Behind the Aga Khan Award’s inevitable rhetoric about quality lies a decidedly political agenda. by Michael Sorkin The winners of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture were announced recently, and it’s an interesting list. This is the eighth cycle of the award — which has been given every three years since 1977 — and the recipients reflect both the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the program. The idiosyncrasies are especially important. For a prize that celebrates the idea of architectural plurality, acknowledging local cultural differences is crucial. Idiosyncrasy is also a great hedge against the spurious universality that has long dominated architectural thinking. And if anything distinguishes this award from better known ones like the Pritzker Prize, it is the expectation that the results will reveal something new about what architecture can be; the Pritzker never defies expectations, except perhaps in the order in which it is doled out to the usual suspects. The award’s formal mission is to recognize both architecture in the “Muslim world” and architecture elsewhere that speaks to Muslim aspirations. The character of this ongoing project is inextricably bound up with that of its progenitor, the Aga Khan. Hereditary head of the Ismaili branch of Islam, he is as much known for his material interests as his spiritual ones, a thoroughly modern religious leader whose extravagant lifestyle and flamboyant entrepreneurship make him part spirit guide, part socialite, and part head of state. The problematic of the Aga Khan’s person parallels that of the award: how to combine traditional Muslim values with modernity in the full Western sense, and how to reenvision spirituality so that it becomes more about art and service than dogma. From the Aga Khan’s standpoint, the award is surely useful both in increasing his own prestige and establishing a progressive cultural vector for Islam, as well as counteracting stereotypes promoted by the Western media. This multiple agenda — and the fact that any comprehensive statement about Islam is bound to be controversial to someone — necessitates a careful political reading of the results. Make no mistake, however: Politics is one of the award’s strengths. If the Aga Khan has made a lasting contribution to the discourse about “quality” in architecture, it lies precisely in a tenacious enlargement of architecture’s scope, in the insistence on a conceptual parity between high cultural manifestations by architects and work by designers outside the mainstream, including local craftspeople who don’t think of themselves as “architects” in the familiar professional sense. Under the direction of the astute Suha Ozkan, the awards committee receives suggestions (which have grown dramatically in number over the years) from nominators around the world. After an initial vetting of the submissions by the jury, experts are dispatched to each site to prepare a dossier about the work, which is then presented to the jury, with the expert remaining to answer any questions about the project under his or her purview. The composition of the jury anticipates the character of the award. This year’s jurors comprised a fairly typical group, including Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki, regionally well-known architects from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia, and Turkey, Mohammed Arkoun, an Islamic intellectual historian from Paris and a perennial ideologue for the Aga Khan program, and Fredric Jameson, the neo-Marxist cultural theorist from Duke. (The steering committee, which is responsible for selecting the jury, counts both Peter Eisenman and Charles Jencks among its well-known members.) At their best, most Aga Khan juries represent a World War II movie bomber-crew assortment of backgrounds and ethnicities: the diasporan theorist, the Marxist, the woman, the superstar, the Jew. This skillful combination of pluralism with the nominal monolith of “Islam” assures the program’s continued relevance and credibility. The spirit of diversity carries over into the range of projects recognized. Although it isn’t mandated, the jury invariably honors a wide variety of project types and a relatively large number of them (in past years as many as 15). If only statistically, those figures raise the question of representation. One begins with what’s conspicuously absent: As with the Pritzker, women are invisible. Increasing the range of projects has not proved to be a formula for inclusion. On the other hand, there’s a wide distribution by countries and a willingness to look in places like Palestine, Iran, and Iraq, which are on the forbidden list for much of the Western cultural media. The most interesting and relevant distribution, though, is by project type. This is winningly broad, ranging from rural and urban self-help schemes accomplished for pennies to planning and infrastructure projects, landscaping and parks, religious buildings, houses, and civic structures of both austerity and magnificence. When coupled with the shifting dynamic of serial juries, the spread allows for the possibility of considerable polemical nuance. This year’s winners were no exception. To begin, there were only seven awards, which makes you wonder why a jury with half a million dollars to distribute would elect to give it to so few people. Clearly, it had nothing to do with the number of candidates — this cycle attracted a record crop. Nor did it have to do with the particularly extraordinary quality of the winners (although there were some extraordinary projects). According to my sources, the most likely explanation is the especially contentious jury deliberations this year and the attendant difficulty of trade-offs. As has happened often in the past, the debate broke down along the lines of formalism versus social content. But let’s get down to cases. One winner