The Panam Nagar Grammar: A Shape Grammar to Analyze the Colonial Houses and Urban Settlement at Panam Nagar, Bangladesh
Panam Nagar is an early nineteenth-century colonial settlement of Bangladesh. It was a famous trade center for clothes and crafts built by the merchants who presumably lived and worked there – and their colonial houses are the jewel of the site. Today, this settlement is dilapidated and needs preservation. The Government of Bangladesh has declared Panam Nagar a national heritage site, but budget constraints and other limitations have delayed conservation efforts. Before conservation or adaptive reuse, a thorough understanding of the site is necessary. Formal analysis provides a basis for successful historic preservation by contributing knowledge on the space and structure of the colonial houses and their role within the urban settlement. Previous research has dealt with ornamentation, documentation, and spatial understanding of Panam Nagar using space syntax. To develop a further spatial and morphological understanding of the settlement, this research will use the shape grammar formal methodology to study the inherent spatial quality of the consolidated type houses. More specifically, the Panam Nagar Grammar aims to shed new light on our understanding of the settlement by unpacking how the houses support a merchant lifestyle characterized by domestic and commercial functions. Shape grammars have been widely used to analyze different architectural precedents and bring understanding to their spatial character. Future research may incorporate the remaining houses to provide an over-arching preservation or rehabilitation plan by building on the Panam Nagar Grammar.
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