Paraa Raises a Perforated Brick Platform for Shared Community Life on an Open Ground in Dhaka's Korail Settlement

Korail is an informal settlement in the middle of Dhaka, a dense patch of tin roofs where public space is scarce and fought over. At its edge sits Ershad Maidan, an open ground where children play and neighbours gather. Paraa, led by architect Kazi Arefin, has built a 332 m² community building along that ground. It is called Machan, the Bangla word for platform. The name is a fair brief: a structure that holds people up and connects them to one another.

The form is not what makes Machan interesting. A narrow brick building with coloured steel canopies could easily have been one more NGO pavilion dropped into a settlement. What sets it apart is how it was made and who it answers to. More than 60 workshops and residencies with Korail's youth, community leaders, students and creative collaborators shaped the design through storytelling, model-making and hands-on construction. A local team then built it. The result reads less like a facility and more like infrastructure for gathering: a long edge to the maidan that can be climbed, occupied, watched from and performed on.

A Brick Edge for an Open Ground

From above, the building looks like a long perforated wall that has thickened into rooms. It does not sit in the middle of the maidan and claim it. It lines one side, which leaves the open ground free for volleyball, games and crossings. That restraint matters in a place where every square metre is contested. Paraa has put the building at the edge and left the field to the people using it.

The palette is steel, concrete and brick, sourced through local suppliers including S S Bricks and Shah Cement. The brick is laid as a lattice rather than a solid wall, so at dusk the building glows from inside and children on the bare ground can see movement on the upper levels. Next to the tin-roofed houses around it, the building stands out without towering over them.

Steps, Stairs and Open Thresholds

The building's most generous gestures are its steps. Concrete treads at the base double as seats, and open stairs climb the facade in full view of the maidan. Children sit on them, climb them and use them as lookouts. The stair here is less a means of getting upstairs than a piece of public furniture, and it signals clearly that the upper floors are not reserved for staff or invited guests.

This is where participation shows up in the architecture. A building shaped by young people who will actually use it tends to put the climb, the perch and the shortcut first. Machan does this without lecturing anyone about it.

Canopies, Colour and Paper Lanterns

Above the brick, curved steel canopies in teal, green, purple and pink mark the building's key points. They are lightweight compared with the masonry below. The steel was fabricated locally, which gives the structure a small-scale, workshop quality. Paper lanterns hang beneath the canopies and turn the roof edges into festival rigging once evening comes.

Colour could easily have become decoration. Here it does more work. It signals the building from across the maidan, separates the light steel frames from the heavy brick base, and gives the porch where women gather in bright saris a canopy that reads as a stage roof. We think it lands because the colour sits on the parts that frame activity, not on the walls.

A Gallery Lit Through Brick

Inside, the programme leans toward exhibition and memory. Brick floors, a display vitrine, pinned photographs and hanging textiles line a corridor, and a glass-topped case holds a model. Sunlight comes through the perforated walls in small points, so the displays sit in shifting, dappled light rather than the flat glare of a white box.

Showing the community's own stories and models inside its own building is a quiet but pointed choice. Korail is usually the subject of other people's photographs. Here, residents can curate what is shown on the walls.

Narrow Passages and Lantern Alleys

Thin concrete walkways and slim alleys run between the perforated walls, with blue and purple railings and lanterns strung under pergola frames. These passages are close in scale to the lanes of Korail itself. The building does not escape its context; it builds a gentler, better-lit version of it.

At dusk the alleys become the most atmospheric part of the project. A child running through a lantern-lit gap between two brick screens is the image that will stick. It also shows that the circulation was designed to be inhabited, not merely passed through.

Terraces Overlooking the Field

The upper levels step back into a series of brick terraces with parapets and zigzagging steel railings. From here, visitors watch volleyball on the dirt below or look out over the busy street. The terraces turn the building into a grandstand for the maidan. That is perhaps the most direct reading of the brief to make the site a shared stage.

The relationship works in both directions. People on the field can see people on the terraces, and vice versa. Seeing and being seen is a basic ingredient of public life, and it is usually missing in settlements where open ground is scarce and enclosure is the default.

A Rooftop Above the Rooftops

The roof terrace, framed by a teal pergola and purple railings, is the building's highest public room. Seated figures look across the low neighbourhood as lanterns light up behind them. In a settlement of single-storey tin roofs, a shared vantage point is rare. Opening it to children and families, rather than reserving it for a managed rooftop function, is a generous move.

Built by Hands, Shaped by Workshops

An annotated workshop model shows where the project started. It is handmade and earnest, with a green play field, a climbing tower, a club house and shaded resting areas. Set it beside the finished terrace, where a girl skips rope while a woman and children sit on a low wall, and the line from workshop to building is easy to follow. The climbing tower became stairs and lookouts, and the resting areas became terraces and steps.

Construction kept that local thread. Civil contractor Eng. Imran, steel fabricator Sohel Rana Khan and carpenters Nazmul Hasan and Sohel Hosen worked alongside a painter and an electrician. Structural engineering came from Gravity Engineers under Eng. Masrur Kabir. Arefin's team included Ruhul Abdin, Tarannum Ali, Fahim Bin Hamid and Ayesha Rahman Chowdhury. This is a small project with a long credit list, and the list itself tells you something about how the building came to exist.

Plans and Drawings

The site and master plans confirm the strategy we read in the photographs: a long, narrow building that lines the edge of a large open ground, wedged between dense neighbours. The ground floor holds three multipurpose rooms, a stair and a circular tree bed beside the lane. Upstairs, a curatorial space, a forum stage and an interactive gallery sit between two circular towers. The section and exploded axonometric show the ramps, stairs and the tree in an open court threading through the stacked levels, with the coloured roof frames lifted above as a separate light layer.

Why This Project Matters

Community buildings in informal settlements often fail in one of two ways. Some impose a polished object the community never asked for. Others are so improvised that they do not last. Machan avoids both. It is robust, built from brick, concrete and steel by a local team. It is also clearly shaped by the people who will occupy it, through a participatory process long enough to be more than a consultation exercise.

For you as a designer, the lesson is in the hierarchy. Paraa put stairs, terraces, thresholds and edges ahead of enclosed rooms, and kept the maidan free. The building works as a platform in the literal sense its name promises: a raised, shared surface from which a neighbourhood can watch, perform, exhibit and simply sit. In a city where public ground is disappearing, that matters more than the form itself.

Machan - Korail Community Platform by Paraa (lead architect Kazi Arefin), Ershad Maidan, Korail, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Area: 332 m². Completed: 2025. Photography: City Syntax.

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