Project Name: Sylhet Divisional Museum

Student’s Name: Mohammad Mahibur Rahman

Project Year: 2025

Project Supervisors’ Name: Prof. Fuad Hassan Mallick, Ar. Dr. Mohammad Faruk, Ar. Dr. Saimum Kabir, Ar. Mohammad Zillur Rahman, Ar. Jalal Ahmed (Guest Faculty).

Head of the Department Name: Prof. Zainab Faruqui Ali

Project Brief: The Sylhet Divisional Museum reimagines cultural preservation as an active, lived experience. Rooted in Sylhet’s heritage, landscape, and community life, the project blends contemplative gallery sequences with open public spaces that invite gathering, learning, and exchange. Its design strengthens the relationship between people and place while catalyzing growth in the underdeveloped Kumargaon area through tourism and local enterprise. By integrating history, nature, and civic engagement, the museum positions itself as both guardian of Sylhet’s legacy and a catalyst for a more connected, forward-looking future, an architectural narrative where the past informs progress.

Site Context: The proposed Sylhet Divisional Museum is located in Kumargaon, an emerging urban edge of Sylhet characterized by mixed residential, educational institutions, small commercial strips, and open lands. The site is connected by sub-arterial and local roads with steady movement of rickshaws, CNGs, and private vehicles, making it accessible yet calm in environmental quality. Surrounded by low-rise buildings and green pockets, the area retains a semi-rural character with visual links to water bodies and vegetation. This context offers strong potential to introduce a cultural landmark that balances urban growth with landscape sensitivity and community use.

Concept:

”চা-বাগানের ঢালে বসে,

শুনি পাখির গান।

দূর পাহাড়ের কুয়াশাতে,

হারাই আমি প্রাণ।”

The Sylhet Divisional Museum reflects the interplay of nature and culture at Sylhet in a recommendation of the timeless words of Hason Raja. The architecture is a reflection on the restful beauty of the region, its misty hills and the tea gardens, and rivers, and transforms them into spaces that stimulate memory and feeling. When people pass through the museum, they feel that history is a voyage through the soul of Sylhet when architecture is poetry, and nature tells stories.

The Vision: The Sylhet Divisional Museum does not intend to be merely a building housing approximately a few artifacts; it is more than that the museum represents a living history of the Sylhet heritage, an area that holds people, history, and culture together.

Heritage: The museum presents the historical background, great personalities, tradition and beauty of Sylhet explaining it to its visitors in a very interesting and dynamic way in chronology.

Community: It is a cultural center, beyond the exhibition rooms, where people in the area can have education, social, and community ways, proper relationships between the museum and the community can be enhanced.

Development: The museum is planned strategically to boost development of the region, promote the cultural identity of Sylhet as well as become a landmark by both preserving history and remaining present.

The Journey: The exploration at the Sylhet Divisional Museum starts with the site which the landscape and open spaces introduce the visitors with the surrounding. It enters the Gallery of Nature which displays tea gardens, hills, rivers, wildlife, etc. Then there is the Gallery of Culture reflecting local traditions, festivals, music, and daily life and the Gallery of Heritage reflecting artifacts and relics that tell about the history and architecture of Sylhet. The tour ends at the Gallery of the Icons that reflects the great personalities that impacted its identity. This sequence will offer an immersive experience where one can explore the atmosphere of Sylhet, its culture, history, and outstanding personalities and do it in a smooth and pertinent manner.

Jury Statements:

Prof. Zainab Faruqui Ali: The project is thoughtfully developed and visually compelling, with particularly strong attention given to landscape design throughout the site. The composition of the pyramidal skylights combined with the elevated tea garden creates a meaningful architectural expression, evoking the image of traditional Sylheti houses set upon a hillside.

Ar. Ehsan Khan: The concept is clearly articulated, and the spatial journey is engaging and well-structured. The design demonstrates strong sensitivity to the site and context, with sections that effectively create diverse and interesting spatial experiences. However, further refinement of the structural approach to the pyramidal skylights would strengthen the technical resolution of the project.