A team from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology has earned global recognition in the first Heat Adaptive Architecture Design competition, a challenge that brought together student designers from around the world to build smart ideas for coping with extreme heat. The BUET team, made up of architecture students Mainul Hasan Seam, Jahra Jarin Jemi, and Sakib Nasir Khan, was selected as one of the top finalists, while another BUET submission by Shouvaggo Sharif Shammo, Mainul Hasan Seam, and Jahra Jarin Jemi finished among the three runners-up. Their work stood out in a competition organized by the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre, showing how student ideas can travel far when they respond to real-world problems. The contest was launched in 2025 and asked architecture and urban design students to propose affordable, scalable, and practical ways to reduce the danger of rising heat, especially for people living in informal settlements. BUET’s project focused on the kind of climate stress many cities now face, including high indoor temperatures, poor airflow, and heat-trapping building materials, and it used passive cooling, material ideas, and community-friendly space planning to answer those problems. The project also received guidance from Professor Khandaker Shabbir Ahmed, whose supervision and support helped shape the team’s work throughout the competition, along with mentorship from George Foden of Nottingham Rights Lab during the second stage of the process. The judging process favored proposals that were creative, locally relevant, and useful in real life, which helped push BUET’s ideas into the final round. The winning models will later be 3D printed and shown at COP31 and other global events, giving the students’ work a wider audience and placing Bangladesh’s young architecture talent on an international stage. For BUET, the recognition is more than a prize; it is a sign that student research and design can help answer major climate challenges with practical solutions that may one day support people in hot and crowded urban areas.
