IMRAN AHMED (Shawjon)

Architect & Filmmaker

Some ground refuses to stay still. The Bangladesh delta, where I grew up, is exactly that kind of place: rivers redraw their own banks, and whole communities are asked to leave homes the map no longer agrees exist. You learn quickly that context is the first material an architect has to explore. Everything else follows from it. The land has its own intentions, and every structure either listens to that or pays for ignoring it, usually with someone else’s life.

That conviction is what carried to California. On a stretch of fire-threatened coast in Sonoma, my team at UCLA worked not to preserve the landscape but to let it regenerate, treating housing, native species, and the terrain itself as a single living system rather than competing claims on the same ground. The project, Sea Ranch: Beyond Preservation, received the Resilience Merit Scholarship in the AIA-LA and ACLA 2×8 competition. What stayed with me was not the recognition but the confirmation that the instinct holds anywhere. A coastline burning in Sonoma and a village dissolving into a Bangladeshi river are asking the same question. Who gets to stay, and on whose terms.

The same question runs through my films. Through Goopy Bagha Productions Limited, the company I co-founded, I produced A Thing About Kashem, an Oscar-qualifying Grand Prize winner at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, and House Named Shahana, Bangladesh’s official submission to the 98th Academy Awards. Both are about people watching the context that made them quietly disappear. I never set out to keep one practice separate from the other. The camera and the drawing turned out to be the same gesture. You look hard at where you are before you decide what to do to it.

I hold an M.S. in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.Arch from American International University-Bangladesh, with more than six years of built practice in Dhaka across residential, commercial, and interior work, from first concept through construction. I am a registered architect in Bangladesh and an AIA Associate member.