Meditations in Entropy: The Work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA in Bangladesh

“The changing climate is no longer debatable here, it is this land’s unfeigned, monstrous reality,” says Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury. His firm URBANA, established in 1995, has produced an astonishingly diverse collection of works of divergent scales, typologies, and contexts and located in one of the meteorologically most complex and challenging regions in the world. A hospital introduced into an economy decimated by rising oceans, a shelter against cyclones in Bangladesh’s southern coastal region, projects for locations in the country’s north near the Himalaya mountains facing devouring waves of floods, and architectural interventions in one of the world’s densest metropolitan areas: URBANA’s designs are incisive critical responses to dissimilar issues and urgencies. They are all rooted in the belief that architecture can no longer be optical or sensational, but be built of philosophy and empathy for our increasingly fragile and shared ecological and human condition. Meditations in Entropy is the first-ever comprehensive monograph on the work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA. It features 16 of the firm’s designs in detail through photographs by acclaimed architectural photographer Hélène Binet and numerous plans, drawings, sketches, and further images. Perceptive essays are contributed by eminent critics and historians Kenneth Frampton, Robert McCarter, and William J R Curtis. The book is rounded-off with conversations between Chowdhury, Swiss architect Niklaus Graber, and the distinguished architectural historian Philip Ursprung that further explicate URBANA’s unique approach.