58
SP: It was a big question as no joint embassies
had been purpose-built, except for some interest-
ing Nordic Embassies regrouping Scandinavian
countries such as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,
in Nepal for example. However these embassies
were always housed in one building with no
specific identity from outside, more like a common
aesthetic under the ‘Nordic’ identity. It was also
a competition with 10 teams from France,
Germany, and Bangladesh, organised in 2009. It
meant that for winning the competition, we had
to come up with a big idea that would carry the
project through. Then came the idea of duality in
a single building, a duality that would be expressed
as typology.
Our team was Franco-Bangla; I had the chance to
associate with SelimBiplob from Synthesis
Architects for this project.
We won the competition against famous architects
from Bangladesh like Rafiq Azam, and the final
against the Germano-Bangla team — Axel Schultes
and Marina Tabassum. Soon after the results of
the competition were published, I had a glance at
the other projects and was surprised to see that
none of the projects had addressed the issue of
two countries together. These were good projects
of single embassies, and not specifically French
or German for that matter.
KM: How did the design emerge — from what set
of ideas, notions, and thoughts?
SP: The design emerged at the Boston airport
where I was killing time at the cafeteria, coming
back from MIT to India after a conference organ-
ised by Rahul Mehrotra with the Aga Khan Pro-
gramme there, on the relation of history and con-
temporary architecture. It was also a time I was
playing a lot ofJenga with my then four-year-old
daughter. It occurred to me that the structure ofThis spread, and next spread, left:
Images of the lobby area of the
building. The structure and design of
the Franco German Embassy
building is perhaps a prototype of
what European embassies could
become in the future
Next spread, top-right: the corners of
the plot are reminiscent of the layout
of the ‘Char Bagh’ (the tradition of
the four -part Mughal gardens) with
ample green spaces; bottom-right:
every entity is accorded its share of
exposure — for instance, continuity is
insured by two staircases facing
each other around the corridor