Kar ghor eta? Rahna ghor kothay? Ke ekhane thake?
Whose room is this? Where is the kitchen? Who stays here?
A woman outside of her mud home in one of the villages near the Panigram site.
Over the last couple weeks, we three interns explored a village near the Panigram site to learn about the Bangladeshi homestead. Read the rest of this entry »
Now, after almost two weeks of settling into our humble abode in Jessore, we interns, have become quite adjusted to our new lifestyle abroad. We eat our egg and ruti in the morning before our hour-long autorickshaw ride to the project site; a ride which often makes me think of getting pulled down bumpy sidewalks as a child in my little red metal wagon. Here, though, the sidewalk is eight feet wider and trucks stacked twenty feet high with local goods like hay, bricks, or goats (though not usually all three together…) fight at top speeds for the extra sliver of road beside me.
Millie waits for our driver Rafik in the autorickshaw.
This is the third summer now that I have been fortunate enough to have interns. This year I have two Cornellians and a student from the University of Edinburgh, all architecture students keen to learn about mud buildings.
The interns spent their first night at my house in Dhaka. I immediately put them to work on an arts and crafts project, but jet lag caught up with them and craft time soon turned into nap time.
Jet lag catches up with the interns as craft time turns into nap time...
Chi Chi stands with her carpentry team
No construction project every progresses according to plan; Bangladesh is no exception. Workers show up hours late, materials arrive of the wrong specifications, and the weather doesn’t always cooperate. As the architecture intern for Panigram, Chi Chi knows first hand the difficulties that arise during construction projects in Bangladesh.
Rising every morning at six A.M., Chi Chi faced the challenge of working with unfamiliar building materials, supervising her first construction project, and leading a construction team as a female in a male-dominated culture. Last night, I had the opportunity to sit down with Chi Chi and discuss the details of her pavilion project. We talked about her design, her team, and how she managed to overcome the many difficulties that arose while building the pavilion.
BRIAN: This is your first project, Chi Chi. Can you describe the challenges that you faced as a young architect working with an international crew?
The mud pit was empty, the rice straw hadn’t arrived, and the cows were nowhere to be found. When we arrived, we found our workers taking a prolonged smoke break, burning daylight with their tobacco with nothing to show for the hours they were supposed to have already worked.
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck and Luke Morton requires Flash Player 9 or better.
Kristin Boekhoff
Owner, Panigram Resort
kboekhoff@panigram.com
Mikey Leung
Designer and Web Guru, Panigram.com
mikey@panigram.com
