His Highness the Aga Khan addresses the audience during the award ceremony of the 12th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, presented in Lisbon, Portugal.AKDN / Gary OtteThe Award was designed, from the start, not only to honour exceptional achievement, but also to pose fundamental questions. How, for example, could Islamic architecture embrace more fully the values of cultural continuity, while also addressing the needs and aspirations of rapidly changing societies? How could we mirror more responsively the diversity of human experience and the differences in local environments? How could we honour inherited traditions while also engaging with new social perplexities and new technological possibilities?
The three-year Award cycle was organised to take up such questions through a wide array of seminars, exhibitions, lectures, publications, and a highly decentralised award selection process. Over time, the Award has been joined by other programmes under the aegis of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, including our Historic Cities programme.
This new discourse, as wide as it has become, has had a continuing, common premise, a conviction that architecture has a capacity to transform the quality of human existence. More than that, we believed that our Quranic heritage gave us the responsibility, as good stewards of the Divine creation, to shape and reshape our earthly environment in the service of humankind.
Shortlisted Project – 2014-2016 Award Cycle: Casa-Port New Railway Station, Casablanca, Morocco
A dynamic transport hub that anticipates the needs of the city of the future.
Casa-Port railway station (French: Gare de Casa-Port) is a “Moroccan National Railway” station in the centre of Casablanca.
This transport hub, designed to anticipate 25 million passenger trips-per-year in the future, comprises a large passenger hall opening onto a wide square to the southwest, and the platforms to the southeast, a shopping centre located on the lower level of the hall, an underground car park and an office building.
The dimensions of the vast concourse and the walkways leading to the transverse platform are designed to deal with commuter travel and peak time loadings occurring over the same periods during the day.
The hall’s glass facades enable travellers to grasp the organisation of the station and its walkways and, on the west side, a contemporary mashrabiyya-like system filters the strong afternoon sunlight. In anticipation of future transformations, the hub has been devised in a way that allows its future connection with a potential regional express line station. In its spaces, volumes, materials, lighting and geometry, the station carries on the heritage of Moroccan palaces and public buildings, while paying tribute to the modernity of Casablanca.
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A dynamic transport hub that anticipates the needs of the city of the future.
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Facing the port of Casablanca, the railway station is located at the meeting point between the medina, the art deco district and the new developments in the city centre. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
Modern mashrabiyya on the west facade acts like a screen between the city and the station to reduce direct sunlight. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
Facades are clad with clear, transparent glass framed in steel structures, while the mashrabiyya is made of fibre-reinforced concrete. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
The architecture of the station hall is characterized by its roof, a wide canopy extending beyond the façades to jut out over the square, and its supporting columns. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
The concourse is the major element of the hub and opens up onto a large fore court on the south-west and the platforms on the north-east. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
Bottom view of the supporting column, which open out at the top to allow light to enter the building through openings in the roof. AKAA / AREP / Didier Boy de la Tour
Arif lives miles away from the crowded city of Chicago. He has interest in technology, spirituality, religion, psychology and community. Find him somewhat engaged on Twitter.
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