MY PILGRIMAGE TO A MODERN MASTERPIECE

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His eccentricities and his singularity would prevent him from building more than a dozen projects in his lifetime. But he had accomplished extraordinary architecture in the United States: the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, a work of endless horizon on the coast of California and, for instance, the Kimbell Art Museum, with its extraordinary quality of light, in Fort Worth, Tex. These works allowed him to test his fundamental thesis for architecture, of modern compositions that were mindful of the great historic precedents, including the utopian work of 18th-century architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne-Louis Boullée.

Kahn contemplated buildings enclosed by double walls - 20th-century interpretations of say, the walled fortress city of Carcassonne, France. He sought architecture that allowed a complete sense of protection. He developed, with his associate Anne Tyng, a belief in geometry as the giver of architectural form. Of cutting dramatic apertures into walls to allow vistas through space. Even in Rochester, N.Y., at the First Unitarian Church, Kahn was improvising with monumental shafts of light and ways of floating a concrete umbrella roof over the worshipping hall. These are all works that relied absolutely on the power of intuition. Ultimately, they were studies that led to the National Assembly.

The military personnel guarding the National Assembly during the state of emergency, which began in January, are anxious about my visit. Only because of the good standing of my host, Nurur Khan, a leading Dhaka architect and long-time photographer of the National Assembly, am I allowed in. Remarkably, though the building is shut to the public, I've been given permission for two separate visits.

The lights have been turned off (there's also an electricity crisis in the country) so we wander in partial gloom through the timeless space. A dozen men stripped to loincloths clean floors in the heat. We wander past. Outside, it's possible to sit on cubes of marble - meditation stools - and overlook the quiet of the lake. And, suddenly, it's time to enter the 16-sided assembly chamber. A military guard turns the key in an enormous wooden door.

And there it is, a beautiful impossibility: a concrete umbrella stretched between parabolic ribs, and suspended more than 100 feet - 30 metres - in the air. It looks as light as transcendence. And maybe you can explain away the tears that come when you gaze up at this great umbrella. Consider the aspirations of a people who suffered much to achieve their independence. Labourers constructed the roof, like the rest of the complex, by climbing bamboo scaffolding held together with jute. Thousands of workers lined up to carry baskets of concrete on their heads.

Five feet of wall height is what Kahn determined the workers could manage every day, and he marked the progress of the building by designing horizontal ribbons of white marble to be set against the joint lines of the poured-in-place concrete. Though the concrete is still pristine, some of the marble coursing has fallen off the building.

It's impossible to understand the space as strictly a visual feast. Kahn's assembly tunes into the cerebral and primordial, the historic and the modern.

"Kahn lived in the cosmic world," says Shamsul Wares, an architecture professor at the University of Asia Pacific, and the man who was moved to tears in My Architect, an award-winning film made by Kahn's son Nathaniel. We're having dinner at a pizza joint in the heart of Dhaka. Like so many other local architects, Wares was studying to become an architect while the National Assembly was being constructed. So Kahn has always been there to guide them. "His assembly building is part of that. Cosmic and ethereal. He starts with the massiveness and then turns it into lightness. His lightness is modernity, but the heaviness is tradition."

When Kahn first arrived in Dhaka, he met with Muzharul Islam, the Bangladeshi hero of modernism, and the man responsible for ensuring the commission went not to him but to Kahn. During my stay in Dhaka, Islam and I meet over tea and salty biscuits one evening at his spacious apartment. At 83, Islam's mind wanders frequently, but he recalls the wonderful teachers at the University of Oregon where he did an undergraduate degree in architecture. It was during Islam's time in the master's program at Yale that he discovered the intellectual aura of Kahn, a frequent guest critic and juror there.

In the early 1960s, Islam toured Kahn through the city and its environs - showing him the river life of Bangladesh, the sailboats, the cargo vessels - and heaved a stack of books upon him. He guided Kahn to the significance of the deltaic landscape, and the need to communicate exactly to the illiterate construction workers. Kahn immediately seized on the potential of the site: the water that gave life to built form. Kahn's first sketch of Dhaka was of three wooden dinghies sailing up the River Buriganga.

The National Assembly appears as a modern fortress, cast in concrete, framed by reflecting water, and set on a gentle hill. But across the water, the housing for the members of parliament is set down close to the ground. Kahn took hold of the terracotta-coloured brick and used it to distinguish the hostels from the monumental assembly building. The bricks have been expertly worked into circles and semi-circles and rotated demi-moons, their edging - articulated as bands, five bricks wide - perfectly detailed. Kahn's team, apparently, drew every brick for the bricklayers.

In many ways, modernity never really checked in to Bangladesh. Colonial houses still line the major rivers, and houseboats still travel the waterways. Rickshaws, hundreds of them, crowd into the main streets, and the pullers carry everything on their bike carts from children lucky enough to be in starched school uniforms to enormous stacks of bananas. Construction workers, often teenage boys, lash together bamboo scaffolding with the balance and strength required of most circus performers. They sleep on wooden pallets at the work site, their laundry hanging over half-finished marble walls. Less charming, of course, are the outrageous levels of malnutrition and the crushing poverty of Bangladesh, at 145 million people the most densely populated country in the world. For these people, Kahn gave an immeasurable architecture.

During my last hour in the Assembly Building, we walk down to the service level where, against the grand walls of concrete and moody light, a small city seems to operate. Elderly women with hair dyed a lurid henna orange gather in the corners with their brooms; red ceramic pots lie in a heap; abandoned furniture has been locked behind iron gates. Children wander about.

It might be something out of the Crusades, except that there are copies of Hansard piled some three metres high against an office wall. In this country of endless struggle and ruinous democracy, the time for the National Assembly has yet to come.

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