SOURCE: Architecture Critic
BYLINE: DAVID DILLON

The AGA Khan Awards for Architecture, presented Nov. 6 in Aleppo, Syria, contrast with the image of a monolithic and isolationist Islamic culture currently being flashed across the world's television screens.

For one thing, the winning projects are remarkably diverse, reflecting the hopes and aspirations of Muslim communities from Morocco to Malaysia. And unlike much Western architecture, which celebrates ego, fashion and expensive technology, this work emphasizes social responsibility and cultural continuity as the essence of good design. That can mean something as basic as bringing water and electricity to a remote mountain village or as sophisticated as inserting a hotel between a beach and a rain forest without damaging the ecology of either.

Many of the winning projects were carried out by grassroots organizations using simple tools and available materials to create jobs and revive local building traditions. Although such work rarely makes its way into the design magazines, it has enormous influence on architectural education and practice in the Third World.

One of this year's nine awards went to a college campus in Tilonia, India, by Barefoot Architects, a group of itinerant and largely untutored designers committed to helping poor people help themselves. Using scrap metal and local rubble stone, they constructed a series of simple structures, some with flat roofs, others with thatched domes, to provide housing and classrooms for the community. And all for $21,000. The architects also designed 250 dwellings for the homeless and a rainwater harvesting system for neighboring villages.

The SOS Children's Village in Aqaba, Jordan, designed by Jafar Tukan & Partners, cares for orphans in a familial, non-institutional way. The children live in crisp wood and granite houses, supervised by surrogate mothers and a cadre of "village fathers" that includes the gardener and the maintenance man. Around them are courtyards, playgrounds, and other signs of normal life. The jury praised the project for setting "a precedent for a new architecture that looks to the future and acknowledges the past." It has already sparked a revival of traditional stonework in the region.

The Nubian Museum in Aswan, Egypt, and the Datai Hotel in Malaysia are larger and involve a more elaborate blending of Eastern tradition and Western technology. Yet here too, the goal is to enrich community life rather than to make grandly disembodied architectural statements.

The hotel, designed by Australian Kerry Hill, is set back from the ocean in order to protect the fragile beach. Its 84 rooms are divided into four freestanding blocks that rest on traditional wood stilts and are connected by walkways and courtyards. Another 40 villas are set into the forest, which was selectively cleared by elephants to reduce environmental damage. Definitely not your typical seaside Hilton.

These triennial awards, with $500,000 in prize money, were established in 1977 by Prince KARIM AGA Khan, the Harvard-educated spiritual leader of the world's 20 million Ismaili Muslims. His objective was not to purge Muslim architecture of Western influences but to integrate the best of East and West into an architecture that is more contextual and more responsive to local needs. Since then, more than 80 projects have been honored, ranging from community housing to a poultry farming school and rural reforestation programs.

Speaking at the awards ceremony in Aleppo, he said, "It is clearly evident that peace in the decades ahead can only be achieved when the pluralist nature of human society is understood, valued and built upon."

It is a message that transcends architecture.