Meditations in Entropy

Over three decades, Dhaka-based architecture firm Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA has produced an astonishing collection of works of divergent scales, typologies, and contexts located in one of the most meteorologically challenging regions in the world. A hospital introduced into an economy decimated by rising oceans, a shelter against cyclones in Bangladesh’s southern coastal region, and architectural interventions in one of the world’s densest metropolitan areas: Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA’s designs are incisive, critical responses to varied issues and urgencies rooted in the belief that architecture must be a reflection of, and sympathetic to, increasingly fragile ecological conditions.

Meditations in Entropy is the first comprehensive book on the work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA. It features 16 of the firm’s designs in detail through photographs by acclaimed architectural photographer Hélène Binet as well as numerous plans, drawings, sketches, and other images. Perceptive essays are contributed by eminent critics and historians, Kenneth Frampton, Robert McCarter, and William J.R. Curtis. A conversation between Chowdhury, Swiss architect Niklaus Graber, and distinguished architectural historian Philip Ursprung, further analyzing URBANA’s unique approach, rounds off this volume.