By CHIN MUI YOON
In a follow-on from our story last week on the workings of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, StarMagexamines three of the nine award-winning projects for 2007.
WHAT does it take for a building to be awarded the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture?
Last week in our stories titled Catalyst for change[1] and Appreciating architecture, StarMag looked at how the award – which is given out once in three years – is designed to enhance the understanding of Islamic culture through architecture.
Nominees can include all types of private and public spaces, but must be dedicated to improving the quality of life in societies where there is a significant presence of Muslims. The award was started in 1977 by the Aga Khan, and has since selected 92 winning projects scattered across the globe.
The award celebrated its 30th anniversary in Kuala Lumpur recently, and announced nine new recipients of the award. Each one of these beautiful spaces embodies that much-desired architectural formula which combines the old and new as well as the fanciful and the functional.
Here’s a look at three of the winning projects in closer detail.
A school built by a community in Rudrapur, Bangladesh
“I like that building; it looks like a fun place!”
That comment came from a news photographer from The Star who was covering the 2007 Aga Khan Award for Architecture seminar in Kuala Lumpur recently.
The building he was referring to was a simple, rustic school in Bangladesh. Clearly, it was not just the Awards jury who thought of it as a delightful place.
This project began in 1997 when Austrian architect Anna Heringer volunteered with German NGO, Shanti, in Bangladesh. There was a need in the village of Rudrapur, in the northwest of the country, for a school to house educational facilities for the village children.
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Heringer proposed a mud-walled building. She thought it was sustainable and suitable for the local environment, but found out that the traditional farmer’s mud houses in the area are dark and susceptible to fungus, and last only up to 15 years.
In 2004, Heringer developed a programme for a mud-walled building incorporating technical improvements. Shanti’s partner NGO in Bangladesh, Dipshikha, agreed to the plan as it recognised and developed locally available potential. The entire community was roped in to help with the project.
“Through the building of the school, we wanted to change the image of the area and strengthen the sense of local identity and self respect of the people,” Heringer explains.
As far as the school building went, ventilation was a top priority.
“We wanted a building protected from the rain and sun, yet one that remained light, airy and ecological,” she says.
Heringer utilised traditional mud walls, which were formed with wet loam. An adapted technique called Wellerbau was used where loam was mixed with straw.
Even the village cows and water buffaloes helped to tread the mixture of rice, straw and jute that were mixed with the loam to stabilise the building! The local craftsmen, pupils, parents and teachers then applied the loam to the wall in layers and trimmed them with spades.
The double-storey school was completed in four months. The first floor was constructed from bamboo, widely used in the country for bridges and scaffolding. The lashed bamboo also acts as the perfect tropical window because of its slats, allowing for ventilation while protecting the building from the elements. As the area sits on a risky seismic zone, bamboo also makes an ideal material for building, as it is light and exhibits high elasticity and tensile resistance.
The classrooms on the lower level are large and airy. Cosy little cave-like rooms are created to add a fun element and are conducive for small group discussions, or just for the children to play in. “It’s a nice environment for learning,” said the school headmaster in a video of the project.
There is little need for interior furnishing apart from straw mats, as it is local custom to sit on the floor. Colourful drapes that hang in doorways are all that are needed to soften the hard surfaces. The result is a joyful school building that sits very much at home in Rudrapur, especially since everyone had a hand in building it!
The jury cited the project as “a fresh and hopeful model for sustainable building globally. The final result of this heroic volunteer effort is a building that creates beautiful, meaningful and humane collective spaces for learning, so enriching the lives of the children it serves.”
An ancient urban monument revitalised in Yemen
The city of Shibam in the Hadhramaut val ley of Yemen is aptly called the “Manhattan of the Desert”. It makes an awesome sight. Out of the desert wasteland rises mud brick high-rise buildings which date back 300 years.
The city is one of the earliest examples of urban town planning, and its labyrinth of lanes unfold to reveal tall mud brick buildings and public spaces. It has now been beautifully restored and accredited as a Unesco World Heritage site.
