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National Assembly Building,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Designed and built by Louis Kahn,
posthumously completed in 1983.

Just seeing it in photographs fairly takes one’s breath away. In Raymond Meier’s color pictures and, especially, in Nathaniel Kahn’s film My Architect, the National Assembly Building—known in Bengali as Sher-e-Bangla Nagar—comes across as Louis Kahn’s most supremely beautiful accomplishment. Particularly in the shots taken at dawn or twilight, the structure glimmers across its surrounding pool of water like a fairy-tale castle or a visionary dream brought to life.

The building is indeed remarkable, and it may well be Kahn’s masterpiece, but the experience of encountering it in person is much more complicated than those lovely images would suggest. At first glance, when seen at some distance, it is downright strange, so strange that its oddity rather than its beauty is the dominant impression. Hulking alone against the skyline, looming above an otherwise flat plain, this weirdly striped cluster of variously shaped walls, some curving, some flat, some punctured by giant cut-outs, defines itself first of all as unique. It is not just the only building of its kind in Dhaka or Bangladesh. It is the only one in the world.

This is not to say that there are not discernible influences, as there always are when something is this powerful. No one can build such a masterpiece alone: a good architect needs to stand on the shoulders of others. In this case, you can see traces of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh (another government complex set on an artificial lake) as well as older and more anonymously designed structures like Sarkej Roza in India or Castel del Monte in Italy. The former is a geometrically patterned Islamic structure lapped at its edges by water, its sunlit squares alternating with deep shade; the latter is an octagonal castle with full-height corner towers, carved out of pale limestone and visible for miles around. One cannot swear that Kahn was thinking of any of these buildings when he designed the Dhaka Parliament, just as one cannot be sure how clearly he remembered the medieval castle surrounded by a moat that he saw on Saaremaa, the Estonian island where he spent his earliest years. But some or all of these buildings were almost certain to have gone into the making of his Dhaka Assembly. (This is, after all, the man who simultaneously denied and admitted being influenced by any architectural antecedents, dryly noting, for instance, “I have a book of castles and I try to pretend that I did not look at this book but everybody reminds me of it and I have to admit that I looked very thoroughly at this book.”) Even so, none of these possible predecessors is quite as startling, in its context, as the National Assembly of Bangladesh. Part of what Kahn’s building seems to declare, in fact, is the very impossibility of its presence in that place—as if the surprise of its having been constructed at all were to be preserved in perpetuity.

As you approach, this initial strangeness does not wear off. Depending on the angle of your approach, the building takes on different shapes, with one side emphasizing its cylindrical towers, another its obliquely angled walls. There is no way to grasp the pattern of the whole from down on the ground. All you can be sure of, as you get closer and closer, is that something important takes place here. The high walls have an imposing quality that is strengthened rather than softened by the alternating bands of concrete and marble, the textured gray marked off vertically and horizontally by the smoother white.

Those distinctive marble stripes, one of the most noticeable features of the design, actually arose in response to a local construction problem. In the Dhaka of that time, the only way to pour this amount of concrete was to have many individual workers, each carrying a panful of wet concrete on his head, march single-file from the cement mixer across hundreds of feet of rough terrain and up long ramps of bamboo scaffolding, where they would then dump their pans into the prearranged wooden forms. What this meant was that the walls could only rise by about five feet a day. Looking at the results of the early pours, Kahn was disturbed by the evident join, the place where one day’s work met the next. So he resolved to recess the concrete every five feet, leaving a six-inch gap that would later be filled with a horizontal strip of white marble. He then introduced intermittent vertical bands of marble into the design as well, creating a wall that appears to be composed of rectangular gray blocks edged in white. From a distance, it looks rather as if a giant had been playing with these blocks and had shaped them into this whimsical structure in order to tempt you closer. The temptation works. You are ready to risk all to get inside.

