The once indomitable architect Mazharul Islam passed away quietly around midnight of July 14, ending a life-time of pioneering and establishing modern architecture in Bangladesh. As the body of the architect was taken to the Art College, friends, former disciples, admirers, even one time detractors, and quite a few people who know little about this legendary man gathered there to say goodbye to the last modernist.
The final journey of Mazharul Islam took him to his first designed building, the Art College, with which he began an astonishing career that bridged the art of building with the project of nation-building, and the ethos of modernity with the spirit of place. Those who knew him remarked that the passing away of Mazharul Islam marked the end of an epoch. He himself defined that epoch. He summarised modern architectural culture in Bangladesh, from its tentative beginning in the 1950s to its proliferation at the present moment. The life and work remained for a long time as a barometer of contemporary dynamic as it negotiated modernisation, westernisation, tradition, and nation-building.
For over five decades, Mazharul Islam was active in defining the scope and form of an architectural culture, taking on the enormous task of creating a modern yet Bengali paradigm for it. To him, modernism was more than an architectural language or aesthetic operation; it was an ethical and rational approach for addressing what he perceived as social inequities in the country. His Marxian principles combined with a Rabindrik ethos in creating a challenging, and often unattainable, mission for himself. His steadfast commitment to the modernist ideology stemmed from an optimistic, even utopian, vision for transforming society. Consequently, his commitment for establishing a strong design culture in Bangladesh was paralleled by an equally deep engagement with the political and ethical dimension of society. All of this was not an easy task to undertake in a place where architecture is pursued more as a commercial or theatrical enterprise than an instrument of social change or greater good.
Mazharul Islam's efforts in creating a vibrant architectural culture depended on establishing the architectural profession of a new nation (Pakistan, later Bangladesh) in the face of strong opposition from bureaucratic and engineering circles, and even some academic one averse to creative challenges. He attempted to introduce an international dialogue in Bangladesh by orchestrating the invitation of such world-renowned architects as Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and Stanley Tigerman to produce exemplary works here.
As teacher, mentor, and visionary, Mazharul Islam influenced the development of many architectural activities. His office, "Vastukalabid," was a springboard for passionate movements by committed young architects; the most notable was the founding of Chetana Architectural Research Society in 1983 that has since then carried out ground-breaking research on architectural history of the region.
Mazharul Islam's architectural intentions had always been bigger than the problem at hand. More than being merely a practicing architect, he epitomised a larger cultural mission, one that confronted the old duality of tradition and modernity. His oft-repeated reflection: "How do we enter the twenty-first century?" reveals an unabashed and idealistic stance towards modernity. Modernity, for Mazharul Islam, was as much a returning as going away. It was a going away from the immediate colonial past in order to return to an "essentialist" condition free from exclusionary religious ideologies, traumatic traditions, propagandist symbolisms, and pretentious iconographies. As much avowed to a Bengali political identity, he would not immediately translate that visually by adopting easy motifs of tradition.
Mazharul Islam's position in this regard was dialogical. Although it was hinged to a specific place, the new position did not falter in engaging in a "world dialogue," that is, in recognising what the philosopher Jarava Lal Mehta described as "the mode of existence of present-day man, who has his sojourn in a region where civilisations, cultures and religions touch each other, where times and places flow together." Mazharul Islam wished to operate within the nexus of a cultural particularness and the humanist idea of "the-world-as-my-village." This twin obligation directed his work ever since his first project.
During the time when Mazharul Islam was active professionally in the 1950s and '60s, Pakistan was in turmoil. The dominant political consciousness in then East Pakistan, aroused by the issue of disparities between the two provinces of Pakistan, and the manipulative use of religion by the central government, polarised most Bengali intellectuals towards secular, socialist thinking. Mazharul Islam was a leading figure in that group. His continuous commitment to a rationalist and materialist philosophy led to a vehement antipathy to the manipulation of architecture and culture within highly politicised religious situations. His work, remaining distanced from both exclusivist symbolization and what he saw as architectural fashion, acquired a kind of ascetic minimalism and intellectual discipline. It is this content that has led to misreading some of the work as uncompromising and stark.
Mazahrul Islam's architectural repertoire was broad; he designed and built universities (original master plan for Chittagong and Jahangirnagar Universities, and design of selected buildings), large-scale housing, government buildings and institutions and numerous residences (rumoured to be in the hundreds). His architectural work, from his earlier approach that expressed the pavilion paradigm -- the open, porous building -- of the hot-humid delta, as in the Art College and NIPA Building at Dhaka University, represents an original contribution in creating a tropical response for international modernism in architecture.
The sixty-year old Art College still conveys the wonderful arrangement of a permeable building that mediates seamlessly with nature (this poorly maintained building should be declared a national treasure and renovated along with its landscape to its old glory). His later works, from the 1970s onwards, reflect a heavier, more earth-hugging language, best expressed in the massive brickwork of the National Library, Dhaka (1980). Even if all his buildings are derived from modern tectonic and construction methods with a geometric rigour, they are products of sensitive environmental meditations. The buildings are intended to be receptacles of "light, green, and air" in the hot-humid delta.
Beyond the single act of building, Mazharul Islam had always urged proper regional planning and large-scale designing of physical space for a country like Bangladesh. Where resources and spaces are limited, greater prowess in creativity is required. With his increasing political engagement he argued for broadening the role of architects in South Asia in order to confront and transform existing social conditions, including the vast rural areas that mostly lie outside the pale of formal architectural activities. Mazharul Islam believed that architecture was a long and relentless struggle; it was a challenge neither for the timid, nor for the compromiser. His life was an embodiment of that challenge.

The writer, an architect, urbanist and writer, is a professor at the University of Hawaii.