The event “Architecture as a Way of Life and Placemaking” was certainly not business as usual at the Center for Architecture. As AIANY Architecture for Education Committee Co-chair, Umberto Dindo, FAIA, said, it felt like a meditation on the universe, life, space, and sensations with the pictures falling into place. That feeling was already present when AIANY 2014 President Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, in his opening remarks, invoked and recited a poem by the great Bangladeshi poet Rabindranath Tagore, the literary Nobel Laureate of 1913, who’s poetic strength he credited with helping him in a very difficult period of his life.
Unusual also, because – how many times do you have a chance to meet an architect who prefers to sketch with watercolors rather than with a pencil? How many architects accept that we are not destined to change the world, but only to change ourselves and our designs? And perhaps most exceptionally – how many architects find the courage to move forward after teachers tell them to change their profession because they don’t deserve more than a failing grade? Luckily for us, Rafiq Azam, principal of Dhaka-based SHATOTTO architecture for green living, did. Continue reading “Rafiq Azam: The Poetry of Architecture and Watercolors of Bangladesh”