Practical Symbolism

Marina Tabassum’s Khudi Bari, installed on the Vitra Campus (image: Julien Lanoo).

“It's a symbolic design,” says architect Marina Tabassum, sat in the shade of her Khudi Bari (“Small House” in Bangla), newly installed on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Raised up a single storey on a space frame of structural bamboo, the Khudi Bari is an airy single room accessed by a flight of steep steps. Inside, a breeze drifts through the house’s open windows, the space elegantly constructed from a shell of sheet metal, dark wooden slats and a pitched corrugated roof. “I don't see it as a purposeful building,” Tabassum continues. “It’s an archive.”

This, on the surface of things, is a surprising sentiment. First created in 2020, the Khudi Bari is a piece of architecture whose purpose could scarcely be more explicit. The house is a modular system that Tabassum and her studio designed for the marginalised landless population who live in the shifting sandbars of Bangladesh's Ganges Delta – a region in which flooding is common, land unstable, and property rights variable. The result of a longterm research project, the Khudi Bari’s form and construction methodology have been designed to provide cheap (approximately $500 per unit) housing that is readily erectable and dismountable within a landscape in which more traditional, permanent buildings founder. It is a housing design that meets a specific social problem with a practical solution.

“Two thirds of Bangladesh is actually the Ganges Delta,” Tabassum explains. “We have more than 700 rivers, and they are intertwined and interconnected – it's more of a waterscape than a landscape.” Within this context, land is frequently washed away, thereby displacing its inhabitants, while other land may emerge spontaneously in the form of sandbars that silt up in the centre of larger rivers such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna. These sandbars become inhabitable and farmable after approximately four years, but new legal challenges for their inhabitants arise at the eight-year mark. The rivers in the Ganges Delta naturally change their course over time, meaning that land in the delta is continually being lost as the rivers shift; due to a quirk of Bangladeshi law, however, which Tabassum attributes to the colonial period, titles to any land that has been lost to the river may be reasserted eight years after the emergence of a sandbar. Should a sandbar develop in the same location as submerged land to which a title was formerly held, the property rights from the former site automatically transfer to the sandbar. “Because there are papers, they’re a kind of inheritance,” Tabassum explains, “so those papers come down from one generation to the next, even without any sign of [the former land].” As such, the people who move to live on and farm the sandbars that emerge from the rivers “do not invest a lot of money in housing because they know this is not their land, [as] they don't have land rights,” Tabassum adds, with the sandbars also capable of being swallowed up by the rivers just as readily as they allow them to emerge. “So they quite often just make a makeshift house.”

The Khudi Bari is a response to this ecological and legal reality, with Tabassum’s work drawing upon and rendering more affordable an existing Bangladeshi vernacular for flat-pack housing – something Tabassum has previously explored as part of her Inheriting Wetness research project (“A local vernacular IKEA that we developed 100 years ago,” she quips). Tabassum’s take on the form meets the essential criteria determined by the nature of the region. The Khudi Bari is raised up so that people’s living quarters are protected in the event of flooding, and designed to be constructed using whatever local materials are readily available (the only custom elements are a series of steel joints that the studio provides through a foundation that oversees the Khudi Baris’ distribution). Moreover, the structure had been conceived such that it can be quickly constructed and deconstructed by the communities that it actually serves. Around 100 have already been distributed throughout the Bay of Bengal, and Tabassum’s design has drawn praise as a sensitive, intelligent response to issues of geography and land ownership, particularly given that climate collapse has increased glacial melt from the Himalayas, heavily exacerbating the challenges faced by those living in the delta.” People are getting displaced within the country from one location to another,” Tabassum notes. “They're losing their homes, becoming landless. They don't have a place to make their houses.”

The Khudi Bari is a testament to the potential of informed, socially-responsive design in a time of crisis. So, what’s one doing on the Vitra Campus, the alpine architectural enclave of a Swiss furniture manufacturer whose social, economic and climactic realities could scarcely be more different to the communities that the Khudi Bari is intended to serve? If the normal Khudi Baris are purposeful architecture, what does it mean for Tabassum’s “archival” version to exist on the opposite side of the world?

The Vitra Campus, at least in its contemporary form, began life in 1981 with the creation of a prefabricated factory building, which was designed by Nicholas Grimshaw following a fire that destroyed former production facilities on the site. In the years that have followed, Vitra has regularly added new buildings, all of which have been executed by leading architects and designers. Today, the campus offers a remarkably dense concentration of structures by Pritzker Prize winners and their ilk, housing buildings that veer between the industrially functional (factory buildings by Álvaro Siza and SANAA); the cultural and museological (the Vitra Design Museum of Frank Gehry and the archival Schaudepot of Herzog & de Meuron; the historical (reconstructions of Kazuo Shinohara’s Umbrella House and Richard Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic Dome); the notionally functional (the working, but almost excessively lovely bus stops of Jasper Morrison, or the fire station of Zaha Hadid, whose architecturally thrilling angles render it ill-suited to the practicalities of fighting fires – a purpose for which it was swiftly abandoned); and assorted interventions that chiefly exist to delight the residents of, and day trippers to, the campus (Carsten Höller’s gleeful slide or Piet Oudolf’s beautiful garden). It is a site that is frequently described as an architectural theme park.

