Architecture in Dialogue
Architecture in Dialogue: Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2019
Andres Lepik (Editor)
ArchiTangle, September 2019
Hardcover | 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches | 352 pages | 210 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3966800020 | 38,00 €
Publisher's Description:
Author Bio:
Andres Lepik (Editor)
ArchiTangle, September 2019
Hardcover | 6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches | 352 pages | 210 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3966800020 | 38,00 €
Publisher's Description:
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is one of the most prestigious and renowned awards for architecture worldwide. Since 1980 the Award has been given every three years to projects that combine social and ecological aspects and translate them into innovative and exemplary design. The Award seeks to identify and encourage building concepts that successfully address the needs and aspirations of societies across the world, in which Muslims have a significant presence.dDAB Commentary:
This publication presents the shortlist of the 2017–2019 award cycle. From a group of almost 400, 20 projects have been shortlisted by the Master Jury and evaluated by an expert group of technical reviewers. Some of these projects have been honoured with the Aga Khan Award. In addition to detailed descriptions of all projects, this book gathers a series of personal statements from the members of the Steering Committee and the Award’s Master Jury on key issues that were crucial in the discussions for the final selection and assignment of the award recipients. Assembled together, this book presents a selection of the outstanding examples of sustainable and socially relevant architecture in the world today and opens up fundamental perspectives for the planning of the future.
Every three years the winners of the latest cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture are announced. With the media blitz that follows, the world is introduced to a half-dozen-or-so projects "that successfully address the needs and aspirations of societies across the world, in which Muslims have a significant presence." More than the remoteness of the projects for someone like me, one of the characteristics of the winners is their diversity, be it in terms of style, formal solutions, typology, scale, budget, and so forth. In one sense this means there is something to like for everybody, but in a deeper sense this means that design excellence spans these and other variables: Creativity can be found in a big-budget mosque or museum as well as in a low-budget school or the restoration of an old district in a city.Images:
The six winners of the 2019 cycle of the Aga Khan echo this diversity, though shared among the schools, museum, public spaces, restoration project, and nature center are three themes: "living heritage, ecological resiliency and recovery, and thriving and inclusive commons." These themes are described by the nine-member jury in Architecture in Dialogue, the book documenting the 2019 winners as the finalists — the 14 projects that didn't win. Each cycle of the Aga Khan is accompanied by a publication that presents the winners and finalists as well as commentary from the jury and the steering committee, which gives recommendations to the jury upon the naming of the finalists.
Architecture in Dialogue is the first Aga Khan publication with ArchiTangle, a new publisher based in Berlin. They follow three books published by Lars Müller Publishers and edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, and a slew of others by different publishers working with different editors. (It should be noted that older Aga Khan books can be dowloaded via their website.) The new book's compact format recalls the Lars Müller books rather than the earlier coffee table books. The twenty finalists are presented in groups of two or three projects, separated by short statements from members of the master jury and steering committee.
The six winners are distributed throughout the book, not loaded at the front before the other projects, as might be the case with other architecture award books. Combined with the fact the winners are only subtly highlighted at the top of the page — the presentation format is otherwise the same for winners and finalists — the book is as much about the finalists as the winners. The design quality is actually so good throughout that I could see any six projects winning the Aga Khan. (In fact, only one of the three images below documents a winner.) That said, the jury citations provided make it clear what made the six winning projects rise to the top.
Author Bio:
The main focus of Andres Lepik is the history and theory of architecture exhibitions and contemporary developments in the field of architectures of social engagement and participatory architectural structures.Purchase Links: