UAP graduate Umme Tahmina Haque wins Tamayouz Int’l Graduation Project Award 2020

Umme Tahmina Haque, a graduate of the Department of Architecture, University of Asia Pacific (UAP), won the first prize for the Tamayouz International Graduation Project Award 2020 for her outstanding work.

This award is open to architecture and landscape design students worldwide to submit their graduation projects each year. It aims to recognise and reward excellence in architectural design and education and celebrate the achievements of young architects.

This time, 1,089  projects were submitted for this award, representing  141 universities and 64 countries. As a winner of this competition, Haque has won a two-year fully funded MSc Scholarship at the Polytechnic  University of Milan.

Haque had always been interested in old cities and folklore, thus for her graduation project, she chose her hometown, Chittagong (now Chattogram). The history of the city is very rich.

Merchants from all over the world anchored their ships in the ports of the city, resulting in the mix of various cultures. According to her, the Chaktai canal of Chattogram was the  main means of trade by water. Asadganj was formed on the banks of the canal. Chattogram is where the dried fish market developed in the eighteenth century, and it has the largest dried fish market in

Bangladesh till date.  But the historical Chaktai canal is known today as the 'sorrow of Chittagong'. The waterway is almost dead due to canal filling and because of that, pressure on the land has increased. Haque wanted to help solve such problems in the city.

Her project,  titled  'A celebration of Trade and Tradition' presents a self grown historic business hub that celebrates the versatile activities of the local tradespeople of Asadganj.

The award committee also announced the Department of Architecture, the University of Asia Pacific from Dhaka, Bangladesh as the Architecture School of 2020.

Assistant Professor Mehrab Iftekher won the Supervisor of the Year Award for supervising the first place-winning project. It was co-supervised by S M Ehsan Ul Haque, UAP.