School of Architecture & Design

The word “Orphan” refers to someone who has lost both his/her natural parents.
Generally, we imagine downhearted sad little children, when we think of orphans. A
home for orphan children is no replacement for a house with loving parents, even if they
are adopted. Furthermore, “Orphanage” is the place where children without parents are
cared for and housed. The place care for her children until the children can be placed in
homes and adopted.
“Save Our Souls” – is where the name “SOS” comes from. SOS Children village is
something different than the images of any typical orphanage comes into mind at first
glance. The organization looks for individual donors from across the world to sponsor a
newly admitted orphan and the donor supports the entire expenses of a kid till the child
grows up. The homes are somewhat like a real family and “village” is thus built up
consisting clusters of homes and additional facilities.
My project intends to give these orphan souls the platform where they can receive all
their needs and get a bit of happiness. Additional to providing a family and a society; the
project adds blending with the entire neighborhood locality. It is hoped that, with the
long span of time, these children will be educated and will become self-dependent. If
they get the adequate opportunity, there will be moment when these orphan souls will
be referred as an asset towards the nation. The project will be a parochial overpass
between the orphan world and the other world.
Keywords: Orphan, Family, Identity, Social-acceptance, Psychology, Equity.

Energy crisis and environmental challenges are becoming greater economic, health and social concerns of the day. Building design and construction processes, whether in the developing or developed world, have to address environmental issues. Library buildings, commonly known as intellectually stimulating and scholarly community places, have been, for some time dealing with this pressing need in quite a few countries. The Green Library Movement discussions in terms of building design and construction of libraries have been going on for a few decades, but only a handful of libraries with green or environmentally sustainable design have been built so far in the Asian context. In most cases, the budget allocation for library buildings is low making the case for sustainable and energy efficient buildings, stronger. This research tries to shed light on the opportunities and challenges of green or environmentally sustainable library buildings, focusing specifically on Asian countries with l...

The building activities in the residential arena of Dhaka are primarily involved in mid to high rise apartments of various sizes and styles in almost every available space. The majority of these, mostly six storied, are compact type buildings with no courtyards inside. Hence there is a lack of natural ventilation and daylight in the interior spaces, which affect the level of indoor comfort. The age-old methods of designing in the context have proven that providing natural ventilation is an important strategy for having comfort. The traditional residences, rural or urban, with interior courtyards created a living condition that was and still is, environmentally, functionally, and socially sustainable. The author, through studying a number of residential buildings both with and without courtyards, stresses that introduction of this important environmental element, or the courtyard in the contemporary apartment buildings can provide much better indoor comfort in terms of light, air and...

As in many other parts of the world, the urban areas of the South Asian region are increasingly expanding. While cities today are the heart of commercial, technological and social development, they are also vulnerable to a variety of natural and anthropogenic threats. The complex urban infrastructure, and the ever-expanding population in cities, exacerbate the impacts of climate change and increase the risk of natural hazards. Throughout history, various hydrological disasters including floods, tidal surges, and droughts, and non-hydrological disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, and storms have led to catastrophic social, economic and environmental impacts in numerous South Asian cities. Disaster risk reduction is therefore central to ensure sustainability in urban areas. Although Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are identified as a promising strategy to reduce risk and increase resilience, there appears to be a lack of evidence-based approaches. NbS are measures that can be pract...

This poster presentation highlights findings from my masters' study that focuses on planned housing environments and children's outdoor play in Singapore. The poster recommends  ways to enhance child-friendliness through design ideas and interventions.

Over the past decade Child Friendly City(CFC) initiative has been developed throughout the world to make the cities more livable and friendly to its children and also to the future child to come. To ensure such objective Convention on the rights of the child (CRC), formulated in 1990 by UNICEF, provides a common framework for action regarding children in the cities or urban context. This paper tries to interpret some selected articles of CRC in terms of physical environment.
Children from middle and upper middle income group, living primarily in the recently grown apartment complexes are deprived of quality contact with nature, safe mobility, autonomy and their capacityto exploretheirsurrounding.Itisanironythatthepoorerchildrencanenjoythese benefits more than the well of though they ‘enjoy in an unhealthy and unsafe environment’(Marco corsi,2002). This study deals mainly with the middle and upper-midle income group children(aged between 2-11 years) and their surrounding physical environment in Dhanmondi Residential Area, thefirstplannedresidentialareain Dhaka.
Dhanmondi Residential Area was developed as a low density(almost 10 person per acre) high income residential area during 1950s. During the last three decade the area experienced a rapid change in density, land use, building types, traffic pattern etc. Such phenomena had their major repercussions on children.
By environment behavior studies this thesis tries to understand the issue of child friendliness in terms of physical environment based on some selected CRC guidelines. By studying the open space structure of Dhanmondi R/A area, some actionable ideas and respective alternative patterns are suggested.Aspartoftheanalysis, visualsurvey ofthestudyarea,questionnairesurveyinaselected sample area, configurational analysis with ‘space syntax’ and building typology-study based on present by law are performed. At the end, a redesign alternative pattern is proposed for the area to create locality or sense of place. Along with other supportive suggestions this exercise ends with designing a micro scale outdoor green open space (at Road 10a) adjacent to dwelling plots to give a visual imagery of physical environment that is actionable in this area.
Key words:
Child friendly City, Urban living environment, Post development change pattern, Open space structure,SpaceSyntax, Buildingtypology,Alternativepattern

This power point presentation reviews the concept of Deconstruction. It provides critical commentaries on the relevance of Deconstructive ideas in the discipline of architecture and professional practices. Relevant international case studies are presented to make a point that the outcomes of 'architectural deconstruction' is subject to the creativity of practicing architects.

