http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/03/09/HOGPOBFVU243.DTL
San Francisco Chronicle
Zahid Sardar, Chronicle Design Editor
Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Culture's winning ways
On March 25 the Aga Khan Trust for Culture will open a history- making park in Cairo that demonstrates the goals set by its triennial Award for Architecture.
Prince Karim Aga Khan, billionaire spiritual leader of 20 million Ismaili Shiite Muslims scattered around the globe, established the Aga Khan award for Architecture in 1977 -- now administered by the trust established in Geneva in the late 1980s. The trust also oversees a Historic Cities Support Programme, an Education and Culture Programme and a Museum Unit.
Al-Azhar Park, to be formally celebrated this month, is the most prominent project in the Historic Cities program, which was set up in 1992. While the Aga Khan architecture award recognizes new Islamic works around the world, the Historic Cities program -- by rescuing Islam's best monuments from history's dust heap -- demonstrates the architectural standard they all, old or new, must meet.
Al-Azhar Park was actually just a rubble-filled, 74-acre site in the shadow of mosques, minarets and rag-tag dwellings near old Cairo's Ayyubid 12th century eastern wall. Its reclamation provides overcrowded modern-day Cairo with scenic open space that Khan's Fatimid ancestors, who once controlled Cairo, would be proud of. Serendipitously, the making of the new park has resulted in the uncovering and restoration of the historic defense wall and many other monuments, including the Ottoman Khayrbek mosque, that surround it. It has brought this poor part of Cairo new livelihoods, revived traditional crafts like woodworking and tile-making, and demonstrated the catalytic effect of architecture on culture.
"I am an eyewitness to the ways in which people relate to themselves and to each other, and my work is a way of scooping and ladling that experience," said Richard Neutra, the midcentury modernist architect who worked in California.
Neutra died long before the Aga Khan award was established, but he may as well have been describing the role this triennial award, now in its ninth cycle, has played in highlighting Islamic societies around the world via progressive architecture.
"Over time, the Aga Khan awards became focused on squatter settlements and self-help social projects, but did not attend to the major institutional developments of large-scale projects," writes Nader Ardalan, an architect in Kuwait and an adviser on the Aga Khan's initial award committee.
However, the current Aga Khan award winners, announced this past November in newly restored gardens around the emperor Humayun's 16th century tomb in Delhi, India, vindicate the award's original boast. They honor the widest possible swath of the Islamic world, and the winners offer deeper insights into urban habitats where most people in Muslim countries live, Ardalan says.
The seven award winners range from humble mud structures to grand towers of glass and steel, and from ancient to modern buildings. Just as the first awards in 1980 recognized the Hajj Terminal tents in Jeddah by the New York firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, this cycle's winners include the legendary library of Alexandria, rebuilt as a modern Islamic repository of knowledge for future generations.
The winners include prototypical low-cost sandbag shelters by an Iranian- born California architect, Nader Khalili, and a stylish, modernistic home made of indigenous materials just off Turkey's Aegean coast. Kuala Lumpur's engineering marvel, the Petronas high-rise towers by Cesar Pelli, is contrasted by a graceful primary school in Burkina Faso, built of sun-dried bricks by a native son who was the first architect in his village to get a degree. And the elaborately restored 12th century Al-Abbas Mosque in Yemen contrasts with the revitalization of Palestinian homes in the Old City of Jerusalem. All are a homage to Islam's rich, ancient tapestry.
"The great challenges to our human settlements today are sustainable urban habitats and architectural designs that are environmentally adaptive and culturally relevant," Ardalan said. "The Aga Khan Awards focus on these basic principles. They help establish design goals, set trends and raise consciousness for decision-makers. Since they spread this awareness internationally, there is also a universal value in them," he added.
A steering committee, an awards jury and a team of experts who visited most of the sites determined winners of the $500,000 award, architecture's largest cash prize.
Indian architect Charles Correa, Mohsen Mostafavi, the dean of Architecture at Cornell University, and Peter Rowe, professor of architecture and urban design at Harvard, were on the steering committee. Also included were Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and a name familiar to many Bay Area readers, Jacques Herzog, a creator of the new de Young museum.
The master jury was varied, with architects and academics from London, Tokyo, Bombay, Bern, Switzerland, Barcelona, Spain, and Amman, Jordan.
The successful 2002-2004 projects are from equally diverse sources. They emanate sometimes from non-Muslims who don't typically work within Islamic environments, but they all further the goal of enhancing Muslim societies.
The wide-ranging Aga Khan award and its progenitor have not gone unnoticed in the Western world, where most such prizes like the Pritzker go to a star architect's total oeuvre. In January, the Prince Karim Aga Khan became such a star, scooping up an architecture award of his own -- the National Building Museum's 2005 Vincent Scully Prize -- for bridging the cultural gap between East and West.