Creating An Entrepreneurial Vision For Design, Architecture And Sustainability- 50 Years In The Making

Sustainability, community engagement, and traditional values are the cornerstone of any conversation on culture, particularly architecture, arts, and music. This holistic approach has become synonymous with how we vision, plan and execute projects in these areas.

There was a time when architecture was dominated by a narrow frame of reference – predominantly from a western perspective of form and function. During the initial stages of globalization in culture and architecture, the dominant approach was uni-directional, with little or no opportunity to cross-fertilize thinking and new ways of working. The Aga Khan, founder, and chairman of the Aga Khan Development Network, recognized this as an issue in the 1970s. Within the remit of the AKDN, addressing the quality of living meant improving the infrastructure, housing, education, and healthcare provisions with a strong focus on aligning with the environment, habitat, and cultural preservation.

In response to a largely homogenous approach to architecture, the Aga Khan established the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1977. The Awards encouraged a multi-dimensional approach to design that addressed the needs and aspirations of regions with a significant Muslim community. The vision for the Architecture awards was to create a platform for innovation and sharing new approaches to design and function, to shift from a globalization approach to ‘glocalization’. The awards encouraged best practices in design and engineering that would combine with community needs and local crafts in trade and construction. Fundamentally this also meant capturing knowledge and creating avenues to educate future generations of architects to adopt a more pluralistic approach to designing buildings used by members of the public.

The Director of the Aga Khan Awards, Farrokh Derakhshani, speaking with Forbes, explained the entrepreneurial nature of the Awards and the ground-breaking vision of the Aga Khan, “His Highness attended most of the executive committee meetings, and he spent time to ensure the Award was developed on a solid basis. In those early days, maybe nobody understood the scale of what we were doing, but now we can see the results after fifty years.” Today we recognize the need to invest in communities. In developing countries, we increasingly recognize the need to create strong institutions in cities and rural areas and restrict the erosion of communities due to migration to capital cities and overseas. Working in education and health emphasized the importance of paying attention to the users. This perspective also meant balancing the immediate needs of services in these areas and creating focal points for the wider community.

The Awards recognize the value of projects and challenge assumptions to create projects designed to develop a holistic approach to the needs of a community, taking a user-centered approach. A striking example of this in the 2022 cycle of winners is the Rohingya Refugee Community center in Teknaf, Bangladesh, designed by Rizvi Hassan, Khwaja Fatmi, and Saad Ben Mostafa.

Derakhshani explains how the Awards encourage us to think about provisions for refugees differently; “people think that what you do for refugees or other groups in post-disaster scenarios means creating temporary solutions, temporary buildings. Nothing is more permanent than temporary solutions. We’ve seen it all over the world, refugee camps are erected as temporary structures, but they remain forever. We know this, and we need to look at these structures from a different point of view.” Derakhshani explains, when asked about the different perspectives, “It’s about the quality of space. We are talking about the intangible nature of belonging. You need a sense of belonging as a user and as a community. This is something you can’t measure, which happens when you come into such a space. You feel that you belong. You build something.”

When building projects for public use, building for longevity means understanding current needs and predicting future needs of how groups will work and communicate with each other the degree of accuracy is impossible, but building space for flexibility is essential. At the same time, most of this thinking is aligned with the architecture and design fields that have flourished in user-design thinking over the last few decades. But imagine the environment when the AKAA was conceived. European countries were rapidly rebuilding after the destruction of the second world war. Inevitably, the academic field of architecture was dominated by European and North American design, which fed through into academia and teaching. Many countries with Muslim populations were designed on the legacy of colonialism. It was virtually unheard of for these countries to share their approaches to design and architecture. The academic field of architecture needed the provision or practice to share resources across their areas of expertise. Countries with similar cultures and challenges could not share their solutions, instead relying on responses that needed to consider local needs. This approach reinforced a sense of individualism and impeded the opportunity to share resources for problem-solving. Derakhshani, explains this dilemma; “Communities can fall into the trap of feeling proud that they have exclusive problems. When you demonstrate to someone on the other side of the world have the same problems, they have addressed it with a better solution. The excuse of exclusivity falls away quickly. The Award focuses on architects, engineers, and those involved in the built environment because architecture touches all levels of society, from the poorest to the richest, government and the public.”

The process behind the Awards was to create a new system of thinking around architecture from a pluralistic perspective. Derakhshani explains how this evolved, “Initially, we had to challenge assumptions relevant to the periods of the 1970s and within a Muslim context asking fundamental questions, such as how do projects support the evolving nature of communities, education, and healthcare requirements?”. Derakhshani continues, “in many cases, we didn’t have clarity and alignment on these conversations at an intellectual level. We recognized the need to engage with academia.” Alongside global seminars, the Aga Khan decided to provide five endowments in architecture to prominent universities, including Harvard and MIT. He also created Archnet, which we now recognize as a crowd-sourcing platform for individuals in this field to upload and share information to widen the breadth of good practice. As this field evolved, the Awards became a catalyst for building and connecting communities, creating connections, and providing different ways for communities to live together. In 2022 the scale and range of award winners are a testament to the vision mapped out by His Highness in 1977.

Of the 463 projects from 55 countries nominated for this year’s Award, the Master Jury selected 20 to visit and evaluate. Six of these projects were chosen to share the $1m prize. They come from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, and Senegal and range equally widely in their execution. The Urban River Spaces project provides residents with access to the Nabaganga River. The six temporary community spaces of the Rohingya Refugee Response program are responding to emergency needs. At the same time, the Banyuwangi International airport looks to the future of East Java. The Argo Contemporary Art Museum and Cultural Centre – a former brewery – is converted into a private museum for contemporary art, and the Niemeyer Guest House has renovated existing structures. Meanwhile, the Kamanar Secondary School is an entirely new creation consisting of classroom pods around existing tree canopies. Each project demonstrates innovation, considering the users, caring for the environment, and conserving historical memory.