You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  The days got hotter and hotter from February to May, eventually requiring a two-hour rest period in the middle of the day. The workday should have started at nine and ended about seven, but Langford’s entire crew always worked until at least nine or ten, and often they stayed until midnight. “A pour which here would take twenty-five minutes would take two or three hours there, because you’re only using a dishpanful at a time,” Fred observed. He decided to speed up the process and also make the laborers’ work easier by doubling the size of the concrete pans and putting handles on either side, so that they could be carried by two workers instead of one. Yet even when the pan sizes were doubled, the laborers still continued to carry them individually on their heads. When Fred protested, they would say, “Oh, it’s not so heavy.”

  To help him create the metal accessories required for the pouring process—all the loops and bolts and brackets and clamps and plates that were needed to put the wooden forms together and take them apart—Langford employed a group of students from a nearby vocational school. These young men, he noticed, would often address him by a name he didn’t understand. “What does it mean?” Fred asked his driver one day, and the man answered, “Favorite uncle.” That May, shortly before Langford left Dacca for good, a photograph was taken of the entire group, including two supervisors, about forty students, and the Favorite Uncle, all standing together in a semicircle, their construction tools laid out neatly in the space in front of them. Although the tall, thin American, hands clasped behind his back, was captured at a distance and was wearing sunglasses, it was still possible to read from both his facial expression and his body language how proud he was of what they had accomplished together.

  Fred Langford must have been pleased with the photo, too, because he included it in a 98-page “Report on Concrete and Formwork” that he submitted to the Pakistan Public Works Department in June of 1966. Like most reports of its kind, this one was filled with abstruse technical information and repetitive details, but it ended on an uncharacteristically personal note. “I would also like to thank the men in the field who participated in the formwork and casting operations. Their wonderful spirit and willingness to cooperate in spite of the limited facilities and trying conditions,” Fred wrote, “was an inspiring lesson in life that I will always treasure.” And he did. All through his long career of working in concrete, the memory of that Dacca period remained etched in his mind, though he never returned there in the subsequent half-century, and hence never saw the Parliament Building in its finished state.

  IN SITU: NATIONAL ASSEMBLY BUILDING OF BANGLADESH

  Interior of National Assembly Building

  (Photograph by Raymond Meier, courtesy of the photographer)

  Just seeing it in photographs fairly takes one’s breath away. In Raymond Meier’s color pictures and, especially, in Nathaniel Kahn’s film My Architect, the National Assembly Building comes across as Louis Kahn’s most supremely beautiful accomplishment. Particularly in the shots taken at dawn or twilight, the structure glimmers across its surrounding pool of water like a fairy-tale castle or a visionary dream brought to life.

  The building is indeed remarkable, and it may well be Kahn’s masterpiece, but the experience of encountering it in person is much more complicated than those lovely images would suggest. At first glance, when seen at some distance, it is downright strange—so strange that its oddity rather than its beauty is the dominant impression. Hulking alone against the skyline, looming above an otherwise flat plain, this weirdly striped cluster of variously shaped walls, some curving, some flat, some punctured by giant cutouts, defines itself first of all as unique. It is not just the only building of its kind in Dhaka or Bangladesh. It is the only one in the world.

  This is not to say that there are not discernible influences, as there always are when something is this powerful. No one can build such a masterpiece alone: a good architect needs to stand on the shoulders of others. In this case, you can see traces of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh (another government complex set on an artificial lake) as well as older and more anonymously designed structures like Sarkej Roza in India or Castel del Monte in Italy. The former is a geometrically patterned Islamic structure lapped at its edges by water, its sunlit squares alternating with deep shade; the latter is an octagonal castle with full-height corner towers, carved out of pale limestone and visible for miles around. One cannot swear that Kahn was thinking of any of these buildings when he designed the Dhaka Parliament, just as one cannot be sure how clearly he remembered the medieval castle surrounded by a moat that he saw on his childhood island of Ösel. But some or all of these buildings were almost certain to have gone into the making of his Dhaka Assembly. (This is, after all, the man who simultaneously denied and admitted being influenced by any architectural antecedents, dryly noting, for instance, “I have a book of castles and I try to pretend that I did not look at this book but everybody reminds me of it and I have to admit that I looked very thoroughly at this book.”) Even so, none of these possible predecessors is quite as startling, in its context, as the National Assembly of Bangladesh. Part of what Kahn’s building seems to declare, in fact, is the very impossibility of its presence in that place—as if the surprise of its having been constructed at all were to be preserved in perpetuity.

  As you approach, this initial strangeness does not wear off. Depending on the angle of your approach, the building takes on different shapes, with one side emphasizing its cylindrical towers, another its obliquely angled walls. There is no way to grasp the pattern of the whole from down on the ground. All you can be sure of, as you get closer and closer, is that something important takes place here. The high walls have an imposing quality that is strengthened rather than softened by the alternating textures of concrete and marble, the wood-patterned gray marked off vertically and horizontally by the smoother white. It is as if a giant had been playing with these blocks and had shaped them into this whimsical pattern in order to tempt you closer. The temptation works. You are ready to risk all to get inside.

