Architect behind Serpentine Gallery’s annual pavilion is also tackling Bangladesh’s museums crisis

It’s been a busy year for Marina Tabassum, the first South Asian architect to design London’s annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. Her installation will be unveiled in Hyde Park on Friday 6 June, but she started work on it last summer, just as a popular revolution rocked her native Bangladesh. After a 15-year-old dictatorship crumbled in the space of a few short weeks, Tabassum was put in charge of five of the country’s museums as well as setting up a new one, dedicated to the recent uprising. It is a fitting role for someone whose architectural practice has always sought to sustain Bangladesh’s regional materials an Indigenous communities and cultures.

When she started working in the country’s capital, Dhaka, in the 1990s, 8 million people lived in the city, which was established by the Mughals in a bend of the broad Buriganga river and then enlarged by the British to administer the province of East Bengal. In the late 20th century, the city was a comparatively relaxed place, with wide avenues, solid brick villas and large orchards. Today, its population exceeds 24 million, its highways are chaotic and its infrastructure is inadequate to the demand. Once, you could drive from Tabassum’s neighbourhood to the airport in 20 minutes; now it can take more than two hours.

“There is a huge housing crisis in Dhaka,” Tabassum tells The Art Newspaper in her Dhaka office. “People migrate to the city because there is a total lack of opportunity in other parts of the country. It’s not a choice, it’s a necessity.” Typically, developers make enormous profits by building multistorey concrete apartment buildings on individual plots. Tabassum, though, prefers to work with materials such as wood, brick and mud, which are abundant locally. “I’m more interested in architecture that has a certain impact,” she says.

Through the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (Face), which she founded in 2018, Tabassum designs low-cost modular housing units for people living on islands in Bangladesh’s low-lying delta or on rivers so wide you cannot see from bank to bank. Known as chars, these islands flood regularly and frequently disappear altogether, but local communities depend on them for their livelihoods and homes. “There are houses on the chars which have survived generations but have moved about 15 times,” she says.

Flood-resistant housing

With Bangladesh increasingly under threat from climate change and river erosion, these communities are having to move more frequently and are struggling to make ends meet. Tabassum therefore designed for char-dwellers a model house she called the Khudi Bari. Communities assemble these easily built houses under the supervision of a carpenter appointed by Face, working to Tabassum’s plan. “It’s just a structure with two levels that is strong enough to withstand thunderstorms and water pressure when it floods,” she says. “So now they don’t have to move away during flooding – they can open the façade of the lower floor so the water can pass through.”

The project was designed with sustainability in mind. “We help them with materials like the wood and the steel connectors, which are the most sophisticated element of the whole design, but they have to give their time and labour, so they are really partners in the project,” Tabassum says. So far, it has been a success. “When you have to move constantly, you lose the desire to make anything beautiful, but now we see people are adding things to the houses, using them differently. It’s nice to see.”

Tabassum’s Serpentine Pavilion builds on the same principles. It is inspired by tent-like structures, known as shamiyana—made of patterned fabric stretched over a usually wooden frame—that are used throughout South Asia for hosting events, such as weddings or religious festivals. Their temporality has particular resonance for her. “All throughout the subcontinent, people’s dwellings are made of fragile materials that are sourced from nature, so they have a shorter timeline and need to be renewed quite often.” It is through use that they are preserved, so Tabassum has prioritised the experience of being inside the structure. “We tried to capture the feeling of being inside it—the light that is quite translucent.”

Much of the culture she is preserving as chairperson of the governing body of Bangladesh’s National Museum is characterised by the same sort of impermanence. For example, the country’s rich heritage of folk art—including painted terracotta sculpture, strikingly fine scroll paintings known as pattachitra, and intricate, embroidered patchworks called nakhshi kantha—was essential to the aesthetic sensibility of 20th-century artists such as Quamrul Hasan and Zainul Abedin, central figures in the development of Bangladeshi modern art.

“Folk art isn’t frozen in time,“ Tabassum says. “Some things, like the quality of the craftsmanship, have been lost, but they have also carried on being used.” For now, her biggest challenge is to get these and many other fragile and valuable artefacts in Bangladeshi state collections properly catalogued and curated. “The museums have such rich collections, but they are not seen in public, because 90% is kept in reserves.”

In a cash-strapped country, museums have never been a priority, but, even so, Bangladesh has plumbed shocking depths. Galleries lack curators, storage units lack air conditioning and dehumidifiers, and whole museums lack inventories. “Our first priority is to look at how things are being looked after and documented,” Tabassum says. “Then we need to find proper curation.”

Bangladesh has an extraordinary wealth of modern painting, printmaking and sculpture that deserves a place alongside the great achievements of Asian Modernism. It is just beginning to be discovered by international buyers, but has been neglected inside the country for decades, with thousands of the best works lying unseen in government storage. In many ways, the reasons for this tell the story of modern Bangladesh: corruption, politicisation and the degradation of institutions.

Tabassum is determined to reverse that neglect. “It’s our cultural heritage, our identity—we have a duty to preserve it.” She is, though, working with a tight budget and a bureaucracy where change is glacial. For an architect who has always valued impact, the task may well be her most critical.

• Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London, 6 June-26 October