Such an understanding of local culture and building traditions can simultaneously address the complexities of the modern world, Shim said, citing a Singapore tower—the 28-story Moulmein Rise, designed by WOHA Architects of Singapore—given an award for adapting the monsoon window and other traditional elements as a creative response to the tropical climate.
The Aga Khan awards spotlight projects serving communities where Muslims have a “significant presence”—but “ ‘significant' is open to interpretation,” according to Sam Pickens, spokesman for the Aga Khan Development Network, which administers the prize. (The Aga Khan rarely speaks to the press and declined to be interviewed for this article.) To be considered, architects are by no means required to be Muslim: The latest cycle included two Dutch architects who won for designing the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Institut du Monde Arabe designed by Jean Nouvel in Paris won an award in 1989, and that same year, the Bangladeshi parliament building by the Jewish American architect Louis Kahn was given a prize. About half the winners have been non-Muslim since the prize was established. Juries for all cycles of the prize have included non-Muslims, among them Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Arata Isozaki.
The awards differ from most other architectural prizes in that the projects must have been completed and in use for at least one full year before they can be considered, and are subjected to extensive review and inspection. Some 343 projects around the world were selected for review this cycle. At the 27 short-listed sites, a dozen architectural professionals interviewed the end users and reported back to the nine-member jury. The rigorous selection process lasts three years, and it is up to the jurors themselves to decide the number of winners among whom the half million dollars in prize money is divided. Unlike the Pritzker Prize, the award goes not just to the designer but to clients and builders as well.
The award is not explicitly political but is part of a larger effort by the Aga Khan Development Network that more clearly is. The Aga Khan abjures militancy in favor of diplomacy and sees investments that promote economic self-reliance in impoverished nations as a means of combating extremism. In Africa, the network has been funding schools for young children that offer a modern approach to the teaching of Islam that departs from techniques used in traditional madrassas where the Koran is recited by rote.
The Ismailis have been periodically persecuted and marginalized by other Muslims, and in 2005 an alliance of Sunni religious groups in Pakistan sought to have followers of the Aga Khan declared infidels. In recent years, according to news reports, employees of the Aga Khan Foundation in Pakistan were attacked and killed by Sunni militants. But the Aga Khan's opponents have matters other than architecture on their minds, says Mounir Bouchenaki, an Algerian archaeologist who formerly served as UNESCO's assistant director general for culture. “In the community of architects, there is great appreciation … I don't think [political activists are] interested. Architecture is not really the subject.”
At a panel discussion for the latest architecture prizes, several jurors invoked the Arabic word ummah, denoting the community of Muslim believers across the world, while stressing they had in mind not the ummah of the caliphate, in which Islamic Sharia law reigned supreme, but what they called a “dialogical” ummah. “Warlords like to beat the drum of the clash of civilizations,” said Harvard literary theorist Homi Bhabha, one of four non-architects on the panel. “There is no such clash of civilizations, certainly not on the side of enlightened Islam.”
Yet despite the Aga Khan's remarkable efforts, a fundamentalist concept of ummah remains entrenched in many of the countries he seeks to modernize. The dangers were made clear this January, when Taliban suicide bombers attacked the five-star Hotel Serena built by the Aga Khan himself in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing eight people. The Aga Khan had spoken at the hotel's opening in 2005, hailing its design by architect Ramesh Khosla as a sign of progress after the extremist Islamic Taliban were ousted from power. Khosla had won an Aga Khan Architecture Award in 1980 for designing the Mughal Sheraton Hotel in Agra, India.
A former foreign correspondent, Michael Z. Wise is the author of Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy. His writing has appeared in publications including the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times.