  There is a grand entrance at the front, but these days it is used only for ceremonial occasions. These days, too, the plazas and steps and lawns surrounding the structure are empty and desolate at all hours. Heightened security has banished the general population from this place that was meant for them, this public spot where they once exercised or strolled or simply stood and admired the massive hall built in their name. “They’ve destroyed it. I do not visit—only in photographs,” says the architect Shamsul Wares, who cannot bear to see the effects of the twenty-first century’s security measures on a place he so much loved.

  Once the guards have checked your pass and your identification, and confiscated your cell phone and your shoulder bag, and ushered you through the metal detector at the end of the entrance tunnel, you will find yourself on the building’s lowest level. Practically the first thing that greets you, on the facing wall, is a sort of shrine to Louis Kahn, with two photographs of him, one young, one old, along with a display of architectural plans and a scale model of the building. The setup suggests a degree of reverence that Kahn rarely if ever met with elsewhere, and this sense of a personal debt to the architect is reinforced by the fact that many ordinary Bangladeshis actually know his name. The building itself is pictured on a standard piece of currency, the thousand-thaka note—another honor Kahn never received from any other country, including his own. When pressed, citizens ranging from taxi drivers to prominent politicians will say that they are grateful to him because “he brought us democracy,” as if the building and its function were one and the same.

  Looking at the plans and the model that are located beneath Kahn’s photos, you can see that the building is structured in the shape of a diamond, one of whose four points lies at the entrance you have just come through. The octagonal assembly hall is at the center of the diamond, the mosque is somewhere directly over your head, and a series of offices and chambers line the four outer walls, set off from the interior functions by an ambula
tory that runs around the entire building. It all looks simple and understandable in the plan. In actuality, it is just the opposite. The building is so changeable, so complicated, and so different at every level that you will repeatedly find yourself lost. “This is the process of learning truth: through disorientation,” notes Wares.

  It is an appropriate methodology for a building that houses the apparatus of democracy, and it applies even to those at the pinnacle of the political structure. “Yes, yes, I’m like Alice in Wonderland,” says the Speaker of the Assembly, Dr. Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, when you ask her if she has ever gotten lost in this vast space. “You can’t go everywhere by lift,” she points out. “You need to know the access. Otherwise you will lose your way.”

  In fact, it is only with the assistance of a clever guide that you’ve managed to wend your way up the ramps and stairs and balconies to Dr. Chaudhury’s elegant double-height office, located near the top of the nine-story building. Barely even aware that there were lifts, you would have hesitated to use an elevator even if you could find one. At least from the ambulatory you have a continuing sense of the space above you and the space below you: you know where you are vertically, even if you have no idea about anything else.

  Still, the sense of disorientation that you experience in the Dhaka Parliament is countered by something much rarer, and that is a feeling of profound wonder. No photo or even film image of the interior can begin to convey what it feels like to occupy these spaces. Visual enticement enters into it—the shimmer of light on the marble-banded walls, the brief glimpses of the exterior landscape through the slits of windows, the Piranesian views from the higher balconies, the pale diagonal ramps slicing across grand circular cutouts, and the other pleasing geometrical patterns formed by the structures and materials. All this is spellbindingly beautiful. But that is the least of it. There is something dreamlike about your passage through the building (and occasionally something nightmarish, in those terrifyingly vertiginous views from the upper balconies—but even the fear is an aspect of the wonder). As you go higher and higher, observing the minute, delightful idiosyncrasies that Kahn wrought at every level of the complex design, you cannot help but feel that the building itself is changing you. The person who emerges from it will not be quite the same as the person who went in.

  From inside this building, it is possible to gain an understanding of Kahn’s genius that none of his other marvelous structures is quite prepared to give you. For here is where he most clearly demonstrates what is implicit everywhere else: that the inside and the outside do not match up. Being outside a Kahn building (or any building, for that matter) is primarily a visual experience, something that can tend toward static appreciation. But what a Kahn building offers you on the inside is a drama, a journey, a narrative with a plot. The drama may be set off by visual elements, but even that is more complicated than it seems. Light and shadow, for example, are not purely visible. They are also tangible, or “sensorial,” as Shamsul Wares puts it. You can feel the sun on your body, or the gratifying coolness as you move into the shade; even without actually feeling these things, you can imagine them as sense impressions rather than just visual stimuli.

  Which is not to discount the tremendous visual effects created by Kahn’s Assembly Building. For instance, there is one “room,” for lack of a better term, that exists entirely for the purpose of letting you stand in the light and look up to the very top of the building. It is an oddly shaped little space, enclosed within a semicircular wall that meets a flat one, like a crescent moon laid on its side. You have reached it after climbing two flights of zigzagging marble steps from the lowest level of the building, and up to now the concrete ceiling of the staircase has hovered closely above you. Now, however, you are released into this smile of a space, looking up at the ceiling many stories overhead, with light pouring down on you through slim glass openings in the roofline and also through a huge, round, glass-paned window. You have emerged from shadow into light, and when you leave this room you will go back into shadow, but now you know that this alternation will be a central and continuing part of your experience of the building. Had you not already done so, you would, from this time forth, view light itself as one of Kahn’s primary building materials.

