Chowdhury graduated from BUET in 1995 and, the same year, co-founded the practice URBANA with his classmate Marina Tabassum; two years later the pair won the open competition for Dhaka’s Independence Monument and Museum of Independence and spent sixteen years building it together before going their separate ways in 2005. His own subsequent work — the Friendship Centre at Gaibandha, the Chandgaon and Gulshan Society mosques — stays close to that first project’s premises: handmade brick, deep research time before design starts, and buildings that treat Bangladesh’s climate and flood-prone ground as the brief rather than an obstacle to it. The Friendship Centre won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 2014–2016 cycle; he has been an Aga Khan finalist twice more and took a RIBA International Award in 2021.