There is a grand entrance at the front, but these days it is used only for ceremonial occasions. These days, too, the plazas and steps and lawns surrounding the structure are empty and desolate at all hours. Heightened security has banished the general population from this place that was meant for them, this public spot where they once exercised or strolled or simply stood and admired the massive hall built in their name. “They’ve destroyed it. I do not visit—only in photographs,” says the Bangladeshi architect Shamsul Wares, who cannot bear to see the effects of the twenty-first century’s security measures on a place he so much loved.

Once the guards have checked your pass and your identification, and confiscated your cell phone and your shoulder bag, and ushered you through the metal detector at the end of the entrance tunnel, you will find yourself on the building’s lowest level. Practically the first thing that greets you, on the facing wall, is a sort of shrine to Louis Kahn, with two photographs of him, one young, one old, along with a display of architectural plans and a scale model of the building. The set-up suggests a degree of reverence that Kahn rarely if ever met with elsewhere, and this sense of a personal debt to the architect is reinforced by the fact that many ordinary Bangladeshis actually know his name. The building itself is pictured on a standard piece of currency, the thousand-thaka note—another honor Kahn never received from any other country, including his own. When pressed, citizens ranging from taxi drivers to prominent politicians will say that they are grateful to him because “he brought us democracy,” as if the building and its function were one and the same.

Looking at the plans and the model that are located beneath Kahn’s photos, you can see that the building is structured in the shape of a diamond, one of whose four points lies at the entrance you have just come through. The octagonal assembly hall is at the center of the diamond, the mosque is somewhere directly over your head, and a series of offices and chambers line the four outer walls, set off from the interior functions by an ambulatory that runs around the entire building. It all looks simple and understandable in the plan. In actuality, it is just the opposite. The building is so changeable, so complicated, and so different at every level that you will repeatedly find yourself lost. “This is the process of learning truth—through disorientation,” notes Shamsul Wares.

For Wares, who met Louis Kahn when the American architect came to Dhaka in the 1960s and 1970s, this search is linked to a kind of spiritual quest that is unrelated to any formal religion. “Kahn was a man of the mind: he explored mind. Mind wants to know the truth. Religion never provides the truth—it’s a belief. Kahn was a spiritual man,” insists Wares. “He was trying to understand the truth in terms of how things happen. That we come from nothing, go back to nothing, was also at the core of his being. So he was interested in space—big spaces, giving you the sense of awe. He also knew that truth can never be known. Truth is ever hallucinatory, obscure. So he made the ambulatory, a labyrinthine process: you lose your way.”

It is an appropriate methodology for a building that houses the apparatus of democracy, and it applies even to those at the pinnacle of the political structure. “Yes, yes, I’m like Alice in Wonderland,” says the Speaker of the Assembly, Dr. Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, when you ask her if she has ever gotten lost in this vast space. “You can’t go everywhere by lift,” she points out. “You need to know the access. Otherwise you will lose your way.”

In fact, it is only with the assistance of a clever guide that you’ve managed to wend your way up the ramps and stairs and balconies to Dr. Chaudhury’s elegant double-height office, located near the top of the nine-story building. Barely even aware that there were lifts, you would have hesitated to use an elevator even if you could find one. At least from the ambulatory you have a continuing sense of the space above you and the space below you: you know where you are vertically, even if you have no idea about anything else.

Still, the sense of disorientation that you experience in the Dhaka Parlia-ment is countered by something much rarer, and that is a feeling of profound wonder. No photo or even film image of the interior can begin to convey what it feels like to occupy these spaces. Visual enticement enters into it—the shimmer of light on the marble-banded walls, the brief glimpses of the exterior landscape through the slits of windows, the Piranesian views from the higher balconies, the pale diagonal ramps slicing across grand circular cut-outs, and the other pleasing geometrical patterns formed by the structures and materials. All this is spellbindingly beautiful. But that is the least of it. There is something dreamlike about your passage through the building (and occasionally something nightmarish, in those terrifyingly vertiginous views from the upper balconies—but even the fear is an aspect of the wonder). As you go higher and higher, observing the minute, delightful idiosyncrasies that Kahn wrought at every level of the complex design, you cannot help but feel that the building itself is changing you. The person who emerges from it will not be quite the same as the person who went in.

