Deputy Commissioner's Office · Moulvibazar · October 2026
Very few people walk into a Deputy Commissioner's office for pleasure. They come about a land record or a mutation case, a certificate, a hearing date, a licence, a relief card, a complaint that went nowhere at the upazila. Some have been on the road since first light, from a tea garden line or a village on the edge of the haor. And almost all of them wait.
For years that waiting happened in the old verandah of the ground floor: an arcade, a few plastic chairs, a notice board pinned with circulars.
The change began as an initiative of the respected Deputy Commissioner, Mr. Md. Touhiduzzaman Pavel. He took up the idea that the front of the district's main office should be rebuilt for the people who come to it, and he carried that initiative through to handover. When his administration asked us to rework the gate, the forecourt and the ground-floor lobby, the brief listed interiors, landscape and lighting. Underneath it was a plainer question, and it shaped every drawing we made. What should it feel like to arrive here when you need something from the state?
জনাব মো. তৌহিদুজ্জামান পাভেল
The respected Deputy Commissioner of Moulvibazar, whose initiative made the new gate, porch and lobby lounge possible
An estate road in the district's tea country. Most of the people who visit the office come from landscapes like this one, and return to them by evening.
00 · The district
Before drawing a single wall we went looking for the district itself. Moulvibazar is tea country: estate after estate of clipped bushes on low hills, tall shade trees standing over them in loose rows, red-earth roads, and rivers that run thin and brown in the dry months and push at their banks once the rains come.
A corporate lobby with a logo wall would have been quick to draw. It would also have belonged nowhere. We wanted the opposite, a room that tells the person sitting in it, without a single sign saying so, that this is their district and the office is part of it. So the tea shoot, the hills and the colour of the leaf became the project's whole vocabulary. Nothing in it is borrowed from anywhere else.
River, scrub and tea, with the town on the horizon. The relief hills and the green of the lobby were taken from views like these.
A road bridge over a river between tea sections, seen from directly above.
01 · Street edge
The gate came first, because it is the first thing anyone meets. Two piers in local exposed brick carry a deep, flat canopy clad in aluminium composite panel. Across its face the office's name runs in gold Bangla letters, with the Government seal at the left. At each end sits a small mark that recurs throughout the project: a tea shoot, two leaves and a bud, rising out of a line of hills.
The sliding gate is stainless steel, fabricated in Sylhet, and five of its bays carry green panels cut with the same leaf. On the right-hand pier a vertical garden climbs the full height.
The less obvious pieces are doing more of the public work. The planter in front of the boundary rail has a stone ledge at sitting height, and in our photograph a man is using it for exactly that, waiting in the shade with a carton at his feet. A steel handrail follows the steps on the left. And the canopy is deep enough to throw shade over the gatehouse and the patch of road where rickshaws and CNGs pull in.
The gate by day. The planter ledge at left is meant to be sat on.
02 · After dark
At night the same gate becomes a light. Concealed LED strips wash the underside of the canopy, the lettering glows, and a warm line runs along the foot of every planter so the kerb, the steps and the curve of the boundary read clearly from across the road.
Some will call this decoration, and we would disagree. A public office that can be found after dark, and whose entrance is lit rather than shuttered, is safer to approach and easier to trust. The street outside is brighter because of it too, which costs the district very little.
The gate at night. The LED lines under the planter edges trace the kerb from across the road.
03 · Porch
Inside the compound, a new porch stands in front of the old arcaded block. Its black fascia carries a single line, lit from behind so each letter sits on a halo of warm light, with the leaf-and-hill mark repeated at either end.
চায়ের দেশে স্বাগতম
Welcome to the land of tea, the first words a visitor reads on arrival
Government buildings usually greet people with prohibitions: no entry, no parking, no photography. Here the first thing anyone reads is a welcome, in their own language, at a size that can be read from the gate.
Beneath it, the floor is laid in red patterned tile and the canopy runs deep enough to step out of a rickshaw in a downpour and reach the lobby steps dry. This is one of the wettest corners of Bangladesh, and the monsoon here is long. A generous porch is a basic courtesy, and it was treated as one.
The porch at night, the forecourt still wet from washing.
04 · Arcade
Between the porch and the lobby runs the old verandah, opened up and re-dressed rather than closed in. Its columns are painted white, edged with copper-toned trim and set on stone bases, so that mops, shoes and luggage hit stone instead of plaster.
Above each opening hangs a backlit photographic panel: women plucking leaf along a slope, an avenue of shade trees, a river bend, a green valley under blue sky. Read one after another they work like a slow film strip of the district, placed where the eye goes when someone on a bench looks up from a form.
Light boxes can easily turn into hoardings. These stay on the right side of that line because of what is in them. There are no slogans and no portraits of officials, only the land and the people who work it.
Overhead, two ceilings do two jobs. Along the circulation, a grid of perforated metal tiles can be lifted for wiring and air-conditioning lines without breaking anything. Over the lobby a timber-toned linear ceiling, slotted with thin lines of LED, brings the space down and warms it.
