Architect Emran & Associates

07/08/2026

The Pencil Clearing Its Throat, July 2026

03/08/2026

This project began almost ten years ago. Since then, the people who first imagined it have gradually disappeared from the project. I left the consultancy six years ago. Colleagues moved on. The police officers who patiently followed every drawing and decision were promoted and transferred. New teams inherited the work, each leaving their own mark along the way.

A building, in a sense, becomes orphaned long before it is completed.

Looking at these recent construction photographs, I couldn't help thinking about something Rem Koolhaas once said: architecture is an unbelievably slow discipline/profession. By the time a building is completed, the world, the sensibilities and the circumstances that gave rise to the original idea are often no longer there.

This building belongs to that condition.

Conceived in 2016-17, it has taken almost a decade to arrive here. The exterior changed in places, responding to decisions made long after the original design team had dispersed. Yet its essential spatial ideas remain intact.

Architecture may be the only creative practice in which an idea must survive so many departures before it can become real.
After nearly a decade, it is satisfying to see the project approaching completion.

The Team: Farzana Nasrin, Nabila Binte Nasir, Sanam Gulrokh Sathi, Engg. Sharif Tanvir, Engg. Mahmud, Saiful Islam (Draftsman), Jamal Hossain (Draftsman). // Addl. Deputy Inspector General Dr. Shoeb Riaz Alam, Superintendent of Police Mr. Shah Abid Hossain (Cumilla), Addl. SP Abu Sufian Ahmed, Addl. SP Abdul Halim, Senior ASP Mahmud.

25/07/2026

Architecture does not end when a building is completed. It continues in the way it is documented, remembered, and experienced.

With that thought in mind, several months were spent designing a website that could serve not simply as an archive, but as another architectural space, new home for our work.

We are pleased that this approach has received a //CSSWinner// “Nominee” selection.
https://www.csswinner.com/details/architect-emran-and-associates/19322

We hope the website itself is the real reward.

https://ar-ea.com/projects/design/architect-emran-and-associates-website

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Detailed overview of the Architect Emran And Associates Website architectural project by Architect Emran And Associates. Discover innovative design solutions.

10/07/2026

www.ar-ea.com

The site is now live!

Explore our dedicated desktop/laptop and mobile experiences, each designed with care.

Thank you for your patience and for being with us.

// A special dedication to a dear friend: wishing you strength, healing, and better days ahead. We're all rooting for you.\

Architect Emran And Associates is a leading architectural firm in Bangladesh, delivering innovative design solutions and architectural excellence. We perceive the skyline not as a limit, but as a canvas for the extraordinary.

29/06/2026

09/06/2026

This project was completed 21 years ago under the guidance of two remarkable architects, Adam Caruso and Peter St. John. It marked a significant shift in my architectural sensibility; a reorientation from an absorbed and inherited way of seeing toward a more deliberate and critical vantage point.

At its core was an interest in banality, not as something accidental or unexamined, but as a conscious and precise intention. Banality became a form of resistance: an attempt to distill architecture to its bare necessities and expose the essential logic of construction. Positioned at a prominent intersection in Manhattan, the building’s mute double-height corner both echoes the industrial traces of its context, allowing the memory of infrastructure and passing train lines to remain present, while resisting the pressure to become a commercially expressive object. In doing so, it offers a quiet, almost withdrawn presence, a kind of visual and psychosocial refuge within the intensity of the street, asking little attention while allowing space for pause.

This sensibility was shaped by a range of references that worked less as stylistic models and more as ways of seeing. Thomas Struth’s photography revealed the city as a field of repetition where ordinary objects accumulate into cultural memory. The industrial landscapes of Bernd and Hilla Becher reinforced this through their systematic documentation of water towers, blast furnaces, and factory structures, where repetition and typological comparison exposed how purely functional engineering decisions can generate unexpected aesthetic and spatial clarity, and how even obsolete industrial forms retain a latent energy for reinterpretation and renewal.

Louis Sullivan’s Guaranty Building further clarified the role of surface, ornament, and detail in shaping architectural intensity. Its terracotta exterior and meticulously resolved interiors, down to handrails and decorative transitions, demonstrate how richness of detail can reinforce the unity of the whole rather than fragment it. In contrast, Sigurd Lewerentz’s work, particularly his idea of the brick as a “lump of clay,” shifted attention toward material rawness, where thick mortar joints, uneven assemblies, and seemingly suspended windows transform construction into an almost primitive yet deeply intentional act, foregrounding the expressive capacity of basic building elements.

At the time, I lacked the skills and tools to fully capture the essence of this project within its context. Looking at it again now, AI has offered a different lens, one that makes it possible to revisit and reframe the work with a renewed sense of clarity and provocation.

02/06/2026

Architect Shahidullah Faruq has a remarkable ability to uncover meaningful possibilities within the ordinary. With “ReRe Pencil,” he reimagined a simple yet pressing social issue as an opportunity for empowerment and change. Developed for the KOKUYO Design Award 2025 with design and research support from me and B. M. Tahammul Kabir, the project transforms discarded newspapers into hand-rolled recycled pencils. The name “ReRe” reflects this double cycle of reuse: newspapers are already made from recycled paper, and are then recycled once again into a new educational tool. By drawing on the existing skills of underprivileged women engaged in bidi-making (cigarette), the project creates an alternative source of dignified livelihood while producing affordable pencils for children. More than a product, “ReRe Pencil” demonstrates how thoughtful design can turn waste into opportunity, generating social value, restoring dignity, and extending the life of materials through a second act of recycling.

30/04/2026

We rarely discuss ideas like “morality” or “virtue” within the domain of architecture. Yet these concepts are so deeply embedded in our existence that, even when we are reluctant, indifferent, or choose to ignore them, they continue to shape how we perceive and construct reality; the very framework within which we operate.

In our work, we respond, propose, critique, and recommend. We shape experiences, suggest solutions, and at times even prescribe ways of living. But underlying all of this is an implicit moral compass; an idea of virtue, that quietly informs our decisions.

The time we are living through has prompted many of us to reflect on where we stand. Each of us develops our own understanding of these questions, attempting to make sense of them socially, existentially, spiritually, and beyond. Otherwise, what anchors our sense of self and purpose?

This video speaks to that core human concern with remarkable clarity. Cinema, as a medium, has always been powerful, but here it becomes a tool for articulating something deeply philosophical. What is particularly striking is how the speaker uses cinema monologues (“Goldilocks”) to frame his argument with utmost intelligence, and how he organizes a complex subject into a structured, coherent, and nuanced poetic narrative.

It provokes, invokes, and evokes, all at once. In a way, it feels like a different kind of architecture.

Hope you enjoy it.

Start your free month of great cinema now at https://mubi.com/likestoriesofold To act in this world is to put yourself in moral peril, to shake the foundatio...