Khudi Bari means 'little house' in Marina Tabassum's native, Bangladeshi language. The structure's compact volume, newly installed among the green expanses of the Vitra Campus, just outside Piet Oudolf's garden, easily reinforces its name. It is small, crisp and beautiful, seemingly delicate and almost disappearing among the tree canopies around it. But don't be fooled; its design represents a mammoth idea, a sturdy and efficient construction conceived after lengthy research to tackle the significant natural and human-made disasters that the architect's home country of Bangladesh has been suffering.
Telling the story of all this and more, the installation of Khudi Bari in the grounds of the famous site in Germany's Weil am Rhein is a celebration of Tabassum's thinking; this dynamic, important example of her hyper-local thinking and socially driven work has now become part of one of the world's most famous collections of architectural structures.