Shibam has obvious historical and archaeological significance. But beyond that, it also sets a fine example of how the old can be so relevant in our modern world. Shibam’s rehabilitation is not for the benefit of researchers or tourists. Behind those fascinating mud walls are an entire community of Yemeni citizens who still occupy this ancient city.
When restoring the nearly 200 homes, the Yemeni-German Urban Development Project approached Shibam as a living community rather than a historical artefact.
Each building resembles a modern apartment, and a single family occupies it. They traditionally use the ground floors for grain and food storage. Sheep and goats are kept on the first floors at night. The men use the second and third floors as living rooms, while the fourth and fifth floors are for women. The sixth and upper floors are thoughtfully kept aside for newlyweds and extended families.
When the project began in 2000, many of these homes were at the point of collapse. Subsidies were given to homeowners for restoration work.
To incorporate training as part of the project, senior master builders were engaged to train and supervise the younger builders. They employed traditional practices such as adding wooden stilts (ma’atin) along damaged facades to help reduce the load of the upper floors. Horizontal wooden beams were used to “stitch” vertical cracks in walls. Floors were removed to reduce the load on some buildings. The workers waterproofed the exteriors by applying lime in two layers with the final wash mixed with a small quantity of red sugar.
To date, nearly 200 homes have been restored as well as several public buildings, monuments, mosques, fountains, a watchtower and the city gate.
The Mud Architecture Association with its 33 master builders and 220 workers and apprentices are directly overseeing all restoration work. But what captured the Aga Khan jury was the project’s insistence on engaging the local population to rehabilitate their own city through community organisations.
For example, the Hawtah Women’s Charity and Social Association runs literacy programmes and classes in sewing and computers for youths. The Hazm Community Centre provides workshops for women and the Agricultural Cooperative Association has 80% of the farmers and landowners involved in restoring the intricate irrigation system around the historic city.
Judges commended the rehabilitation of the city of Shibam: “Through the efforts of NGOs, architects and stakeholders, Shibam has eluded imminent obsolescence under the amnesiac pressures of globalisation, growing into a platform for the reinvention of the vernacular high rise in 21st century conditions.”
A university for an aspiring nation Malaysia’s own University of Technology Petronas proudly takes its place as a winner in this year’s Aga Khan Awards for Architecture.
The project is the result of a collaboration between GDP (Group Design Partnership) Architects, a large Malaysian firm credited with producing some prominent buildings, and Foster + Partners, the prestigious English firm of 1999 Pritzker Prize winning architect, Lord Norman Foster.
If the school in Rudrapur, Bangladesh is rustic in every sense, the University of Technology Petronas is a grand project signifying Malaysia’s ambitions for 2020.
From the start, the landscape and weather conditions posed a challenge to this project. The 450ha site where it sits is hilly and forested. To preserve the natural topography of the area, the core academic buildings were laid in a radial manner, skirting the base of the hills forming five crescents enclosing a central park.
A dramatic, soaring crescent-form roof supported by steel columns winds around the edge of the site. It covers pedestrian routes and provides a defined shaded zone for social interaction and circulation.
Viewed from above, the university’s canopy elevation echoes the tree canopy of the densely forested site.
The design employs a low energy concept where the canopy acts as an effective shade. The blocks are separated by central passages that encourage airflow – quite a departure from massed chunks of buildings commonly found in schools and learning institutions.
Cantilever shading and opaque glass reduce solar glare and gas-fired centralised chilled water systems are used for cooling. Water is also collected from the roofs for irrigation.
Elements of the design fascinated the jury. The all-encompassing shaped canopy was found to be a contemporary reinterpretation of the classic metaphor for tropical architecture, that of an umbrella offering protection from the sun and rain.
As an academic centre for 6,600 students in the study of civil, mechanical, chemical and electrical engineering, the university provides a suitably inspiring environment.
The jury thought so too, citing the project’s significance as “an exemplary use of a performance-based approach to architectural design that goes beyond the diagram. The design is instructive, aesthetically satisfying and technologically novel. This is a high-tech emblematic architecture appropriate for a scientific university in a rapidly developing nation.”
(Text adapted from reports by architects Jimmy C.S. Lim, Salma Samar Damluji and Hanif Kara).
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