LEGACY OF COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE IN KHULNA CITY

Abstract

Khulna city was established during the British colonial period as a sub divisional center in 1842. The city is characterized by a number of colonial buildings along K.D. Gosh Road forming civil line of the government. On the other hand, artifacts of private nature are scattered within the city. These colonial artifacts have distinct aesthetic value but may not be categorised according to definite tenets of style. A City can be judged from two approaches; one is being the historical approach, other being the structural analysis. These judgments are in fact value judgments and the basis of urban aesthetics. For that reason aesthetics emerges as a tool for the investigation of the study. However the study is confined only with the visual qualities for judgment of buildings as artifacts in Khulna city in historic time frame of British Colonialism. Typological significance of urban artifacts that also determine the character of the aesthetics and have been taken care. As a case study, city aesthetics of Khulna was assessed by identifying the nature and the type of
involvement in their development process. From the findings, types and the quality they produce as building block of urban image divided the whole artifacts into components of urban aesthetics. The outcome of the study will help city dwellers to receive, synthesize, assimilate and classify the colonial artifacts as components of perceiving the colonial image of Khulna city. Again a significant practical value of such studies would be drawn from an area of concern to those architects, planners and policy makers whose primary problem is the design of housing for the rapidly expanding urban areas of the so called developing world. Here as elsewhere design solution must be congruent with the value system and culture of the community being housed.