Into this mix, the Khudi Bari represents a curious addition. The structure’s emphasis on climate is, on the one hand, fully in keeping with recent work undertaken by Vitra’s CEO Nora Fehlbaum, a third-generation member of Vitra’s founding Fehlbaum family. Fehlbaum was appointed to lead the business in 2016 and has explicitly described her tenure in terms of environmental concerns. “The way we think about it,” Fehlbaum explained at the press conference for the Khudi Bari’s unveiling, “the first generation set out to build a commercial enterprise; the second generation added to that commercial enterprise a cultural mission; […and] as the third generation, we are setting out on an environmental mission.” Here, there is a clear connection to Tabassum’s intentions with the Khudi Bari. ”The reason I decided that we could come here is because it is symbolic of the time of climate crisis,” she says. “We're building it in the Bangladeshi context, [where perhaps] nobody knows about it. When you have it here in a place where a lot of people visit, it gives us symbolic attention.” It is, in this sense, a fixed archive of the more nomadic Khudi Baris in Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, there are potential dangers to transporting a hyper-local solution from the context in which it was designed to a wealthy campus in which it will inevitably become, at least in part, an object of aesthetic appreciation. The Khudi Bari system is thoughtful, economic and climate-sensitive, but its location in the Vitra Campus (positioned just off the Oudolf garden) emphasises a different quality to the design: its sheer loveliness. In Vitra’s version, the rawness of some of the Khudi Baris that are in-situ in Bangladesh is replaced with the picturesque: the structure is finished to a high degree by the company’s construction team, who have also used leftover bamboo and residual bricks from the nearby Siza factory to create a beautiful picnicking area that accompanies the house – an addition that mimics designs for furniture that Tabassum and her collaborators created in Bangladesh, but whose more bucolic context in Weil am Rhein invariably shifts the lens through which the structure itself is viewed. Of course, there is nothing wrong with disaster relief architecture also being aesthetic. Shigeru Ban’s humanitarian paper and cardboard structures are no less serious and practical for being beautiful, for instance, and there is a reverse snobbishness at play in the idea that such structures should solely concentrate on function at the expense of the more ephemeral virtues that would be sought in other structures. “Some people do not have enough funding, so they just use salvaged corrugated sheets, which are kind of dilapidated,” notes Tabassum of the manner in which Khudi Baris have hitherto been constructed in Bangladesh. “But even then, we still try to create a pattern so that it looks nice and dignified.” It is worth remembering that no Khudi Bari is purely functional, but rather all exist as working homes that embody myriad different forms of value that we would take for granted in a more permanent building.

In spite of this, there remains a legitimate question as to whether the Khudi Bari’s social meaning is shifted out of focus in its translation from practical solution to symbolic archive. In the summer sun, resplendent in its Alpine idyll, the Khudi Bari reads less as urgent and effective housing, and more as a charming garden house in the vein of 2023’s addition to the Vitra Campus, Tsuyoshi Tane’s Tane Garden House (a project that was undeniably beautiful, as well as intelligently concerning itself with climate and sustainable construction through its use of local materials and building techniques). It is a risk to which the company is alert, with Rolf Fehlbaum, Vitra’s chairman emeritus, acknowledging in his opening remarks at the Khudi Bari’s unveiling that “you can of course ask, ‘Why would Vitra do or show something which is actually an answer to a [social issue] in Bangladesh?’ […]It could be read a bit as exoticism. But it’s really not that.”

Perhaps the best justification for the Khudi Bari’s addition to Weil am Rhein is that Vitra has always sought for its campus to play home to first-class architecture, drawing in practitioners from around the world whose work the company believes should be celebrated. While earlier additions to the campus were frequently monolithic and self-consciously assertive in their design (influenced, perhaps, by the fact that the early additions were chiefly industrial and cultural buildings), the Khudi Bari makes a stirring case that another form of architecture worth celebrating can also be (and perhaps, ought to be in climate-straitened times) site-specific, light, and flexible. More recent additions to the campus, such as Tane’s thatched Garden House (2023), and Oudolf’s garden (2020), have prioritised forms of architecture and construction that seek to engage with issues of climate and landscape, sitting sensitively within their environment rather than imposing themselves upon it.

The Khudi Bari continues this approach towards the campus’s growth, and the Fehlbaums and their team deserve considerable credit for acknowledging that the era of starchitecture in which the campus first blossomed has passed (at least critically speaking), and for adjusting their commissioning strategy accordingly. Today, Vitra seems to have pivoted to prioritising more socially-engaged, climate responsive forms of practice that are in-line with the architectural discourse of the 2020s. “I think it's an important contribution on our campus,” Rolf Fehlbaum remarked upon the Khudi Bari’s opening, “and shows that architects have a social role, and that the architecture of resilience can also be beautiful.”

Happily, the Khudi Bari has been installed in the campus next to a structure with which it shares a certain similarity: Renzo Piano’s 2013 Diogene. A research project begun by Piano in the early 2000s, Diogene is a cabin that serves as a “single-occupancy living unit which functions in total autonomy as a self-contained system”. Replete with all the necessities of life, as well as its own internal power and water supply, Piano’s design is intended to provide a comprehensive living space wherever it might be installed. Diogene is not emergency housing, but Piano’s studio acknowledge that the intention of its design is for the cabin to “function in complete autonomy, in varying climatic conditions, independent of its environment.” It is a fascinating structure, managing its environment through the use of expensive technical systems, but its interest in operating independently of its surroundings perhaps betrays its age: today, the approach of Tabassum, in which architecture seeks to operate within its environment, is seen as a more contemporary, essential form of practice. Diogene is ingenious, but specifically designs against its environment; Khudi Bari, by contrast, designs in concert with the ecological and social realities it finds itself within. If the Vitra Campus is to serve as an architectural theme park, it is only right that new additions to its grounds should represent exciting and daring forms of contemporary architecture (even if the issues to which they respond are of the utmost seriousness): in 2024, the Khudi Bari seems a fitting standard-bearer for this kind of progressive practice.

Words Oli Stratford

Vitra paid for Disegno’s trip to visit Khudi Bari.

Material Connection