Architect, researcher and educator Marina Tabassum, originally from Bangladesh, applies architecture and design as tools for change, developing a practice strongly rooted in social involvement. Her work is deeply aware of the specific environmental, cultural and historical aspects of the place and context in which she intervenes.

Having been exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale, the year in which she held a conference in Lisbon, and winner of the 2016 Aga Khan Prize, her work is being displayed for the first time in Portugal as an exhibition. Marina Tabassum. Materials, Movements and Architecture in Bangladesh, curated by Vera Simone Bader & André Tavares, came from Munich’s Architekturmuseum Der Tum to Museu de Arte Contemporânea/Centro Cultural de Belém (MAC/CCB) and is now presented differently.

It shows the work developed by the architect since 1995, reflecting an inspiring and impressive approach in how she works alongside local communities, and with her students’ input, all to solve specific problems with a global impact. A profound attachment to architecture’s social and cultural role is made by building a collective sense of belonging on a project-by-project scale.

As the curator André Tavares puts it, “Marina’s work proves how architecture can be a way of thinking, of generating ideas, of finding solutions out of materials that move from the earth to construction, from people to other people, from shifting places and the movement of people and ideas”.

The exhibition opens with an installation depicting the waterways of Bangladesh’s landscape. More than 700 rivers meander through the country, continually changing their course, along with lakes, dams, canals and wetlands, all of which flow from the Himalayas. Marina Tabassum emphasizes the “aquatic landscape” that shapes “the massive delta” forming her country, a third of which is made up of mud, along with the impact of water and its ever-changing courses on the territory’s architecture.

Khudi Bari is a modular bamboo and steel structure that shapes a house conceived for the population living on the Meghna river’s sandbanks. As the location and layout of these same sandbanks varies along the riverbed, this construction is easily assembled and disassembled, and can therefore be moved when floods occur. Each shelter costs around €450 and includes an instruction booklet on how to build it. Several units have been installed already, significantly impacting the communities’ lives.

Its design was drawn up together with the population, like the Panigram Resort project, aimed at restoring “the wisdom of the land” through an entirely earthen construction undertaken by people from neighbouring villages and the setting up of craft and gardening workshops geared towards environmental, health and hygiene awareness. These initiatives encourage a relationship between the local community and the private resort, leading to the Wisdom of the Land installation conceived for the Venice Biennale.

Mariana Tabassum has also developed other projects of great social impact, most notably the Aggregation Centers set up in the border region of Cox’s Bazar, which sheltered more than a million Rohingyas from Myanmar in 2017. The project attempted to give women farmers the chance to sell their goods by offering them a market space and a workplace.

Or the new women-led community center at Camp 8E, Kutupalong, Ukhiya, one of the world’s largest refugee settlements, replacing the previous one destroyed by a fire in February 2020 during the pandemic. The Khudi Bari structural system was once again adopted to build both projects.

Using local materials is a must, in an effort to establish a symbiotic relationship between the built work and nature, and to restore the human-nature bond, “a relationship that marks the community life in rural areas that has been lost with city culture, reliant on air conditioning and artificial goods,” Marina Tabassum says.

Innovation is firmly combined with limited resources and budget constraints, as architecture serves as an active tool to tackle pressing current issues to bring about change and impact the world. Major transformations can be achieved through minor interventions. “How we architects can become tools for change” is precisely what Marina Tabassum hopes to impart to her students “by exposing them to the depressing needs of the world” and involving them in working with local communities to develop solutions to these shortcomings.

The exhibition’s social aspect includes texts in Bengali, Portuguese and English, with a view to bringing the local Bangladeshi community into the audience.

Apart from these, the display includes several projects located in and around Dhaka, such as the Bangladesh Independence Museum, a series of residential buildings, monasteries, including Bait Ur Rouf Jame, which gave the architect the 2016 Aga Kahn Prize, the Hamidur Rahman memorial, the place where Bangladesh’s first constitution was written, and even experiments with new materials, such as a marble floor designed for an office building. The majority of these buildings are made of brick, the material featured in the exhibition, and planned in such a way as to make the most of natural ventilation and light as space-qualifying factors, rather than artificial means.

This exhibition throws up pressing questions about architecture’s social role and the role of the architect as a transformation agent. Marina Tabassum. Materials, Movements and Architecture in Bangladesh can be seen at Museu de Arte Contemporânea/Centro Cultural de Belém (MAC/CCB) until September 22.