Aga khan awards 2001.

Results of the ninth cycle of the Aga Khan Awards are less dramatic than on some previous occasions. For instance, there is nothing to compare to the numinous qualities of Sherefudin's White Mosque at Visoko, Yugoslavia (AR October 1983), nor the wacky dynamism of the Kaolack Cultural Centre in Senegal (AR November 1995). Perhaps nothing so arresting was submitted in this cycle.

More surprisingly, in a scheme which has often celebrated memorable new work and talent, there is no recognition of those modern commercial buildings which, here and there across the Muslim world from Turkey to Indonesia, have begun to respond to local cultures and climates, as well as to modern technology and capital accumulation. Lack of recognition of this work is sad because drear and simply bad commercial buildings determine much of the texture of cities in Muslim countries. Inspiring examples are desperately needed to help improve urban quality -- which is one of the main aims of the Aga's programme. Perhaps the jury's standards were too exacting. But many of the most important award winners of the past have not been perfect (what building is?), even so, they have often had much to teach.

However much this year's jury (1) may have been over-cautious, it has reinforced lessons of previous cycles. Having been interested in the Awards for some two decades, I have realized that, every three years, they remind us of certain basic truths about architecture. At first, I thought it was impossible to compare a village improvement programme to, say, a tourist hotel. Indeed, in the earliest cycles, there were some rather strange decisions -- more at the richer end of the spectrum, than the poorer.

But the exemplary process by which projects are premiated has had a maturing effect. The fact that the buildings have been examined after a considerable period of use, and carefully reviewed for functional and social performance, (2) gives the Awards unrivalled depth and continuity. There has been a consistent commitment to issues which we now take for granted, such as urbanity, the importance of trying to build in harmony with the planet, user participation and the needs to respond to history, topography, climate and local culture.

Depth and continuity

The latest set of awards reinforces such values, and continues to demonstrate how work from all parts of the spectrum of riches can have value and be of importance for all others. For example, it is not difficult to imagine how ideals from the Barefoot Architects centre at Tilonia in India (p55), with their Morrisian and Gandhian ethos married to a determination to demystify technology with solar collectors, computers and geodesic domes, could prove instructive to educational communities in Western countries. The balance of influence of ideas would be different, but Tilonia holds out hope for humane synthesis between sets of ideals which have too often been thought to be incompatible.

Similarly, work for the very poor includes the Kahere poultry farming school in Guinea (p58), where the Finnish architects have successfully related latest Western thinking about ecologically appropriate materials to traditional social patterns. In the SOS orphans' village at Aqaba in Jordan (p60), the architects have attempted, apparently successfully, to reinvoke the morphology of traditional Arab towns and married it to conventional modern construction to generate a place which has scale appropriate for children and is economical to run in t at very hot climate. Even the least obviously architectural scheme in this cycle of awards -- improvement of community facilities at impoverished Ait lktel in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco (p70) -- has things to teach about participation and climate management.

Giving heart

Two projects from Iran are welcome signs that during the '90s, when Iran was in many ways cut off from the rest of the world, good work was clearly being created there which can now be celebrated. The Tehran park (p71) adds greatly to the pleasures of urban life, while the programme for rehabilitation and re-use of fine old buildings in other cities (p68) must obviously have an effect on perceptions of traditional formal and spatial fabrics. In Turkey, at Antalya (p63), the Modernist campus lacked any sense of place and space. Here, traditional Mediterranean devices have been collaged together to give a human heart to the formerly coldly functional institution.

At the richest end of the economic scale, the Datai Hotel in northern Malaysia (p62) is entirely intended for well-off people. But it none the less reinterprets tradition, not only in its ravishing spaces, but in its careful use of passive climate-control arrangements to reduce artificial cooling loads, and in its very careful healing of wounds in the rain forest inevitably caused by a major building site.

Only once does the jury's judgement seem to falter: in its recognition of the Nubian Museum at Aswan in Egypt (p66). The complex is popular with both local people and tourists alike, but it is a nearly farcical travesty of the much more moving and better considered original scheme.

If the Aga Khan Awards have one thing to teach, it is that architecture is not an autonomous art. It is created out of the interaction of many forces: political, legal, economic, social, ecological, historic, technical as well as aesthetic. In good buildings, these forces are related and controlled by creative intelligence emerging from teams (3) guided by tenderness for humanity and the planet.

(1.) Darab Diba, architect (Tehran); Abdou Filali-Ansary, social scientist (Casblanca): Dogan Hasol, architet and publisher (Istanbul); Mona Hatoum, artist (London): Zahi Hawass, archaeologist (Sydney): Norani Othman, sociologist (Kuala Lumpur): Raj Rewal, architect (New Delhi).

(2.) Broadly, the procedure is that the awards secretariat receives nominations from all over the world, which should be for buildings that have been in use for at least three years. These are filtered down to a list of over 100, which is then examined by the jury, and further reduced to a shorter list, each project on which is visited by a technical assessor. Technical assessors' reports are analyzed by the jury, which then makes its final choices.

(3.) The awards are also exemplary in recoginizing projects as the result of collaborative effort by designers, clients and builders alike.