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The Aga Khan IV posing as a scholar at Harvard College, 1958. Picture courtesy AKDN
Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, the Aga Khan IV and forty ninth Imam of Nizari Ismaili Muslims, died February 4 in Lisbon. He was 88. The Aga Khan’s eldest son, Prince Rahim Al-Hussaini, has been designated the Aga Khan V.
Prince Karim, who was born in Geneva in 1936, got here into the hereditary function of non secular chief of the worldwide Ismaili Muslim group in 1957 after the demise of his grandfather. Over a 60-plus-year rule, he embraced his accountability, as he mentioned in 2006, to “do all inside his means to enhance the standard, and safety, of the every day lives” of Ismailis and burnished a legacy of philanthropy targeted on well being care, training, and tradition—and that fused religion with structure.
After turning into the Aga Khan, he surveyed the Islamic world and “felt that we had misplaced our cultural identification within the constructed atmosphere, our pluralism,” he mentioned in a 2005 interview. He responded by founding the Aga Khan Growth Community (AKDN), which was established in 1988 and has labored with main architects to construct tasks world wide. The Aga Khan Belief for Tradition, a part of the AKDN, ensures the preservation of historic buildings in international locations with a powerful Ismaili heritage, like Morocco, Egypt, India, and Pakistan. He established the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Structure at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how to “be sure that the people who find themselves designing perceive the societies for which they’re working.” In 2014, the Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Heart in Toronto, designed by Pritzker Prize–winner Fumihiko Maki, opened as a middle for “intercultural dialogue and understanding by way of the humanities” that additionally homes greater than 1,200 items of Muslim tradition, from manuscripts to work to textiles, spanning the ninth to twenty first centuries.
Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Heart in Toronto. Picture by Gary Otte, courtesy AKDN
However it was the Aga Khan Award for Structure (AKAA) that represented his most vital response. Established in 1977, the award was created, partly, to honor and lift consciousness of the Islamic world’s architectural heritage. It’s introduced each three years to “tasks that set new requirements of excellence in structure, planning practices, historic preservation, and panorama structure,” whereas looking for “to determine and encourage constructing ideas that efficiently handle the wants and aspirations of societies the world over, by which Muslims have a big presence.”
“The award was designed from the beginning not solely to honor distinctive achievement, but additionally to pose basic questions,” the Aga Khan mentioned in 2013. “How may Islamic structure embrace extra absolutely the values of cultural continuity whereas additionally addressing the wants and aspirations of quickly altering societies? How may we mirror extra responsively the variety of human expertise and the variations in native environments? How may we honor inherited traditions whereas additionally partaking with new social perplexities?”
The AKAA was final awarded in 2022 to 6 tasks, together with Rivzi Hassan, Khwaja Fatmi, and Saad Ben Mostafa’s Rohingya Refugee Response in Bangladesh; andramatin’s Banyuwangi Worldwide Airport in Indonesia; and the renovation of the Niemeyer Visitor Home in Tripoli, Lebanon. Latest previous winners embrace Heneghan Peng’s Palestinian Museum in Birzeit (2019), Zaha Hadid Architects’ Issam Fares Institute in Beirut (2016), and the rehabilitation of Tabriz Bazaar, a tenth century World Heritage web site in Azerbaijan (2013).
Whereas the Aga Khan’s demise resonated profoundly with the 15 million Ismailis world wide who appeared to his non secular steerage, members of the structure group equally mourned the lack of a guiding pressure.
“It’s inconceivable to overestimate the Aga Khan’s affect as a serious pressure for good, particularly in creating international locations and areas,” wrote Hashim Sarkis, dean of the Faculty of Structure and Planning at MIT. “It was additionally beautiful how a lot of an architect he was, in his ardour for buildings, in his spatial pondering and artificial method to issues…but additionally how he seen structure as transformative of our lives and societies.”
Farshid Moussavi, who designed the Ismaili Heart in Houston, took to Instagram to eulogize “a visionary chief who devoted his life to bettering the standard of life for people and communities worldwide—no matter origin, religion, or gender. The teachings I’ve discovered from him are immeasurable. I take solace in realizing that his legacy will proceed to encourage and information us for generations to return.”
Moriyama Teshima Architects, which labored with the Aga Khan on Ottawa’s Delegation of the Ismaili Imamat and the museum and middle in Toronto, remembered in a submit on LinkedIn his “perception in structure’s transformative energy to foster pluralism, understanding, and non secular reflection. His imaginative and prescient challenged us to assume past bodily buildings, reminding us that structure has the potential to be a bridge between communities, a logo of shared humanity, and a beacon of hope.”
