National Assembly Building of Bangladesh by Louis Kahn

This is a building I would love to visit.
Louis Kahn has interested me ever since I started doing architecture.
Khan was considered to be a modernist but his work is distinguished from other contemporary architects of that time and in my opinion this building is special.

The National Assembly Building of Bangladesh could not (with favor) be moved anywhere else.
It has context, and it uses it beautifully. The monolithic is there throughout Khans oeuvres, here it melds together with pakistani/bengali tradition and takes on a new identity. It has strong identity and place.
The surrounding water and the light creates the conditions and the richness that the space plays with.
The concrete gets to play a well-favored role as it meets with the water and is mass but at the same time merges geometric openings that flood in light.
The halls are aligned around a central parliamentary grand chamber at the heart of the building,
which does not only fit the program as a core but also conceptualizes the light as space that Khan had in mind.
To me, this building has a certain inherit prime of sci-fi film mystery.

Still-image from the documentary 'My architect'

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

'Brutal/beautiful?' from http://ilbonito.wordpress.com

Via Archidaily by Naquib Hossain

Geometry

Architecture as meteorology

Philippe Rahm Architectes is a Paris-based architecture practice led by swiss architect Philippe Rahm.

Their philosophy is towards a meteorological architecture. This is how their approach is explained on their website:  

'Climate change is forcing us to rethink architecture radically, to shift our focus away from a purely visual and functional approach towards one that is more sensitive, more attentive to the invisible, climate-related aspects of space. Slipping from the solid to the void, from the visible to the invisible, from metric composition to thermal composition, architecture as meteorology opens up additional, more sensual, more variable dimensions in which limits fade away and solids evaporate. 

The task is no longer to build images and functions but to open up climates and interpretations. 

At the large scale, meteorological architecture explores the atmospheric and poetic potential of new construction techniques for ventilation, heating, dual-flow air renewal and insulation.'

Make architecture an actual cloud. If the sublime is experienced with all senses and architecture in space has the power to bestow these, architecture as meteorology makes perfect sense if it is effective.

At zona Tortona, Milan 2009 Philippe Rahm created “De-Territorialized Mileus, a “climate-related performance installation” that considers the relationships between indoor and outdoor and artificial and natural surroundings. His working hypothesis was on display as futuristic forms of air purification, heating and lighting, all which have the end goal of “naturalizing” an indoor living space in phase with the external environment, but without the negative effects of atmospheric pollution and global warming. (http://inhabitat.com/the-best-of-zona-tortona/)