  The variety of lighting effects in the Parliament Building is remarkable. At one point you are out on an exterior terrace overlooking the lake, with bright sunlight glinting on the water; a man poling along in a skiff looks exactly like the picture Kahn sketched when he first came to Dhaka. You re-enter the building in near-blinding darkness, and it takes you a moment to discern that you are already back on the lamplit main “street” of this structure’s interior, where shadow is your constant protection against the harsh exterior heat. Elsewhere, as you stand on one of the upper balconies that look out over that internal street, you can see two distinct varieties of light playing against the marble-banded concrete walls: a golden light coming directly down through the series of Japanese-made glass blocks that form the roofline windows, and a silvery, reflected light that bounces off one of the outermost façades and shines onto an interior wall. Both kinds of light are entrancing, especially in combination, and yet neither overwhelms the cool shade.

  The assembly hall itself offers still another kind of visual and dramatic experience. Having progressed up several levels of the ambulatory, you are at long last ushered into this central space—the whole building’s reason for being, the heart of the democratic process. Unlike anything else you’ve seen thus far, this grand space is instantly graspable. You can clearly discern the eight sides of the octagonal plenary hall; you can count the ranked tiers of strongly raked seating assigned to delegates, visitors, and press; you can spot the podium at which the Speaker presides, the doors by which she and the delegates enter. The room is tall but not excessively tall for its width. People are not dwarfed by it. Rather, their presence defines it, so that its height seems to be a function of human dignity. And capping it all is a ceiling that appears to float overhead with unbelievable lightness. The roof is a tent, but a tent made of concrete, delicately tethered to the wall at just eight points, so that natural light shines in under each of the tent flaps. This covering shields the roof from the outdoors and at the same time lets the outdoors in.

  “In the plenary hall you can hear the rain, if it’s raining,” comments Dr. Chaudhury. “In the daylight you can see the light, and at night you see the night.” She thinks of Kahn as “a person who felt that it was important to be close to nature. He had an idea for the environment. And also the broadness and spaciousness—that has an impact. I think there’s a calmness. It is a building where there’s so much hustle and bustle and argument, but within a serene context.”

  In saying this, the Speaker is describing not only the assembly hall itself, but also the whole building. “It’s very spacious—the corridors, when you move from one end to another, it’s not cramped,” she points out. “This is important for a people’s place, with many people moving together.”

  It is true that overall the Dhaka Assembly Building is designed for multitudes rather than solitude. Most of the time, in order to take in the sensations aroused by a Louis Kahn building, you need to have time by yourself. You need to sit quietly in the space—whether it’s the plaza of the Salk Institute or a gallery of the Kimbell Art Museum or the grand atrium of the Exeter Library—and take in what it has to say. Kahn’s buildings, for the most part, speak to you as an individual: they give rise to the kind of private communion that he felt could only take place between two people in a room together, when what is said is so particular that it “may never have been said before.” With most of Kahn’s great buildings, that companion is the structure itself, and you need to be alone with it to understand what it is telling you.

  But the Parliament Building in Dhaka, in this as in so many ways, is different. You are never alone here. It’s not just that you are not allowed to go unescorted into the building; it’s also the fact that the business of t
he building is public communion, public encounter, public argument and agreement. It is a place meant for many people, and whatever serenity it produces (which is considerable) is a serenity snatched from the crowds.

  “What is assembly? is the conceptual question behind the Parliament Building,” observes Wares. “Why do people assemble in a single place to talk about one thing?” He then proceeds to elaborate on the idea of community that underlies such a structure. “A shopping center is not a community,” he points out. “In an Assembly Building, people come together to talk about one thing; then it becomes a community. When the souls unite, then it becomes a spiritual place. He was concerned with soul,” he remarks about Kahn, “or mind. Mind can be analyzed. Soul cannot. It is more mysterious.”

  That Kahn was indeed concerned with soul, in whatever way he may have defined it, seems clear from the breathtaking, mysterious space he designed for worship here. The mosque is located at the front of the Parliament Building, but because it is on the third floor, you cannot get to it directly from the outside. Its external walls are hidden behind cylindrical sections of concrete, so you cannot see into it, either. In this sense it is a kind of Holy of Holies, a relatively inaccessible core. The only way into it is up a branching flight of steps from the brightly illuminated crescent-moon space where you first viewed the building’s full height.

  The plenary hall may be the Assembly Building’s raison d’être, but the mosque is its heart in a different way. That Kahn viewed it in those terms is suggested by the heart-shaped corner windows, each composed of two semi-ovals with a slight downward dip at their ninety-degree joint. Thus each pair together, linked across adjoining walls, forms a multipaned heart through which light pours into the space below. Concrete buttresses at the roof level follow and extend the curves of the windows, so that each ovoid shape seems three-dimensional on its own, and thus doubly three-dimensional when it joins its mirror image at the corner.