From 24th to 29th January 2026, an architectural exhibition was held at Aloki on Tejgaon Link Road, Dhaka. Yet, to call it merely an exhibition of architectural projects would be misleading. What unfolded in the space felt closer to an art installation. Eight extraordinarily talented architectural design practices presented thoughtfully curated installations intended not to display finished buildings, but to reveal fragments of their design processes.

The public response was striking. Visitors did not move through the space with the detachment typical of project displays; they lingered, circled, and engaged with the mind-blowing pieces of installations. In that sense, the event was undeniably successful.

On the opening day, two lectures accompanied the exhibition: Professor Shamsul Wares from the Bangladesh University and Associate Professor Farhan Karim from the University of Arizona. This essay is a reflection on the relationship between those two presentations and the exhibition itself.

Professor Wares spoke from an academic and historical standpoint, tracing the evolution of modern architecture. He revisited how, in its effort to serve mass society, modern architecture rejected ornamentation and, in doing so, gradually distanced itself from emotion and human appeal. As a reaction to this emotional vacuum, postmodern architecture emerged. He then shifted his discussion toward reading architecture through the lens of existential philosophy.

Dr. Farhan Karim, on the other hand, invoked the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri in relation to the exhibition. Tafuri’s deep disillusionment with modern architecture led him to argue that modernism never truly resisted capitalism; rather, it became one of its most effective instruments. According to Tafuri, architecture’s claims of social transformation often masked its complicity in sustaining the very system it appeared to critique. Toward the end of his lecture, Dr. Karim referred to Kenneth Frampton and the proposition of Critical Regionalism as a possible response to this crisis. These theoretical positions are, to a large extent, familiar to many of us engaged in architectural education and practice.
Let us now attempt to read existentialism and Critical Regionalism from the perspective of our own time and place.

To explain existentialism, Professor Wares referred to Albert Camus’ novel The Outsider. Its central character, Meursault, lives in French Algeria, suspended between geographies and cultures. He is detached from tradition, shaped by an imported European culture, and inhabits a harsh climate to which he does not belong. He is alien not only to society but to the land itself. One may read Meursault as a metaphor for what modernism does to human beings. Kenneth Frampton, in a different context, seems almost to have found in Meursault the human equivalent of the modern glass building — transparent, placeless, emotionally detached, and transferable to any part of the world without resistance. Meursault becomes, in this sense, the existential counterpart of international modern architecture. It is worth remembering that Camus wrote this novel in the aftermath of the Second World War, at a time when the moral and cultural certainties of Europe had already begun to collapse.

Kenneth Frampton, on the other hand, formulated his theory of Critical Regionalism after the disillusionment that followed the events of May 1968 in France. The graffiti, slogans, and street writings of May ’68 did not merely influence art and politics; they reshaped architectural thought for decades to come. Frampton, deeply attentive to this moment, absorbed the intellectual atmosphere of that uprising. His writings are so interwoven with French phrases and references that they often become difficult to read without some familiarity with the language and the context of those events.

Perhaps the figure most intellectually shaken by the failure of the May ’68 movement was Manfredo Tafuri. What began in France soon echoed in Italy under the name Hot Autumn, leaving the country politically and culturally restless for years. Tafuri, who once believed that architecture possessed the capacity to transform society, gradually lost that faith. After witnessing how easily revolutionary energy was absorbed, neutralised, and re-instrumentalised by existing systems of power, he concluded that architecture was far less autonomous than it claimed to be.

Another name that became unexpectedly relevant to this exhibition — because one of the installations drew conceptual inspiration from his novel — is the Czechoslovak writer Milan Kundera. Kundera’s disillusionment parallels Tafuri’s, though in a different field. The spirit of May ’68 reached Czechoslovakia in the form of the Prague Spring. Kundera, who had once placed his hope in socialism, witnessed Soviet tanks enter Prague — invited by a socialist government to suppress its own people. This moment shattered his faith in ideological certainties.

Out of history, novels became a place of solace for Kundera. His famous work ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ emerged as an escape from history: politics receded into the background, and personal life became everything. History itself, in his view, became little more than an absurd theater.

For Tafuri, idealism about architecture was replaced by historical skepticism; for Kundera, faith in socialism was replaced by irony, memory, and the fragility of personal experience. Both thinkers turned away from grand narratives and toward a more critical, intimate reading of history, culture, and the human condition.