From inside this building, it is possible to gain an understanding of Kahn’s genius that none of his other marvelous structures is quite prepared to give you. For here is where he most clearly demonstrates what is implicit everywhere else: that the inside and the outside do not match up. Being outside a Kahn building (or any building, for that matter) is primarily a visual experience, something that can tend toward static appreciation. But what a Kahn building offers you on the inside is a drama, a journey, a narrative with a plot. The drama may be set off by visual elements, but even that is more complicated than it seems. Light and shadow, for example, are not purely visible. They are also tangible, or “sensorial,” as Shamsul Wares puts it. “He found something in the light. You feel that you are washed clean,” Wares points out. “The light has some existence. It is not totally abstract; it is also visible, it is also feelable. Light is sensoriality.” And it’s true that, within the National Assembly Building, you can repeatedly feel the sun on your body or the gratifying coolness as you move into the shade; even without actually feeling these things, you can imagine them as sense impressions rather than just visual stimuli.

Which is not to discount the tremendous visual effects created by Kahn’s building. For instance, there is one “room,” for lack of a better term, that exists entirely for the purpose of letting you stand in the light and look up to the very top of the building. It is an oddly shaped little space, enclosed within a semi-circular wall that meets a flat one, like a crescent moon laid on its side. You have reached it after climbing two flights of zig-zagging marble steps from the lowest level of the building, and up to now the concrete ceiling of the staircase has hovered closely above you. Now, however, you are released into this smile of a space, looking up at the ceiling many stories overhead, with light pouring down on you through slim glass openings in the roofline and also through a huge, round, glass-paned window. You have emerged from shadow into light, and when you leave this room you will go back into shadow, but now you know that this alternation will be a central and continuing part of your experience of the building. Had you not already done so, you would, from this time forth, view light itself as one of Kahn’s primary building materials.

The variety of lighting effects in the Parliament building is remarkable. At one point you are out on an exterior terrace overlooking the lake, with bright sunlight glinting on the water; a man poling along in a skiff looks exactly like a little sketch Kahn made of the watery landscape when he first came to Dhaka in 1963. You re-enter the building in near-blinding darkness, and it takes you a moment to discern that you are already back on the lamp-lit main “street” of this structure’s interior, where shadow is your constant protection against the harsh exterior heat. Elsewhere, as you stand on one of the upper balconies that look out over that internal street, you can see two distinct varieties of light playing against the marble-banded concrete walls: a golden light coming directly down through the series of Japanese-made glass blocks that form the roof-line windows, and a silvery, reflected light that bounces off one of the outermost facades and shines onto an interior wall. Both kinds of light are entrancing, especially in combination, and yet neither overwhelms the cool shade.

The assembly hall itself offers still another kind of visual and dramatic experience. Having progressed up several levels of the ambulatory, you are at long last ushered into this central space—the whole building’s reason for being, the heart of the democratic process. Unlike anything else you’ve seen thus far, this grand space is instantly graspable. You can clearly discern the eight sides of the octagonal plenary hall; you can count the ranked tiers of strongly raked seating assigned to delegates, visitors, and press; you can spot the podium at which the Speaker presides, the doors by which she and the delegates enter. The room is tall but not excessively tall for its width. People are not dwarfed by it. Rather, their presence defines it, so that its height seems to be a function of human dignity. And capping it all is a ceiling that appears to float overhead with unbelievable lightness. The roof is a tent, but a tent made of concrete, delicately tethered to the wall at just eight points, so that natural light shines in under each of the tent-flaps. This covering shields the roof from the outdoors and at the same time lets the outdoors in.

“In the plenary hall you can hear the rain, if it’s raining,” comments Dr. Chaudhury. “In the daylight you can see the light, and at night you see the night.” She thinks of Kahn as “a person who felt that it was important to be close to nature. He had an idea for the environment. And also the broadness and spaciousness—that has an impact. I think there’s a calmness. It is a building where there’s so much hustle and bustle and argument, but within a serene context.”

