Adnan Zillur Morshed

THE GRUDGING URBANIST

Adnan Zillur Morshed, PhD, is an architect, architectural historian, urbanist, and public intellectual. He is a professor of architecture and architectural history at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and executive director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism at BRAC University. Morshed received his Ph.D. and Master’s in architecture from MIT, and BArch from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, where he also taught. He was a 2018 TEDxFoggyBottom speaker at George Washington University. He is the author of multiple books; among them, Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015), Oculus: A Decade of Insights into Bangladeshi Affairs (University Press Limited, 2012), DAC, Dhaka in 25 Buildings (Altrim Publishers, Barcelona, 2017), and River Rhapsody: A Museum of Rivers and Canals (BRAC University, 2018).

What does ‘good history’ look like?

No historian should be able to answer the question on good history without a degree of trepidation, ambivalence, and uncertainty.

4 November 2025, 04:00 AM

Bangladesh’s eunomia problem

In the ancient Greek society, eunomia outlined how things should be in an ideal society.

10 January 2025, 02:00 AM

Shamsul Wares: A teacher who inspired generations of architects

Aristotle once said, “Those who know, do. Those who understand, teach.” Shamsul Wares understood, and hence taught.

21 June 2024, 05:00 AM

Faujdarhat Cadet College / A post-Partition heritage campus worth preserving

FCC should not be viewed simply as one of the cadet colleges; it is a heritage campus that can be showcased to the world.

25 May 2024, 02:00 AM

Planning for Dhaka's new night

Dhaka should be readied for a nighttime culture that offers a potpourri of entertainment options to people.

17 May 2024, 01:00 AM

Has Dhaka become a status city?

The status city often serves the privileged, while the huddling masses eke out a minimal existence

26 January 2024, 02:00 AM

Is human civilisation at an inflection point?

Our brains are being reprogrammed to look for the easiest solutions to our most vexing social and political questions.

1 December 2023, 02:00 AM

Architecture for marginal communities.jpg

Is there an architecture for marginal communities?

Our experience of designing Brac regional offices across rural Bangladesh.

2 October 2023, 02:00 AM

The impending wrecking ball for another Dhaka masterpiece

I do not know how to respond to this barrage of apocalyptic news from Dhaka.

28 November 2020, 18:00 PM

SDGs, the tyranny of sameness, and a lesson for World Cities Day

Yesterday was World Cities Day (WCD). In 2013, the United Nations General Assembly designated October 31 as WCD to build global awareness of the challenges that cities around the world face.

31 October 2020, 18:00 PM

SDGs, the tyranny of sameness, and a lesson for World Cities Day

The world’s urban future is full of challenges. But one of the greatest among them is a simple but profound one: the universalisation of urban problems and their generic solutions.

30 October 2020, 18:02 PM

A looming tragedy in the University of Dhaka’s centennial celebration

Is this the right way to celebrate the centennial of the University of Dhaka in 2021? Like many of my colleagues in Bangladesh and around the world, I was horrified to learn that the university administration has made plans to demolish a 20th century architectural icon inside the university campus to expand and upgrade its insufficient facilities.

26 October 2020, 18:00 PM

What if a 7.9 Richter-scale earthquake hit Dhaka?

The runway of Dhaka’s international airport was torn asunder along the axis. The damage forced all international flights—carrying emergency medical supplies, food, temporary shelters, and heavy-duty rescue machines—to divert to Chittagong and Sylhet.

21 September 2020, 18:00 PM

Discrimination by design

I was reading a harrowing report in the New York Times that revealed startling data about how federal officials in the United States during the 1930s demarcated or “redlined” certain areas of different cities as “hazardous” or “risky for business,” based on the concentration of poor Black people or immigrants in them.

15 September 2020, 18:00 PM

To remove or not to remove?

Lincoln Park is our community hub on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Just a block away from where we have lived for nearly two decades, it is a magnificent swath of urban green, within walking distance from the US Capitol.

20 July 2020, 18:00 PM

How can Dhaka become more resilient to future pandemics?

Cities have generally been the epicentres of the devastation caused by Covid-19, fuelling debates around the world on how to make cities more resilient against future pandemics.

15 June 2020, 18:00 PM

Not rewarding honesty is promoting dishonesty

It is hard not to notice the frozen posture of BUET engineer MD Delwoar Hossain’s murdered body on the bank of the Turag river.

22 May 2020, 18:00 PM

Density is not the problem – lack of public health and social justice is

In America, one of the politically charged reactions to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has been the denigration of urban population density.

7 May 2020, 18:00 PM

Adieu, Architect Bashirul Haq

A Bangladeshi pioneer departed this world on Saturday, April 4, 2020. Architect Bashirul Haq was a poet who crafted his poems with the language of brick, green, light, air, and tactility.

5 April 2020, 18:00 PM

Bangabandhu and the Bengal Delta

It is fascinating that Bangabandhu began his Unfinished Memoirs (published in 2012) with an existential characterisation of his birthplace in geographic relationship to a river: the Madhumati river, which divides or connects the two southern districts of Faridpur and Khulna.

19 March 2020, 18:00 PM