The campus park is the public interface and heart of the university. Given the urban lake site, the vision is to present an innovative and sustainable inner city campus that exemplifies tropical design strategies in response to the hot, humid, monsoon climate while demonstrating the sensitive integration of nature and architecture. The main design strategy is to create two distinct programmatic strata by floating the academia above the lake and revealing a campus park below.
Social interaction spaces are incorporated throughout the university to allow for both planned and spontaneous student activities. Differing scales and types of social spaces cater to varying group sizes, all designed for maximum comfort and interaction, with dynamic visual links across levels allowing students to observe activities happening across voids. The building section is designed to catch the breezes and direct them to these gathering spaces, while providing shelter from sun and rain.
Sim Choon Heok (centre) and Richard Hassall (right) of WOHA receive a Global Awards Finalist 2018 certificate for the design for BRAC University’s new campus in Bangladesh on behalf of the project team including WOHA, J A Architects and Transsolar Energietechnik from Edward Schwarz, representing the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction.
Remediating a wetland and floating a new university above it, this project adds both open and built space to the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
By Mun Summ Wong - National University of Singapore (NUS), School of Design & Environment, Department of Architecture, Singapore and
Ideas: Embodied Carbon , Urban Requalification
This project achieves the impossible: it adds both built and open space to the city. The site is polluted swampland within Dhaka.
Working with the client, an NGO-run university by BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), the project team proposes a building that floats above the pond.
Project authors
WOHA
Singapore
J.A. Architects
Bangladesh