The arcade running back into the old verandah.
The light-box panels above the openings to the porch.
From the arcade the welcome wall is already in view, so someone coming in from the forecourt can see where to sit before reaching the door.
05 · Welcome wall
Turn left from the porch and the wall is in front of you. It is the one place where we let ourselves come close to sculpture. The upper field is hand-troweled plaster with a pearly, broken sheen, closer to the inside of a shell than to paint. Across its lower half rise layer after layer of sage-green hills in relief, each one lifted off the next and lit from behind, so the ridges glow the way the district's hills do when the morning mist starts to burn off. Above them stands a golden tea plant, and above that the line চায়ের দেশ মৌলভীবাজারে স্বাগতম, with the office's name beneath it.
A planter strip runs along the base with a row of small shrubs, a shorthand for clipped tea bushes. Track spotlights graze the plaster from above, and grey fluted panels with narrow light slots frame the whole thing on both sides.
In front of all this is a long upholstered bench, and to us that bench matters more than the relief. Put the most carefully made wall in the building behind a seat and the seat becomes the best place in the room. It belongs to whoever happens to be waiting.
The wall from above at dusk, the bench set close to the planter strip.
From the lobby side, with the arcade light boxes and forecourt beyond.
06 · Lobby
The lobby itself is deliberately quiet. Large light porcelain tiles, polished, easy to mop after a monsoon day of muddy sandals. Square columns in white with the same copper corner trim and stone skirting. A stair in dark granite with a stainless-steel and glass balustrade rises to the upper floor. The space beneath it, which in most offices slowly fills with broken chairs and old files, is closed off by a run of marble-look storage doors.
Beside the stair, a stone-topped counter sits under glazed windows, and next to it a second waiting corner: olive fluted panels, three vertical light slots, a bench, a tall planter and the project plaque. A dark directory board is fixed to the fluted panels beside the welcome wall, so the question of where to go next can be answered without stopping someone to ask.
Most of the arcade openings stay open to the forecourt. In a hot-humid climate that lets air move through the lobby on its own for much of the year, and it keeps the room in sight of the gate, which matters to people who are nervous about where they are allowed to go.
The lobby in one view, from the welcome wall at left to the second waiting corner and the old verandah at right.
The second waiting corner, with its plaque.
The directory board on the fluted panels, looking out to the arcade.
From the stair toward the porch, under the run of light boxes.
The stair and its under-stair storage, with the old verandah running off to the right.
07 · Stair landing
The stair sits on the lobby's main axis, and the wall at its landing carries the second part of the story. It uses the same pearly plaster and the same grey fluted panels as the welcome wall, but the hills are drawn differently here: flat bands of gold, bronze and dark brown, some smooth and some grainy like sorted leaf, sweeping across in two waves with sprigs of gold leaves between them.
Unlike the welcome wall, this one speaks two languages. চায়ের দেশ মৌলভীবাজার sits above a gold rule and MOULVIBAZAR – THE LAND OF TEA below it, for the guests who come to the office from outside the district and from abroad.
Seen from the porch, the lobby is symmetrical. A bench against the welcome wall on the left, a bench against the olive panels on the right, and between two white columns the dark granite stair rising to this lit wall. The room gets a clear centre, and anyone standing at the door can tell where the way up is without reading a sign.
The landing wall, with its Bangla and English lettering.
The lobby on axis from the porch, the stair and landing wall framed between two columns.
08 · Handover
These pictures were taken on the days around handover in October 2026. A red cloth still hangs over one plaque, waiting for its unveiling. A pedestal fan stands in a corner, and a few plastic chairs sit in the verandah beyond. We chose not to crop them out.
A public building is in use long before anyone finishes designing it, and the real test of this lobby will come later, in what people bring into it: wet umbrellas, files tied with string, a child who wants to touch the hills. If in a year the bench is worn at one end and the floor is scuffed near the counter, we would take that as a sign it worked.
New and old side by side: the welcome wall, the stair, and the exposed brick of the original block at left.
09 · For the public
Stripped of finishes, the design comes down to a short list of commitments. They are what we would ask any district office to keep, whatever it chooses to put on the walls.
The tea, the hills and the rivers are on the walls. The benches are for the people who came. If we had to put the brief in one line, it would be that.
Road, river and tea, seen from above. This is the district the lobby was built to welcome.
Initiative: Mr. Md. Touhiduzzaman Pavel, respected Deputy Commissioner, Moulvibazar
Client: Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Moulvibazar
Scope: Gate, porch, arcade and ground-floor lobby lounge; interior, landscape and lighting works
Design and execution: ARCHCELL Design Development, Dhaka
Principal Architect: Kamanashish Barua, B.Arch (BUET), MIAB CB-066
Photographs: Site and drone photographs, 20–21 October 2026
Text and photographs © 2026 ARCHCELL Design Development
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