Fortress of solitude
THE man wakes in an unfamiliar city. It is hot, sweaty and only seven in the morning. Curse this infernal heat! Cycle bells, footsteps and strange sounds seep in.
The visitor's guides arrive, it is time. He is blindfolded, and the two set out in a car. Soon they are standing on a grand lawn. Wet dew seeps through his sneakers. The guide, a Bengali architect, takes the blindfold off. Blinking into the sunlight, the visitor stares at a castle of lines and stone, rising out of a moat of crisscrossing canals. He stares for a long moment. Slowly, quietly, he begins to cry.
The visitor is Nathaniel Kahn, and the building is the Shangshad Bhaban -- centerpiece of Louis Kahn's National Capital Complex in Dhaka. The intense preparation for this moment of communion is behind the scenes. The story of the blindfold, put on by a local architect, came out in a later interview: "I said, look I want to see this thing the right way. I don't want to see it in an accidental way."
The viewer who comes to the film My Architect meets Louis Kahn through his physical sculptures. The sunlight streaming through Kimbell Museum roof, the grand geometry of Exeter's library, the unfinished designs for a Holocaust memorial, the dewy mornings that surround Shangdhad Bhaban -- all are rendered with a quiet, unblinking precision.
Kahn's mission was to instill the monumentality and mystery of the classics into architecture, replacing the cold functionality of the steel-and-glass era. In his structures, the materials were simple, often limited to brick and concrete. In his quest for spirituality, he would engage the raw material itself in the dialogue. The interplay of light with material was the base element that could create a changing building-- one that moved forward with time and vantage point.
"I knew that when I was in Dhaka the film was over." There in front of the Shangshad Bhaban, Nathaniel discovers his father in the lines and cavernous spaces. Even in the midst of brutal warfare in 1971, Louis Kahn continued work on this project. "When the war was on, everybody said stop working, because we don't know what's going to happen, we don't know if there is going to be a government after this, and you're not being paid." His response was: when there is peace again, they will need this building.
When I first reviewed My Architect four years ago, I wrote: "Not only is it home to Bangladesh's parliament, its central, vast green grounds act as an oasis in the middle of a poorly planned, congested, third-world mega-city." Speaking of its multiple uses, Nathaniel said: "Everybody has a story about meeting a friend on the plaza, playing a game on the lawn, being a child on the lawn, walking around the Crescent Lake, exploring the area that the streets go past the hostels."
But Nathaniel was extraordinarily lucky with the timing of his film. A few years later and he would have filmed his finale in a lonely fortress, empty of people, life or meaning. His last low angle shot would take in a wire fence, past the legs of guards, sentries, paramilitary and police. There would be no civilians in a single frame (certainly not the exuberant "Dhaka morning walker's club" of the film). Since 2006, the building has been dying, fatally surrounded by fences. The cage of national security, the only framing device left for Kahn.
Two weeks ago, a group of German architects came to visit Dhaka. Armed with university letters, ministry permissions, VIP phone calls, they were allowed access to the inside grounds. I called up one member and asked if my friend could join them. She has never been inside, you see.
"I don't think we can manage that, they have taken photocopies of everyone's passport."
"But she's Bengali."
It seems the officials didn't care. My Bengali friend stayed behind.
Later, they met us for dinner. We who could only imagine the interior had to depend on these visitors for a second-hand look. Wide-eyed stories of soaring beauty. But also sadness at a crumbling interior, absence of light, eerie stillness, sleeping cleaners, the musty smell.
It has come to this. The only way I can enter the Shangshad is to come with foreign friends. The rest of you: go home, go home. Wanting to take a morning walk, do adda with old friends, eat chinabadam, hold hands with your partner, take in the fresh air, gaze into the open space, the vision of stone, the beginning of life. Not now, not here. Your city is dying, finally.
Architect Dorothee Riedle wrote to me in an email: "I started to wonder what this security fuss is all about. What can be the reason for sealing off the building for the last few years? Maybe I am too foreign to understand? It is very hard to understand why a government would want to keep people from enjoying their nationality around their parliament building in this desperately needed green and open space. It deprives the building and what it stands for of much of its qualities. Writing all this I started to wonder how easy it would be to get access to the German Reichstag. According to their web-page, it is really easy. It is possible to take part in guided tours through the house daily, to apply for a visitors seat for the hearings, etc."
In My Architect a young boy stares up at the Shangshad Bhaban, and is reflected into the water. He expresses the sense of wonder we drink in at journey's end. Someone, somewhere has choked the joy out of that scene. In the name of what?
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