ABSTRACT
When it was commissioned, Louis Kahn’s monumental National Assembly Complex in Dhaka (today capital of Bangladesh) was supposed to be a Pakistani response to Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh complex in Delhi. Its construction took a long time: begun in 1962, the complex remained unfinished at the time of Kahn’s death in 1974 to be completed only in 1983. More recently, the world has been reminded of the existence of this unusual building through Nathaniel Kahn’s award winning documentary film on his father’s life and work (2003). 2 When I visited the building in 2004, I was not blindfolded as was Kahn’s son who wanted to experience a sort of empathic shock effect on his arrival. Keeping my eyes open I could see masses of people, many of them underfed or misshapen as well as begging children. The National Assembly towers on an artificial mount and the first impression it yields is rather “Nordic.” The brick boxes with their pop-up circles and triangles look like oversized climbing constructions for a playground. The wooden windows that lurk through the cutout triangles of the concrete boxes—an effect that is not clearly visible on photos—evoke the homeliness of Black Forest log cabins or Russian dachas while the brick part is vaguely reminiscent of Pietilä’s Hervanta housing complex in Finland.
