A coastal settlement in Bangladesh that expects to be damaged

Three students at the Architectural Association designed a coastal settlement that expects to be damaged. Floods and cyclones will take pieces of it. So the whole thing is built to be repaired, piece by piece, by the people living in it. The project is called NOTUN, which means new in Bengali, and it sits at Kalapara in Patuakhali District, Bangladesh.

Chuyu Zhang, Darya Holub and Hankai Ye made it as an MSc dissertation in the Emergent Technologies and Design programme, under Elif Erdine and Milad Showkatbakhsh. Four scales run through the work: landscape, settlement, building, fabrication. Each one was simulated before anything was drawn solid.

Start with the ground. Rainfall simulations picked where water storage ponds should sit. Agent-based modelling then laid out a network of channels to move water between them, and terraced banks slow the runoff so the higher land can hold houses while the low zones stay open for crops and storage. The embankment blocks are the interesting part. Sand, clay and potato starch, pressed and interlocking, made in a mould cut on a CNC. They are not meant to last. The blocks act as temporary scaffolding for vetiver grass: roots pass through the openings, the starch binder breaks down, and the vegetation takes over the job of holding the soil. Concrete would have sealed the site forever. This lets the planting do the work instead.

Above that, wind. CFD runs tested how the houses should sit relative to each other and which way to face under cyclone conditions. The chosen arrangement cut wind speed inside the clusters by roughly 30 percent. Cellular automata and evolutionary optimisation spread the housing types across the safer ground. The houses themselves are bamboo on prefabricated metal connectors, with woven panels that can be swapped out, and a roof opening that ventilates on a normal day and helps balance pressure in a storm. When a bamboo member or a wall panel fails, you replace that piece. The house stays up.

A Meta Quest 3 workflow overlays the full-scale assembly on site, so foundations and connections can be positioned with visual checks as you go. The intent is that construction and post-disaster repair stay with local crews rather than specialists flown in.

The material samples were tested in water and under compression before any of this was claimed. There is one full-scale block. The project is listed as a speculative design research dissertation from 2024, which is the honest description: the simulation is thorough, the built evidence is a single mould. The ecological argument still travels, because the planting does the structural work that concrete usually does. Resilience as the capacity to recover, not the absence of damage.

Project page: https://www.emtech.aaschool.ac.uk/notun Programme: https://www.aaschool.ac.uk/school/programmes/taught-postgraduate-programmes/emergent-technologies-and-design

■ Filed from Canopy: the Plants, Light wing of the city.