Bangladeshi architect Kashef Chowdhury, director of Bangladeshi architecture firm Urbana, has been announced the winner of the 2021 International Prize for the World's Best New Building by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for his Friendship Hospital project.

A model of climate-conscious design built with the bare minimum of resources, the Friendship Hospital beat off competition from a Berlin-based gallery by David Chipperfield, and a cycle and footbridge in Denmark by Wilkinson Eyre.

The RIBA award-winning hospital is located in Bangladesh's Satkhira.

Chowdhury has designed the building to be a machine for rainwater harvesting, with every roof and courtyard surface draining into the central canal, which runs into two storage tanks at either end of the site, according to a report published in The Guardian on January 25.

It is the first "land hospital" for the NGO Friendship, for which Chowdhury has helped to convert several boats into floating hospitals in the past, designed to serve remote communities in the delta region. Built with a tight budget of just under $2 million, their first permanent building provides a medical lifeline for thousands of people in an area that was heavily affected by a major cyclone in 2007.

Chowdhury told The Guardian: "I am encouraged that this may inspire more of us to commit to an architecture of care both for humanity and for nature, to rise collectively to the urgencies that we face today on a planetary scale."