Study on the spatial organization of the houses of Panam Nagar, Sonargaon

Abstract

The ancient city of Panam was established in late 19th century in a non-urban setting in Dhaka region. Panam was famous for cotton manufacturing and trading during British rule. The cotton traders built a good number of closely located and nicely ornamented buildings with narrow street frontage. According to history these buildings were owned by merchants who were absentee landlords, coming Panam once or twice a year. However, history explained little about their life styles and function of these buildings. The area was well protected by cannels which run around Panam Nagar. The buildings apparently similar from outward had a variety in terms of their spatial organizations which remains unexplained without any evidence of their use pattern. In their study Asiatic Society of Bangladesh classified the buildings of Panam into three basic typology-‘the double heighted hall type’, ‘the courtyard type’ and ‘the consolidated type’. Apparently the layouts of large houses of Panam, with courtyards, are similar to the urban houses of Dhaka region having courtyards with encircling corridors giving access to series of rooms. But the double heighted hall remained uncommon in the house forms of Dhaka. Again the consolidated houses of Panam do not have any kind of similarity with the prevailing consolidated houses of Dhaka. Although researchers attempted to classify those buildings into common residential types available in this region, a large number of buildings of Panam remain unexplained due to their idiosyncrasies and dissimilarities with the available types. With the help of space syntax this thesis tried to find out the genotypes of the houses of Panam Nagar. Space syntax transforms the buildings into the form of adjacency graphs to represent, quantify and interpret spatial pattern in such a way that their underlying ‘social logic’ is understood. In search of genotypes, the syntactic data compiled here are compared to find any difference in the spatial organization among the different type of houses of Panam and to explain the ordering of space in these buildings in relation to the prevailing types in Dhaka region. However, spatial analysis reveals that ringiness became the major character of these buildings. In fact, the houses of Panam have overlapping rings connecting most of the interior spaces along with the exterior suggesting the depth of the buildings of Panam much shallower than the buildings of Dhaka. From graph analysis it is quite clear that the halls were distributed with the exterior in a ring, thus become shallower and easily permeable for the visitors. It can be interpreted as the need of privacy was low indicating that buildings have less residential quality in respect to the socio-cultural background of Dhaka. Interestingly, spatial analysis suggests that the consolidated type buildings with segregated central spaces and integrated frontal rooms are completely different from any prevailing typology of Dhaka. Thus with the support of space syntax analysis this research suggests that perhaps some of the houses of Panam were not residential type; rather they have some other commercial use which is not clear from their history.