Marina Tabassum

With her first monograph, Marina Tabassum intends to inspire people by spotlighting special architectural elements which pervade her work, such as Light and Spirituality, Brick and Materiality, Place and Memory, and People and Community. These elements will be examined by architects and scholars who have impacted her work- with whom Marina Tabassum had the opportunity to interact and share her works. The book will take a look at Tabassum's architectural journey from its early beginnings to future projects and ongoing research. As an architect listed in 2020 by Prospect magazine as the third-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era, her perhaps most well-known feat is the Bait Ur Rouf Mosque in Dhaka, which won the Aga Khan Award for architecture in 2016. Her holistic involvement in this project, which she undertook on request of her grandmother but completed alone with self-sourced private funding, reveals her dedication to impactful architecture. Readers can look forward to the presentation of a wide variety of projects including early URBANA projects, such as the Independence Monument of Bangladesh and the Museum of Independence, the more recent and steadily ongoing research on the $2000 Home and the movable house, and Khudi Bari, modular mobile houses for victims vulnerable to climate change and Rohingya refugees. All projects are represented in text and photographs, from residential to museum architecture, with a focus on sustainability, sensitivity to both history, and the demands of modernity, atmosphere, and materiality. Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum is the founder and principal architect of Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). She founded and heads FACE, the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity, in Bangladesh. Tabassum has been honored with multiple awards such as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum's Jameel Prize, and the 2021 Soane Medal for architecture from the Sir John Soane Museum.