in particular — an infrastructure project in the Indian city of Indore — struck me as brilliant and moving, a truly profound project. The scheme is the brainchild of Himanshu Parikh, an engineer who recognized that, in the absence of a municipal sewer system, people living in the city’s slums were using the nearby Khan and Sarawati rivers as sewers. By combining sanitary improvements — sewer lines laid along the riverbanks, new sewage treatment facilities, and government-subsidized toilet hookups to the new lines — with street-lighting, roadwork, and the construction of community halls, the project has dramatically improved the local environment and the lives of the slum-dwellers. Part of the scheme’s appeal is the collaboration that produced it — a coalition of residents, government, nongovernmental organizations, and industry. One result has been a startling decrease in crime, most of which was committed in the old communal washhouses. The Indore scheme was one of three awards given to projects in India, a concentration that raises the issue of Islam’s relationship to the nation-state. By the time the jury met, the Indian government was in the hands of the BJP, the strident Hindu nationalist party that has been openly antagonistic toward Islam. It seems likely that at least some members of the jury meant to send a message of tolerance by recognizing projects in nominally secular India, which are sure to be used by religiously mixed groups. The second Indian prize — for a lepers’ hospital sponsored by the Norwegian Free Evangelical Mission and designed by two Norwegian architects who were students at the time — is irreproachably worthy, the first such facility in a region desperate for them. Simple, elegantly designed, and sensitively built, the project provides a safe, self-sufficient, and reposeful environment for people accustomed to being treated as pariahs. The third project, Charles Correa’s design for a new assembly building in Bhopal for the state of Madhya Pra-desh, is the curiosity of the Indian selections. Like all of Correa’s work, Vidhan Bhavan is a beautiful job, at once formal and relaxed, sensitive to site and climate, and replete with allusions to local architectural traditions. What’s unusual is that Correa uses the form of a Hindu mandala to organize the plan. Calling this building Muslim is surely a stretch, and its inclusion again seems to signal the extension of the prize’s catchment area to include the developing world in general. It also brings up a crucial recurring issue: the place of iconography. If the jury means to define Islamic architecture more broadly than just by geography or demographics, the projects’ inscribed systems of meaning deserve some attention. One of the Aga Khan’s stated missions is to coalesce Islam (with its traditions of sacred imagery) and Modernism (which has historically preferred “meaningless” abstraction). Islam, though, seems more attuned to the predilections of postmodernity (with its own readmission of iconography). Now that abstraction has ceased to be politically correct, at least in the Western worlds of art and architecture, the question is, must we read all buildings symbolically — and is it even possible not to foreground such readings, especially in a project like Correa’s where they are so deliberately inscribed? The 1998 awards have it both ways. Another fine winner (despite its somewhat regressive social content) is a deluxe country club in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Designed by Frei Otto and Omrania Architects with structural engineers Buro Happold, it is celebrated for its relationship to the desert landscape, its inner garden, and its Teflon tensile structures that supposedly evoke the tents of the Bedouins. A fundamentally abstract work, it was partly legitimated by the jury’s attribution of iconic meanings that probably weren’t intended by the author. (Certainly no one would describe Otto’s Olympic Stadium in Munich, a similar structure, as Islamic.) Although iconography is not normally commutable, meaning was somehow acquired in the migration. As a rationale, this is a bit fast and loose, allowing meaning to be detached (in Bhopal) or attached (in Riyadh) at will. The most transparently political award was for the restoration of the historic center of Hebron. It looks like a good job was made of it: historically sensitive design, fine standard of craft, townspeople trained in building skills, no neighborhood residents displaced, revival of commerce and a sense of life, hygienic improvements, etc. Of course, what distinguishes the project is the site — ground zero for the territorial struggles of Palestinians and Israelis. The Palestinians of Hebron have adopted the Israelis’ familiar strategy of using historic restoration to establish the authenticity of their claims of ownership. It’s not the first time the Aga Khan Award has indirectly criticized Israel: the 1989 cycle honored the restoration of a mosque in Sidon, Lebanon, which the Israelis had bombed during their invasion. The remaining two awards were less impressive. An arts complex in Lahore by Pakistani architect Nayyar Ali Dada exemplifies the form-versus-content problem. Despite its scale, the building — a rather stiff piece of architecture that has apparently greatly enriched the city’s cultural life — seems slightly beside the point. So does the house by Jimmy C.S. Lim in Malaysia, a fine but less than extraordinary work that continues the award’s long-standing tradition of recognizing vaguely folkloric houses for the better classes. One of my sources tells me that Zaha, who apparently saw shades of a Proun in the plan’s juxtaposition of two triangles, was a strong advocate for this project. Such opinions — such tastes — are the great strength of the Aga Khan Award, a defiance of the idea of “correct” architecture and a passion for deliberation about the best.