The third in a series of ten public events interrogating how architecture, planning and contemporary creativity enhance and affect both quality of life and sustainability in a range of Muslim contexts, held in the iconic Aga Khan Centre.

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This lecture brings together three strands; the challenges faced in enhancing the quality of urban life for Muslim communities, which are then presented through fifteen projects that have received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture since its inception about forty years ago. The projects are either urban in nature, or architectural projects with a significant urban impact. Finally we will look at an open online course that has been developed for the Education Programme of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) that addresses the topic of enhancing the quality of life for Muslim communities through these fifteen projects.

The coming together of these three subjects: enhancing the quality of urban life, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and open online courses, makes for an interesting combination. Thousands of projects have been nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture since its inception in 1977, and over 110 of these have received the Award. These projects have been extensively documented, and provide a highly valuable database regarding the evolution of the built environment across the lands of Islam (and also of non-Muslim areas with sizable Muslim populations) over the past four decades. The use of this wealth of knowledge and information as an educational tool, however, has unfortunately been rather limited. This open online course is among the very few courses that draw on this wealth of knowledge as an educational tool and uses it for the exploration of a very important subject. Moreover, by developing an open online course for this subject, access to the course is not limited to the students of a single university, usually an elite Western university, but is provided to students everywhere.

Speaker

Dr Mohammad al-Asad is an architect and architectural historian. He is the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of the Built Environment in Amman. He studied architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and history of architecture at Harvard University before taking on post-doctoral research positions at Harvard and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

He is a member of the board of directors of the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts. He also had served as the Coordinator of the International Academic and Curatorial Committee for the Discover Islamic Art project of the Museum With No Frontiers, and was a member of the Amman Commission, which served as an advisory body for the Mayor of Amman.

Al-Asad was a project reviewer for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture between 1989 and 2007, and has been a member of the Award’s Steering Committee for its 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 cycles.