Discussion on bridging "Deshbe'desh"

Abdullah Motaleb and Martina Motaleb

Talking about the haphazard mushrooming of multi-storied buildings at Dhanmondi, Kolabagan, and now at Banani and even in the vicinity of the Osmani Memorial Hall, Abdullah said, "I don't know them in particular but I do see them in Dhanmondi. I've been running around this part of the city for the last few days that I've come here. I was brought up in Dhanmondi: it's a part of my childhood. I was here in Bangladesh till five years ago. Coming back three years ago I feel this has an emotional impact as you miss your childhood as everything has changed. I try to look at things in a professional fashion. It was all very different in my childhood days: things change all the time but not to its best and I have a feeling, that more I look at it, places are not changing for the best interest of the people who live here."

Asked to suggest some remedies and go into further details in the discussion, Abdullah said, "In the last few days we've spoken to quite a few architects. We're building opinions of our own while talking to friends: we have some ideas on which we'll think about when we return home. Only after we've done that can we come up with a vision about what we think should be done in Dhanmondi. We'll be taking a few papers and plans with us. You cannot say ad hoc that this is good or bad for you.

"We came here at the invitation of Goethe Institut," Abdullah said, when asked what brought him to Dhaka, "We've developed our 'language' and we found that our heritage is very important for us. Our seminar was a juxtaposition of 'be'desh' and 'desh' to allow a view to a space occupied by pre-judged opinion and possible conflicts. Concealed there one can discover possibilities and hope. Our seminar and exhibition are projects that survey the space provided by the dialectic of the name giving term 'deshbe'desh'. "We've tried to put both our backgrounds, Martina coming from Germany and my being brought up partly in Bangladesh and partly in Germany, and try to say what can be done to combine the elements as we put them in architecture. We develop our architecture around it and a friend of ours came to Bangladesh and he proposed an exhibition to the Goethe Institut, which immediately reacted and had us brought here. We'll, in time, study the city and the country."

Asked how they had amalgamated old edifices with new buildings in German town like Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne, Martina said, "They didn't amalgamate them as such: they only built new ones beside the old ones." Talking about whether it was easier for them to do this than when we do it in Bangladesh, without making it a hotchpotch in the final analysis, Martina said, "In Germany too we need more planning as we need to preserve some of the old buildings : in one centre in a city the constructions can be high, while in other parts they can be low."

Abdullah talking about the Indian Embassy at Berlin that the Motalebs had designed, said, "I was the project architect for the firm 'Leon Wohl Hage-wernik': about eight architectural offices had been invited to join that competition. We had two thoughts:

a) how people would move through the building, that the figure of meandering was quite appropriate in the Indian sense b) we wanted some materials to be brought out from India such as the stones that interested us: we took the Indian red sandstone for the surface and that was prefabricated in India. There is a greenish floor which was also prefabricated in India as were also the 'jalis' which were also done by the Indian craftsmen."

"Our construction at Santiniketan," Abdullah said, when asked to dwell on that, "was quite interesting and the job was after our own hearts. We tried to build a vision of what we thought was appropriate for the situation at Santiniketan that would be used by the local people and the foreigners who came there to study or simply visit. Tagore's heritage is thus preserved in 'Tagore Einstein Centre'. We tried to keep the two great men in mind and transformed, in some ways, the personalities of the two into a kind of architecture."

Giving their professional backgrounds, Abdullah explained that they had been practicing for the last twelve years in Berlin and Munich and in the last two years they had tried to promote their own office "Motaleb Architects", stressing on simplicity and suavity in their projects of all sizes. They want to give people space to rest as the world around zooms past them: they took care to provide places of retreat. The exhibit shown at Goethe Institut presented part of the works that they had done.

The couple met, as Martina elaborated, at a theatre workshop near Augsburg, 20 years ago and today they have two boys, Nathaniel and Rapheal, 15 and 18. She said that they worked their lives around the children and had no problems combining career with rearing children and seeing to household chores sans domestic help. It was refreshing to meet such a bright-eyed, contented and career-oriented couple of architects.