Global South and Postcolonial Positioning

The founder’s 2025 biography positions New Contextualism ‘as both a Global South contribution to architectural thought and a globally relevant method for resilient futures’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). His co-author’s university profile describes her work on it as ‘shaping discourse on regenerative design from a Global South perspective’ (BRAC University n.d.b).

Knowledge and Power

The founder’s account of the approach begins with a historical rupture. The close fit between architecture and context that he found in the early monasteries of Bengal ‘was disrupted during the colonial and post-colonial eras when modernist ideas swept the globe. Modernist architects, in their pursuit of universality, often disregarded the unique characteristics of local places, creating placeless, alienating structures’ (Reza 2023c).

Modernism, in his later formulation, ‘often arrived in contexts like ours as an external imposition—its sleek lines and abstract forms frequently disconnected from the lived realities, the climatic imperatives, and the deeply ingrained cultural sensibilities of Bengal’ (Reza 2025). The same texts note how local knowledge has been undervalued. Vernacular building traditions, the founder writes, are ‘often dismissed as backwards or uncreative’ (Reza 2023c). The September 2025 essay observes that the division of cities into enclaves for the rich and the poor ‘is broadly seen in the Global South’ (Reza and Nitu 2025).

A similar concern runs through the founder’s historical writing, although those essays do not mention New Contextualism. ‘Much of South Asian history has been written from the viewpoint of empires, making local knowledge seem less important’ (Reza 2026a), and Bengal ‘is rarely permitted to speak in its own historical voice’ (Reza 2026b). The parallel between the two bodies of work is an editorial reading; see Civilizational and Historical Research.

Local Epistemologies

The texts treat local and vernacular knowledge as a resource for design, not as a relic. Vernacular traditions ‘contain deep knowledge about sustainable construction and adaptation to local conditions’; the approach ‘does not mean blindly mimicking old architectural styles’ but calls ‘for intelligently reinterpreting the past to inform new directions’ (Reza 2023c). The founder’s example is the transitional semi-open space of older buildings in the hot, humid tropics, which can be reinterpreted ‘through elements like sun-shading louvres, jalis and buffers’ (Reza 2023c).

The April 2025 essay draws on the knowledge embedded in the delta itself. Understanding the ‘al’, ‘the raised earthen embankment crucial for agriculture and movement in the delta’, informs infrastructure and settlement design in flood-prone areas, ‘a lesson derived directly from the geographical and historical context’ (Reza 2025). The early monasteries of Bengal responded to climate by ‘harnessing breezes, managing monsoon rains, and utilising locally available materials like terracotta’, and their builders understood principles ‘we now strive to recapture: designing with nature, not against it’ (Reza 2025). Resilience, likewise, ‘often involves learning from vernacular traditions, which frequently embody passive resilience strategies’ (Reza 2025).

Contextuality Across Different Societies

The approach is presented as rooted in one place but not confined to it: ‘deeply embedded in our local experiences yet aspiring towards global relevance’ (Reza 2025). It ‘rejects the wholesale importation of “International Styles” just as it rejects parochial isolationism’, seeking instead ‘a productive hybridization, analogous to the process that shaped Baņgālee culture itself through encounters with Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, Islamic, and European influences’ (Reza 2025).

Its claim to travel rests on its structure. The framework is described as ‘context-agnostic’: ‘design engages principles and ten intertwined layers; only the answers change with place’ (Reza and Nitu 2025). The documented applications beyond Bengal include a proposal for the Al-Cazaba in Spain, presented as an example of ‘cross-cultural contextualism’ (Reza 2025), and a competition entry for the Gateway of India precinct in Mumbai (Reza and Nitu 2025). The 2026 article on Somapura Mahavihara proposes re-establishing its monastic traditions ‘in dialogue with local and global contexts’ (Reza and Rahman 2026). See the Project Map for where the documented projects are.