This book is about the shortlisted projects and the six final recipients of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2022.
This year marks AKAA's 45th anniversary. In a meeting in February 2022, an independent Master Jury shortlisted 20 projects from a pool of 463 projects nominated for the 15th Award Cycle (2020-2022). Subsequently, after on-site reviews of the shortlist by a team of experts, the jury awarded six projects amongst them.
Each one of the 20 projects presented in the book sets an outstanding example of sustainable and socially relevant architecture in the world today. In addition to detailed descriptions of the projects, this book includes texts, which come from a wide range of geographies, they are informative and descriptive, often striking an emotional note. Together with the project presentations, the publication thereby guides the reader through a contemplation of an architectural question of increasing urgency in our current times of crisis: how to build ethically for our shared global future.
After the foreword by Farrokh Derakhshani, Director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Sarah M. Whiting, the Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design gives the opening with her reflection on Globalisation 4.0. The subsequent contributions range from notes on architecture as a humanist empire by Nasser Rabbat, the Aga Khan Professor at MIT to a text on the optimism of humanity by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, director-general of the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, writes on the perspective of the dialogical, followed by a contextualization of Modern Architecture in the Muslim World by Sibel Bozdo?an of Boston University, and Nader Teherani, founding principal of Boston-based architecture firm NADAAA adds a Salon des Refusés.
The six Award winners, who will share the $1 million award, one of the largest in architecture, show promise for communities, innovation and care for the environment:
Bangladesh: Urban River Spaces in Jhenaidah and Community Spaces in Rohingya Refugee Response in Cox's Bazar; Indonesia: Banyuwangi International airport in Blimbingsari, East Java; Iran: Argo Contemporary Art Museum and Cultural Centre in Tehran; Lebanon: Renovation of Niemeyer Guest House in Tripoli and Senegal: Kamanar Secondary School in Thionck Essyl.