If we look at Bangladesh in parallel to Europe during the 1968 uprisings, we find Dhaka itself boiling with mass unrest in 1969. Under the oppressive rule of Martial Law administrator Ayub Khan, people’s fury reached a breaking point. This historic moment inspired Akhtaruzzaman Ilias to write the acclaimed novel Chilekothar Sepoy, published around the same time as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

In Ilias’s narrative, the subaltern character Haddi Khajir, emerging from the lower echelons of society, becomes an icon of resistance and defiance. While European intellectuals wrestled with disillusionment in the face of historical events, a subaltern figure from Old Dhaka stepped into the public sphere. Whereas the heroes of Kundera and Camus seek to live by rejecting history, the subaltern rebel of Ilias embraces history to assert his humanity. In one hallucinatory vision, the protagonist of the novel, Usman imagines protesters from Dhaka, Meerut, Bareli, and Lucknow marching side by side, their slogans merging the anti-British Revolt of 1857 with the 1969 movement in Dhaka’s streets.

History, of course, does not stop. In July 2024, Dhaka witnessed another wave of student-led uprisings, where countless wall paintings and graffiti articulated the continuity of historic struggles. Events from 1971, 1952, 1947, as well as figures like Khudiram, Titumir, Nazrul, Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and Shukanto, reappeared across bricks and walls. Streets transformed into public squares and theaters, staging heroism and resistance in brutal, often improvised performances.

Students, teachers, street children, professionals, rickshaw pullers, and even imams participated in these political theatres. Among the varied wall paintings, some carried messages particularly resonant for architects and urban planners: slogans such as “Come to my city,” “This city is mine,” “This city is a city of magic,” and, in Munshiganj, “We have to think beyond Dhaka.”

In Europe, architectural and urban theories often crystallised after large political events like May ’68, and these theories eventually traveled to the Global South through textbooks. In Bangladesh, comparable uprisings have occurred, yet they rarely trigger theoretical discourse. The July Uprising, despite its immense scale and impact, has yet to generate a corresponding framework for understanding or shaping our urban spaces. This exhibition, Parallels, provides a starting point for such reflection.

Dr. Farhan Karim noted the absence of overt politics in the exhibition, observing that:
“Unlike the modernist promise of social or political emancipation, the post-2000 generation expresses a growing disenchantment with inherited moral narratives, particularly those shaped by post-independence expectations. Rather than positioning architecture as a tool for grand social redemption, these practices turn inward, focusing on the experiential, tactile, and material conditions of space. 

In today's Bangladesh, especially since the July 2024 revolution and its calls for reform, this shift may seem unexpected. Yet this critical distance from established paradigms makes the exhibition both timely and essential. The disappointment felt by this generation is not resignation, but a productive pause—an opportunity to reconsider the future of Bangladeshi architecture beyond inherited frameworks and exhausted promises.”

In resonance with Dr. Farhan’s optimism, one can hope that the architectural imagination of this generation remains pro-people, sustaining the aspirations of youth. Yet, architecture as a creative practice is inherently introverted. Even when an architect inhabits society, there is often a sense of being both inside and outside one’s own city—a tension between engagement and detachment.

Charles Baudelaire first articulated this symptom in 19th-century Paris, noting the estrangement of individuals drawn to the city by the lure of market economy: everyone is surrounded by others, yet everyone remains a stranger. Upon first entering the exhibition at Aloki, I observed break bats floating across the gallery ceiling, which recalled Baudelaire’s vision of the alienated modern man. 

Luis Kahn once remarked, “Even a brick wants to be something.” In that installation, the bricks seemed to aspire to float like clouds—the same way Baudelaire’s stranger yearned for the unclaimed freedom of the sky.

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best, your father, 
your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds…the clouds that pass…up there
…up there…the wonderful clouds!
(The Stranger, Translated from French by Louise Vrese)

The catastrophe of the 1947 Partition, the division of socialism between Moscow and Beijing, the repeated frustrations of political movements, and the oppression of Martial Law all left deep marks on Dhaka’s intellectual life in the 1966s. Translated in in Bangla in 1961 by Buddhadev Basu, Baudelaire’s ‘The Stranger’ profoundly influenced Dhaka’s writers, intellectuals, and students, who identified with a figure without family, country, or material attachment—someone who sought to exist freely, like clouds drifting above the city. Professor Shamsul Wares emerged from this generation, and many of us have been shaped by his teachings, directly or indirectly.

Amid political uncertainty and unrest, the hosting of ‘Parallels’ deserves high praise. It offers multiple avenues for critique, reflection, and discussion, and the participants, curators, and discussants must be thanked for creating this space.

Architect Taufiqur Rahman Khan is the Coordinator, School of Design, Alliance Française de Dhaka.

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