"In the last couple of decades, the phenomenon of ‘play’, specifically children’s play, has got significant attention in global policy debates as well as in a variety of academic disciplines. Although much has been written on play, play remains to be a puzzlingly ‘difficult’ concept to define (Piaget 1962, Flanagan 2010: 4). The difficulty lays in the construction of the concept of play itself. Play seems to be more an ambiguous metaphor (Sutton-Smith 1997) than a serious topic of scientific study. Metaphorically, ‘playing’ might refer to almost all human and animal activities (Karoff 2013) and as such tries to escape definition. For example, playing as designing, playing as writing, playing as doing music, playing as creative exploration, playing as taking part in sports, playing as making fun, playing as playing role, playing as story telling, playing as acting, playing as pretending, playing as hiding and so on. Such vagueness and multiplicity of meaning (re) creates a new ground for (re) interpretation of the significance and meaning of play and its spatial derivatives such as playground.
Given such complexities exist, in this presentation I will highlight my explorations on two dominant strands of literatures on play: a) those creating a voice for play by seeing it as a significant ‘right’ in a diminished world of (children’s) outdoor play; and those trying to (re) conceptualize the variegated meanings of the cultural phenomena called ‘play’. I will show, by borrowing concepts from earlier theorists-of-play, why it is important to (re) consider both of these strands together while (re) addressing spatial manifestations of play, i.e. playgrounds, in planned urban settings. I will argue that it is not feasible to isolate ‘play’ and ‘playgrounds’ from other interconnected sociocultural and spatial-temporal phenomena. Such explorations might help me to develop a framework for my research involving play, playgrounds and their networks.
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Over the last couple of decades, graph theory based analytical models and application tools have got their impetus in planning literatures along with the development of computational technologies. Such models and techniques help to study urban spaces scientifically and analyze patterns of complex urban phenomena efficiently. Commonly known as urban network analysis tools, such quantitative tools might be useful in the analysis of spatial configuration in play places of high-density urban areas and linking analytical outcomes to planning processes of the city.
This presentation explores contemporary urban network analysis (UNA) tools and their background theories with reference to key secondary literatures. Existing state-of-the-art techniques have been revisited. Diverse UNA tools have been categorized based on two considerations: a) the kind of mathematical approaches, matric or topological, these methods adopt in representing urban spaces and b) the ways these tools incorporate social aspects, such as land use distribution, density, accessibility, etc., within their spatial framework. Potential means on how some of these methodological tools can be applied to understand locational distributions and accessibility of play places in the city have been the key background concern of this study.

There has recently been a model around to address traffic congestion in the capital Dhaka. The model suggest stopping perpendicular movement of cars with dividers in intersections and creating internal U-turn systems for right- side moving vehicles in other roads. In this article I shared some of my comments on this proposal.

Spatial accessibility measures have their roots in transportation and land use planning in the 1960s. While methods for measuring aggregate accessibility have been well established, developing high-resolution models that are applicable at a disaggregate level is of recent interest. One of the challenges is to incorporate human factors in the assessment, so as to better describe the reality and improve the precision of analysis. Studies on children’s accessibility to play spaces (CAP) are among the numerous efforts to address this challenge.
This study asked what could be a potential conceptual framework to evaluate accessibility to outdoors play spaces for children in extremely dense urban context.
Following a case study based mixed method approach; this study first studied the accessibility pattern of a highly dense residential area in Dhaka, Dhanmondi R/A, with specific focus on children’s accessibility to public play spaces. CAP was analyzed following the space syntax model of accessibility. Analytical findings were discussed with reference to the field observational and interview data. By discussing other relevant accessibility measurement models, this paper further developed a conceptual framework to evaluate disaggregate accessibility of play spaces for children in extremely dense urban context. The developed framework proposes a combination of state of the art quantifiable models to measure children’s accessibility to play spaces.
This working paper reasserts the necessity to rethink urban public play spaces by considering place, path and people factors of accessibility. The proposed framework might benefit future researches and urban planning process when the objective is to enhance spatial accessibility to opportunities in highly dense urban living environments.

The concept of child-friendly-city (CFC) originated from the general confession that cities are not as friendly to the child as it could be. A growing number of literatures assert that urban built environment needs to be rethought.
This presentation interprets the notion of ‘child-friendliness’ in urban living environment with reference to five selected articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (formulated in 1990 by UNICEF). The study focuses on spatial interpretation of those articles in Dhanmondi Residential Area -- a planned residential area in the urban context of Dhaka.
A mixed method approach have been adopted. Methods include: structured observation, interviews, formal analysis of street network and building typologies, alternative formal study, and visualisation of an alternative urban form. Street network have been analysed through space syntax. With particular emphasis on a redesigned alternative pattern is proposed for the study area that suggests creating identifiable locality,  safe access to the available open spaces and initiatives to enhance children's independent mobility in the studied area. The study ends with a hypothetic design-exercise to give a visual imagery of the actionable ideas.