md. Shohel Rahman, begins from this climatic reality and builds outward from it, producing a house whose most distinctive spatial gesture is simultaneously its most environmental one.

The building is constructed in cavity wall brick throughout, its double-leaf masonry creating a thermal buffer that slows the transfer of heat from the sun-baked exterior surface to the cooled interior air. In a town without the reliable shade of an established urban canopy, this is not a refinement but a necessity, and the architects have treated it as such: the walls are thick, their texture deeply varied, and the exposed brick carries the particular warmth of a material that has been used in Bengal for centuries, here deployed with a precision that connects tradition to performance.

At the building's centre, a continuous staircase rises through all three levels, but its spatial role extends far beyond circulation. The stair occupies a vertical void that functions as a thermal chimney. Cool air is drawn inward from the shaded perimeter of the building at lower levels, travels upward through the void, and exits at the top as it warms and rises. The sketch diagrams included in the project documentation make this explicit: arrows of cool blue move inward and upward; red arrows of hot expelled air exit at the crown. A glass element at the top of the chimney intensifies the stack effect by warming the air at the summit, accelerating the upward draw. The result is a passive ventilation system that operates continuously even on the stillest Pabna afternoons, when no cross-breeze can be relied upon.

The programme is organised across three distinct living zones, each one conceived as a separate domestic world. On the ground floor, two commercial units are embedded within the building's base, their entries deliberately concealed from the street so that from outside the building reads as a unified residential composition. The units are not incidental: the owner lives in Dhaka, and his elderly parents remain in Pabna. The commercial tenants provide both income and a continuous human presence that ensures the parents are never alone in the building. The entries to these units are positioned so that residents can move between the ground floor activity and the privacy of the upper levels without the two worlds intersecting. On the first floor, an open-to-sky terrace is cut into the mass, its railing designed so that the geometry itself creates privacy and safety, the screening built into the form rather than added on top of it. The family living at this level is the social heart of the house, the floor where the full household gathers.

Above, a chilekothi occupies the topmost level, a room apart from the rest of the house, designed for the owner's use when he returns from Dhaka. The staircase connects these three worlds, public at the base, familial in the middle, private at the summit, but it does not dissolve their separateness. Each zone retains its own identity, its own threshold, its own sense of enclosure.

From the exterior, the building reads as a composition of heavy brick masses with deeply recessed openings. On the east and west elevations, layered verandas provide shading across the most exposed faces. On the south, window seats are pulled outward from the main wall plane, creating intimate recessed positions where a person can sit within the thickness of the building and look out across the surrounding landscape, framed by the brick on either side. In the construction photographs, the building's character is already fully legible before a single finishing coat has been applied: the brick does everything, and the spaces between the masses, the courtyards, the voids, the terraces, are as purposeful as the walls themselves.