"Bengal Stream: The Vibrant Architecture Scene of Bangladesh" Exhibition in Dhaka

Sat 10 Dec - Mon 9 Jan' 23

The exhibition “Bengal Stream: The Vibrant Architecture Scene of Bangladesh” documents and celebrates the dynamism and innovation of contemporary architecture in Bangladesh. The exhibition was created by the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel, Switzerland, and the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements in Dhaka. After a successful tour in Europe, the exhibition now comes to Dhaka.

Bangladesh has contributed to the global arena of architecture through an incredible mixture of contrasts and creative diversity. In the delta region, it is not only the boundaries between land and water that are blurred, in which past and present merge anew, but new conditions are constantly formed and presented. An enduring participant of this phenomenon is the architecture of the land, as the exhibition of 60 projects by established and young Bengali architects shows. Bamboo structures from the past meet monumental walls of béton brut, while Bengali latticework ornaments (jali) originally made from brick transform into semitransparent fabric. This oscillation between local and international influences was already apparent in the modern movement in the Bengal Delta. It is seen in the oeuvre of the Bengali protagonist Muzharul Islam and the modernist master Louis Kahn. The generation after that has carried forward that oscillation in a robust manner.

The exhibition contains original drawings and models, photographs and other documents of architecture.

The exhibition “Bengal Stream: The Vibrant Architecture Scene of Bangladesh”, ran from 9th December, 2022 to 9th January 2023, at Bengal Shilpalay, Dhanmondi, Dhaka 1209.

The exhibition was curated by Niklaus Graber, Andreas Ruby and Viviane Ehrensberger, and produced by the Swiss Architecture Museum in collaboration with the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements, Dhaka.

Five years ago, “Bengal Stream” opened at the premises of Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM) in Basel. Thousands of visitors from all over Europe visited the exhibition, and it was widely reviewed in the press as well. After the successful inauguration in S AM Basel in 2017, the exhibition traveled to the Centre d’Architecture ‘Arc En Rêve’ in Bordeaux, France in 2018 and then finally to the DAM, Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany in 2019.

You can find out about the previous editions of the exhibition on our website: Basel | Bordeaux | Frankfurt