Fort City: Layering Faith, Commerce, and Memory

Entry for competition "Re envisioning Anderkilla Jame mosque at Chittagong, Bangladesh"

2025

This proposal explores the spatial and temporal entanglement between sacred and civic infrastructures—an 8,500-person mosque, a 16th-century Mughal relic, and the prominent book market—within the dense urban fabric of Chittagong. Here, architecture acts as urban acupuncture: stitching together fragmented layers of memory, faith, and commerce into a resilient, collective ground.

The Mughal mosque atop the hill was originally built as a significant landmark for the city. Over time, the bustling book market of Chittagong developed around it, gaining its own importance. The new mosque complements the intricate design of the old mosque through its simple, geometric form, while the old mosque extends and connects with the materiality of the plaza and the grand stairs. The new mosque both serves as a backdrop to the old mosque from the west, and acts as a beacon to the city from the east. From the grand stairs to the north, the two mosques come together in harmonious synergy. 

The surrounding book market, reimagined through the logics of local alleyways and vernacular typologies, wraps the sacred ensemble in a porous urban edge—suggesting a contemporary fortification not through defense, but through cultural density. While the city, in turn, becomes the second layer of the fort, surrounding the entire mosque and market complex.