Bandarban · Chattogram · Thimphu Founded 2009

We build on ground that moves.

Roads that climb, spans across valleys, slopes that have to be held, and buildings founded on hillsides in the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the eastern Himalaya. Every drawing starts from a survey of the ground it has to stand on.

See the work Talk to us about a site

17yearsIn hill practice
212kmOf hill road built
9spansValley crossings
1,060mHighest finished site

Selected sites

Ten places the ground had a view of its own

Point at a panel to hold it open, or open one to read the whole picture. Left alone, the row walks itself.

04 / 10A 44 m clear span in glued laminated ribs. Nineteen hundred seats and not one column in the room.

Hill roads
Hairpin geometry
Soil nailing
Gabion walls
Cable-stayed spans
Ropeways
Micropiles
Stepped rafts
Gravity mains
Constructed wetlands
Drone photogrammetry
Monsoon drainage

Disciplines

One practice, because on a hillside they are one problem

The building, the road that reaches it and the slope under both are drawn by the same people, in the same office, from the same survey.

Hill roads & alignment

Alignment, ruling gradients, hairpin geometry and drainage, for roads that have to climb without taking the hill apart.

Bridges & spans

Girder, truss, cable-stayed and ropeway crossings, for valleys where the way round is twenty kilometres of bad road.

Slope stabilisation

Soil nailing, gabion and dry-stone retaining, planting through the face, and the drainage that decides whether any of it holds.

Buildings on slope

Lodges, clinics, halls and schools on stepped rafts and micropiles, so the building comes to the ground instead of the ground being flattened for it.

Water at altitude

Intakes, storage, gravity mains and constructed wetlands, for settlements sitting above the reach of any pump.

Survey & ground investigation

Drone photogrammetry, boreholes, and a full wet-season record of the site, before anybody draws a line on it.

Method

Four things we do on every job, in this order

01
Read the ground
One survey in the wet season and one in the dry, before the first sketch. Hill ground behaves like two different materials across the year, and only one of them shows up in March.
02
Draw the water first
Where the rain goes decides the road, the footing and the wall. We set the drainage, then fit the structure to it. Doing that the other way round is how hill work fails.
03
Build with what is there
Cut is balanced against fill on the same site. Hauling soil up a hill road costs more than it is worth, and it costs again when the borrow pit starts to slide.
04
Come back
Every slope we build is walked again after its first full monsoon. What that walk finds goes into the next drawing, which is the only reason the drawings have got better.

Record

Finished, and still standing

2025Nilgiri Cable-Car StationBandarban1,060 m top station
2024Haa Valley RopewayHaa, Bhutan1,180 m single span
2024Langtang Winter IntakeRasuwa, Nepal3,480 m intake level
2023Hill Tracts Assembly HallRangamati44 m clear span
2023Bandarban Hill District HospitalBandarban11 footing levels
2022Sajek Valley Link RoadRangamati19 km at 1:14
2022Chimbuk Ridge LodgeBandarban30 rooms at 900 m
2021Thanchi Suspended FootbridgeBandarban96 m clear span
2020Chimbuk Constructed WetlandBandarban6,400 m² reed bed

People

Four partners, and whoever is on the hill this week

Ishrat Kabir Chowdhury

Principal — architecture

Leads the building side. Seventeen years of putting rooms on slopes without flattening them first.

Mahmudul Haque

Partner — geotechnical

Boreholes, slope stability and the retaining. Signs off every cut face on the practice's work.

Sonam Dorji

Associate — Thimphu office

Runs the Bhutan work: the ropeway, the poplar walk, and the high-altitude spans behind both.

Ruksana Parveen

Associate — water & drainage

Intakes, gravity mains and the monsoon drainage that the rest of the practice designs around.

Start a project

Send us the site before you send us the brief

A location, a photograph and the month you took it tells us more than a floor area does. We will say plainly whether the ground can carry what you want on it.

On site this week: Ruma–Keokradong alignment, chainage 8+400

+880 1712 000000 studio@example.com

Bandarban studio

House 4, Balaghata Road, Bandarban 4600

Chattogram office

Level 6, Agrabad C/A, Chattogram 4100

Sunday — Thursday9:00am — 6:00pm
Saturday10:00am — 2:00pm
Site visitsBy arrangement, dry season preferred