The National Parliament House

Designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1982, the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban is one of the landmarks of 20th-century architecture.

The American architect Louis Kahn was commissioned in the early 1960s to design a capitol complex in Dhaka. Construction was interrupted by the Liberation War and continued after independence; the building was completed in 1982, after Kahn's death, and the parliament first sat there that year. Its massive concrete walls, inlaid with marble lines, are cut with huge circles, triangles and rectangles that bring light into the interior. Surrounded by an artificial lake and lawns in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, it is admired worldwide as a masterpiece.