EVOLO SKYSCRAPER COMPETITION ENTRY: A Nation in the Sky (in collaboration with Prantik)

A Nation in the Sky

The story a 50-year old refugee camp declaring independence in Dhaka in 2021

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Geneva Camp, was one of the oldest refugee camps in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Living in deplorable condition since 1972, the people here had long been disregarded by both the host nation and the promised repatriation land in Pakistan. These people became citizens of no-where. The skyscraper is the story of what happened in 2021, when they declared their independence from Bangladesh and started building their nation. The Confederation of Geneva Camp!  Less than a square mile and land-locked, they became the tiniest nation in the world, and extended towards the only direction open to them. Up.

The skyscraper is the form they arrived at not by deliberate design, but due to the organic growth over time. Extending upwards is nothing new to them. They started their life in 2m by 2m tents, which overtime they extended into 6 stories. The city in 2021 was already a mini-Manhattan. Their leaders took this idea to the next scale once they became independent.

The skyscraper is made of tiers or levels that act as new grounds. Each one is built once the citizens occupy the one below. All private buildings are built by the citizens into the superstructure grid provided by the state. The material is the plastic waste recycled from the neighbouring countries. The food is produced in hydroponic pods hanging from the tiers. Every drop of water is harnessed from the air. The major functions such as the parliament, the forts, the public facilities and the mosques are built by the government to seed the growth of the settlement vertically. But a nation is more than just the infrastructure. The leaders of this new country knew this well.  

What makes a nation? Population, territory and sovereignty. More importantly, as Anderson has pointed out in “Imagined Communities”, nations needs foundational myths to bind the people together into a cohesive identity. The decade long neglect, social isolation, and oppression allowed a narrative to form where the people of Geneva Camp began to desire their own sovereign territory, and move beyond the title of a refugee camp. The old congested living quarters became a holy site. The tiers were constructed to ensure that the original urban fabric and close-knit pattern of buildings where not harmed as the tiers were built.

Once independence was declared, the first thing that they built were the geo-thermal power stations underground. Sovereignty means self-sufficiency, and the first thing to secure to hold onto a nation is to secure an energy source. The undergrounds station was built in a way to allow a potential skyscraper to be built in the future, as there was no land to extend horizontally anymore. The idea from the leaders was to create a new land in the vertical direction.

Continuing the tradition of building their own houses, the city was essentially the shell into which the citizens built their spaces informally. The logic is co-formal, allowing informal organizations in places by left open by the formal urban growth vertically. The incremental deposit of housing overtime creates an impression of a chaotic ensemble of human and material condition.

This is 2071, the nation in the sky is growing still, they are in their 10th tier, they just constructed the new US embassy. The nation-state of Geneva Camp is embodied in the perpetual growth towards the sky. The skyscraper and the nation are one and the same. In Dhaka’s skyline, Geneva Camp serves as a defiant landmark of justice for refugees around the world.   

Team: Tanzil Shafique (OpenStudio)

Kazi Akif Akash / Kazi Rafid Bin Zaman / Sayem Anwar Tuhin (Prantik)