Architect, Marina Tabassum: Khudi Bari means tiny house, but it’s more than that.
I’m Marina Tabassum. I’m an architect.
It’s important to understand Bangladesh as this whole network of water. We have more than 700 rivers. And so, the land is constantly shaping and reshaping, and these sandbeds form in the middle of the river, which give place for marginalized people, who have no land ownership, to come and make their houses. They don’t know how long that sandbar will exist, so people need to move. It’s been happening for ages. And also, we started working on it during the COVID time, when a lot of people lost their jobs. And you'd see people moving, making a little shelter for themselves.
As architects, when you see somebody living in a situation like that, we thought, can we do something?
Khudi Bari—it’s a structural system, where you need a few steel corner joints to then plug them together with bamboo. And then, if you add these modules together, it can turn into a really large structure. It should not be too complicated for people to be able to build it or take it down or too heavy for people to carry when they have to move.
With climate change, flooding has increased. We also have thunderstorms. That’s why the Khudi Bari structure has this cross-bracing, which makes it sturdy enough to withstand that wind and water.
When we were doing our research, we asked a lot of people: I mean, this is a very difficult place to live, why do you still stay here? And the answer was, “this is home.” The notion of home and your connection to the ground is so sacred that you cannot really question that, so you just have to find a better way of giving that ability to move.