Renowned Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum has won the Millennium Lifetime Achievement Award at the upcoming Lisbon Architecture Triennale which is expected to kick off on September 22.
The Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) founder will accept the award at a special ceremony in Lisbon on September 30.
The 2021 Soane Medalist is known for her contributions to environmental design and an approach to architecture that is in tune with their natural environments and embraces the design challenges posed by the environment.
Marina joins a list of past recipients that includes Kenneth Frampton, Álvaro Siza, and last cycle’s winner Denise Scott Brown, reports Archinect, an architectural website.
A jury statement mentioned that her work “demonstrates a deep sense of commitment to the social and cultural role of architecture, with particular attention paid to building a collective sense of belonging in each new project.”
“Marina Tabassum’s unique practice touches on the spiritual fundamentals of architecture, without losing sight of its responsibilities and potential impact,” Archinect quoted the jury saying.
They said her projects demonstrate a strong, clear ethical position and delicate, sophisticated design, without compromising on innovation with limited resources and constraints.
“Marina Tabassum's bold step forward, transforming architecture’s role from a passive-commission model into an active-initiative one, keeps showing us the way towards how architects can challenge the climate crisis and bring about social change in an experimental, respectful and inspiring manner,” they said.
In March last year, she was named a steering committee member of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2020-2022 cycle, an award she has under her belt.
Marina’s approach prioritizes local skills and materials over technocratic solutions, working in harmony with natural cycles and using indigenous knowledge to intervene with minimal means, without “the roaring noise of architecture.”
She also designed the Bait ur Rouf mosque in Dhaka, modelled from bricks and ‘daylight.’ The project won her the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Like all her projects, the mosque is well-ventilated and at one with its surroundings.
Born in 1969 in Dhaka, Marina grew up in a war-ravaged country and witnessed much death and destruction.
She says that the social responsibility that she brings to her practice has been instilled by her father, who was the only doctor in their area and would attend a long queue of patients from the neighboring slum before setting off for work.
She graduated from architecture school in 1995 by which time, she says: “The affliction of consumer architecture had already infested Dhaka”.
Resisting the urge to join in the consumerism, she co-founded her first practice, Urbana, with Kashef Chowdhury the same year she graduated.
Their decade-long partnership, in work and life, spawned several noteworthy projects, from the Bangladesh Independence Monument and Liberation Museum to housing that responds to the tropical environment with large openings, terraces and verandahs, according to the Guardian.
To Marina, the first architect from the global south to win the prestigious Soane award, architecture is a service rendering profession.
According to her, the enormous disparity between the rich and the poor is largely unsustainable and they hope to make themselves available beyond the one percent of the rich population.
