Adnan Zillur Morshed

THE GRUDGING URBANIST

Adnan Zillur Morshed, PhD, is an architect, architectural historian, urbanist, and public intellectual. He is a professor of architecture and architectural history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and executive director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism at BRAC University. Morshed received his Ph.D. and Master’s in architecture from MIT, and BArch from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, where he also taught. He was a 2018 TEDxFoggyBottom speaker at George Washington University. He is the author of multiple books; among them, Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015), Oculus: A Decade of Insights into Bangladeshi Affairs (University Press Limited, 2012), DAC, Dhaka in 25 Buildings (Altrim Publishers, Barcelona, 2017), and River Rhapsody: A Museum of Rivers and Canals (BRAC University, 2018).

Has Dhaka become a status city?

The status city often serves the privileged, while the huddling masses eke out a minimal existence

Is human civilisation at an inflection point?

Our brains are being reprogrammed to look for the easiest solutions to our most vexing social and political questions.

Is there an architecture for marginal communities?

Our experience of designing Brac regional offices across rural Bangladesh.

How to reclaim flyovers as people-centric ‘green’ infrastructure

Characterised by a culture of ad hocism, these valuable urban lands below elevated road infrastructures rarely reach their full potential.

Forging a Bengali identity through modernist architecture

After completing his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Oregon, Eugene, in June 1952, the 29-year-old Muzharul Islam (1923-2012) returned home to find a postcolonial Pakistan embroiled in acrimonious politics of national identity.

The Louis Kahn mystique: 20 years after ‘My Architect’

The legend of Louis Kahn remains strong.

How we should design the next generation of parks

Do we need the 24/7 hustle and bustle of Dhaka – the cacophonous dramas of this sleepless city – reproduced in its parks too?

Heatwaves, global warming, and the ethics of our cities

We must rethink how cities are planned, designed, and administered to combat the adverse effects of both the heat island problem and climate change.

May 18, 2021
May 18, 2021

The sociology of eco-grief: Saving Suhrawardy Udyan

Eight years ago, in May, a large crowd staged a sit-in at Gezi Park, next to Taksim Square, Istanbul’s bustling public plaza in the downtown of its European side.

May 9, 2021
May 9, 2021

Your land is my land: Environmental injustice in Bandarban

Land is the closest thing that we know. We cultivate it, build on it, transform it to meet our needs, commercialise it to maximise economic gain, and derive our identities from its widely varying geographic characters.

April 6, 2021
April 6, 2021

How about experiential indicators of wellbeing?

That gross domestic product (GDP) is not a fully satisfying measure of a country’s progress is no longer news. The awareness of GDP’s inadequacies in revealing a nation’s state of development is now almost mainstream.

February 9, 2021
February 9, 2021

Memories, cultural imaginations and Dhaka

How do cities like Dhaka in the throes of frenzied development deal with memories and literary depictions in the process of their transformations?

December 29, 2020
December 29, 2020

How the demolition of a train station changed America

At the heart of the ongoing debate on the potential demolition of TSC and Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka is an old philosophical dilemma—how to progress while retaining some loyalty to history, a key concern of many 20th century philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur.

November 29, 2020
November 29, 2020

The impending wrecking ball for another Dhaka masterpiece

I do not know how to respond to this barrage of apocalyptic news from Dhaka.

November 1, 2020
November 1, 2020

SDGs, the tyranny of sameness, and a lesson for World Cities Day

Yesterday was World Cities Day (WCD). In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly designated October 31 as WCD to build global awareness of the challenges that cities around the world face.

October 31, 2020
October 31, 2020

SDGs, the tyranny of sameness, and a lesson for World Cities Day

The world’s urban future is full of challenges. But one of the greatest among them is a simple but profound one: the universalisation of urban problems and their generic solutions.

October 27, 2020
October 27, 2020

A looming tragedy in the University of Dhaka’s centennial celebration

Is this the right way to celebrate the centennial of the University of Dhaka in 2021? Like many of my colleagues in Bangladesh and around the world, I was horrified to learn that the university administration has made plans to demolish a 20th century architectural icon inside the university campus to expand and upgrade its insufficient facilities.

September 16, 2020
September 16, 2020

Discrimination by design

I was reading a harrowing report in the New York Times that revealed startling data about how federal officials in the United States during the 1930s demarcated or “redlined” certain areas of different cities as “hazardous” or “risky for business,” based on the concentration of poor Black people or immigrants in them.

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