National Assembly Building, Dhaka

The National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, known in Bengali as Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban, is the seat of the Parliament of Bangladesh, designed by the architect Louis Kahn together with Muzharul Islam and built between 1961 and its completion on January 28, 1982. Kahn's design, originally commissioned for a planned second capital of Pakistan, groups eight peripheral blocks around a central octagonal chamber, the peripheral blocks rising to 110 feet and the central block to 155 feet, and surrounds the complex on three sides with an artificial lake meant to echo the riverine landscape of Bangladesh. The main assembly chamber seats up to 354 members beneath a parabolic shell roof designed to admit natural daylight, and the complex covers about 840,000 square meters across 210 acres, among the largest legislative complexes in the world. Kahn died in 1974, before construction finished, and his associate David Wisdom oversaw the remaining work; the building received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1989.