For the 13th cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Master Jury embraced the notion of plurality,
exploring not just projects in diverse contexts but the boundaries of the discipline itself, recognising that new knowledge
sometimes emerges in the lines between
categories. For established practitioners, this posed a particular dilemma: how to identify
merit in projects
whose very terms force us to question the limits of our understanding. The traditional categories of our discipline – corporate, cutting-edge, infrastructure, socially
responsive, environmentally sound
– are not as fixed
or concrete as they
once seemed.
The six Award recipients, arrived at after long and sometimes
heated discussion, accurately reflect the wide range of entries: a pedestrian bridge
that privileges use over form;
a sacred space that plays
inventively with tradition; a project that is at once landscape and building; a
bold, contemporary insertion into a traditional setting; a diminutive library
operating at a much larger micro-urban scale, and an urban
park that provides
new forms of public space. In such a context,
a universal language
of architecture no longer seems appropriate: what remains are creative and often modest
site-specific responses that generate new vocabularies of their
own.
- Bait Ur Rouf Mosque, Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Friendship Centre, Gaibandha, Bangladesh
- Micro Yuan'er Children’s
Library and Art Centre, Beijing, China
- Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Tabiat Pedestrian Bridge, Tehran, Iran
- Issam Fares Institute, Beirut, Lebanon
"Report of the 2016 Master Jury.” In Architecture and Pluralism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi. Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2016.
Aga Khan Award for Architecture