The Aga Khan award for architecture: an inquiry on changing narratives

Date

2024-3-11

Author

Shahri, Mohammadjavad

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After 45 years, 15 cycles and numerous seminars and publications, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA) has accumulated a collection of noteworthy works. This study seeks to explore the history and progression of the award program by scrutinizing its selection criteria, underlying narratives, and its contributions to the field of architectural discourse. The research investigates how the award correlates with architectural approaches of its time, and the diverse issues tackled by it. In scrutinizing the projects and publications of the AKAA, a series of keywords has been extracted from the contents of jury reports on award recipient projects, official books, and seminars. After categorizing these keywords based on relevance, four distinct underlying narratives were recognized. The main keywords of the four underlying narratives are “cultural identity”, “regionalism”, “innovation and sustainability” and “community self-help development”, which feature prominently in AKAA texts and the realized projects that have been awarded. Through visualizing the compiled data in tables, charts and graphs, discernible turning points in the award's trajectory are detected, highlighting the changes of focus within the award program. An examination of the award's official aim to recognize "architectural excellence" through its publications reveals several distinct yet interconnected definitions. These definitions, in conjunction with the underlying narratives and the turning points over the 45-year history, elucidate the transformation of the award and how it stays relevant to both its audience (Muslim societies) and the architecture of the day, with a shift from intangible and theoretical pursuits to more concrete and practical ends.

Subject Keywords

Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Content Analysis, Underlying Narratives, Architectural Excellence

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109425

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis