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JOINT WINNER
CRITICISM
KAZIKHALEEDASHRAF
In an irascible terrain that alternates between emerald green rice paddies and swirling, churning flood waters, a new project called the Friendship Centre seems like a woven terracotta raft that has been swept out from a remote village in a distant time, and now lies stranded on the flood plains that surround the small town of Gaibandha in the north of Bangladesh. With half the local population engaged in agriculture, the town is encircled by fields and mounds with homesteads, a perennial image of rural Bangladesh. The region is also not far from many wellknown Buddhist brick monasteries dating from the eighth century and earlier.
A few miles east of Gaibandha and the project site flows the mighty river Brahmaputra- Jamuna, which streams down from Tibet carrying and depositing silts and sands as it braids the Bangladesh delta with intertwined channels and that delicate land-form, the char, created by fresh silt deposits. People in that region have always lived with the Janus-faced river, receiving at the same time the blessings of the alluvial soil and brunt of the seasonal deluges. Despite being a precarious land-form, chars - with their rich soil and abundant fish - have drawn people, mostly the poorest in the country, for farming and fishing. Social conditions and economic opportunities, however, remain limited in those remote island-like chars.
Designed by the Dhaka-based architect Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury, the Friendship Centre was created as a training centre for an NGO working with people inhabiting the nearby chars. The centre trains people, and also rents out the facilities for meetings, training and conferences. The site for the centre is a low-lying area outside Gaibandha, a predominantly agricultural...