In saying this, the Speaker is describing not only the assembly hall itself, but also the whole building. “It’s very spacious—the corridors, when you move from one end to another, it’s not cramped,” she points out. “This is important for a people’s place, with many people moving together.”

It is true that overall the Dhaka Assembly Building is designed for multitudes rather than solitude. Most of the time, in order to take in the sensations aroused by a Louis Kahn building, you need to have time by yourself. You need to sit quietly in the space—whether it’s the plaza of the Salk Institute or a gallery of the Kimbell Art Museum or the grand atrium of the Exeter Library—and take in what it has to say. Kahn’s buildings, for the most part, speak to you as an individual: they give rise to the kind of private communion that he felt could only take place between two people in a room together, when what is said is so particular that it “may never have been said before.” With most of Kahn’s great buildings, that companion is the structure itself, and you need to be alone with it to understand what it is telling you.

But the Parliament Building in Dhaka, in this as in so many ways, is different. You are never alone here. It’s not just that you are not allowed to go unescorted into the building; it’s also the fact that the business of the building is public communion, public encounter, public argument and agreement. It is a place meant for many people, and whatever serenity it produces (which is considerable) is a serenity snatched from the crowds.

“What is assembly? is the conceptual question behind the Parliament Building,” observes Shamsul Wares. “Why do people assemble in a single place to talk about one thing?” He then proceeds to elaborate on the idea of community that underlies such a structure. “A shopping center is not a community,” he points out. “In an Assembly Building, people come together to talk about one thing; then it becomes a community. When the souls unite, then it becomes a spiritual place. He was concerned with soul,” he remarks about Kahn, “or mind. Mind can be analyzed. Soul cannot. It is more mysterious.”

That Kahn was indeed concerned with soul, in whatever way he may have defined it, seems clear from the breathtaking, mysterious space he designed for worship here. The mosque is located at the front of the Parliament Building, but because it is on the third floor, you cannot get to it directly from the outside. Its external walls are hidden behind cylindrical sections of concrete, so you cannot see into it, either. In this sense it is a kind of Holy of Holies, a relatively inaccessible core. The only way into it is up a branching flight of steps from the brightly illuminated crescent-moon space where you first viewed the building’s full height.

The plenary hall may be the Assembly Building’s raison d’être, but the mosque is its heart in a different way. That Kahn viewed it in those terms is suggested by the heart-shaped corner windows, each composed of two semi-ovals with a slight downward dip at their ninety-degree joint. Thus each pair together, linked across adjoining walls, forms a multi-paned heart through which light pours into the space below. Concrete buttresses at the roof level follow and extend the curves of the windows, so that each ovoid shape seems three-dimensional on its own, and thus doubly three-dimensional when it joins its mirror image at the corner.

Constructed of glass, concrete, and the omni-present marble banding, with walls that are partially paneled in wood to lend the room a traditional warmth, the mosque is a precise cube, measuring just under seventy feet in each direction. While Kahn no doubt intended this as a reference to Mecca’s sacred cube, or Kaaba, the shape also has a visceral effect even on those who don’t recognize the allusion. To be held inside a cube is to be contained with an exactitude that is both pleasing and stirring. One is aware of one’s placement in relation to all six equal surfaces, just as one is aware of their congruence to and distance from each other. Things seem in balance from within a cube—and if the cube is as beautifully lit as Kahn’s is, from above and also from the side, the feeling of serenity is magnified.

That all the light within the mosque is reflected light accounts in part for its special feeling of repose. You cannot see the outdoors, because the high, curved, outer walls block your view, but the light nonetheless reaches you. The room has affinities with church architecture (those flying buttresses at the roof level, for instance), but it is clearly not a church. It honors the principles of a mosque, yet without any appearance of exclusiveness or specificity. One can partake of its contemplative nature without belonging to its religion, or indeed to any religion at all. Whoever you are, it will speak to you. And unlike the rest of this avowedly public building, it speaks to you in your capacity as an individual—a soul, if you like, or a mind. When you leave it, the desire to be back inside will stay with you, lastingly.

Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her biography of Louis Kahn, You Say to Brick, is due out in March 2017 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.