Although the emphasis of the Aga Khan Award is on architecture, it addresses the built environment as a whole.
By Mohammad al-Asad
THE AGA KHAN Award for Architecture recently announced the winners of its 10th award cycle. Every three years, an international jury selects a group of projects that express excellence in the design and implementation of building projects intended to serve Muslim communities. Hundreds of projects are submitted for every award cycle. Of these, a group of less than 30 is short-listed. Technical reviewers visit the projects and report on their findings to the jury (I have served as a technical reviewer for the award on a few occasions). Based on these reports, the jury selects the winning projects. Nine projects were selected for this cycle of the award.
Many architectural awards usually end up glorifying an architect or an architectural design. Many architectural awards also end up emphasising architecture almost exclusively as an artistic process that is concerned with the creation of form, and totally ignore architecture as the main setting in which we human beings spend most of our lives and interact with each other. The Aga Khan Award does acknowledge individual achievement as well as high-quality designs, including the cutting-edge and the avant-garde, but the uniqueness of the award is in its emphasis on the positive contributions that building projects can make to the lives of the people they serve, and to humanity in general.
Ismailimail 