The Aga Khan Award for Architecture announces the Master Jury for 2025
- 12 Oct 2024
Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer
The Master Jury for the 2025 Aga Khan Award for Architecture has been announced. The independent panel responsible for selecting the winners of the prestigious US$ 1 million award, will meet in January 2025 to evaluate and shortlist projects from hundreds of nominations worldwide. The nine members of the Master Jury for the 16th Award cycle (2023-2025) are: Azra Aksamija, Professor & Director, Art, Culture and Technology Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA; Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop, Advisor for Heritage Projects, Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities, Manama, Bahrain; Lucia Allais, Director, Buell Center, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, USA; David Basulto, Founder, ArchDaily, Santiago, Chile and Berlin, Germany; Yvonne Farrell, Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio, Switzerland; Founder and Partner, Grafton Architects, Dublin, Ireland; Kabage Karanja, Co-founder, Cave_bureau, Nairobi, Kenya; Assistant Professor of Architectural Design, Yale University, New Haven, USA; Yacouba Konate, Professor of Philosophy, University Félix Houphouet Boigny of Abidjan-Cocody, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Hassan Radoine, Director General & Full Professor, Citinnov SA for Integrated Territorial Planning and Smart Cities, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Rabat, Morocco; and Mun Summ Wong, Professor-in-Practice, Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore; Co-founding Director, WOHA, Singapore.
Azra Aksamija is an artist and architectural historian born in Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina, based in Boston. Her artistic practice engages with topics such as the representation of Islam in the West, the agency and resilience of refugee communities, and the role of art in addressing social inequalities and environmental challenges. Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop is an architect and curator with over 15 years of experience in the cultural development, architectural and planning fields. She is a board member of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. Lucia Allais is an architectural historian, whose work addresses architecture’s relation to technology and politics in the modern period and on the global stage.
David Basulto is an architect and editor. In 2006, he founded ArchDaily and its global network of sites in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. ArchDaily is one of the most important and influential media outlets for architecture and interior design. Yvonne Farrell is an Irish architect and academic. She was one of the two who were were selected as the 2020 Pritzker Prize laureates. Kabage Karanja is a Nairobi-based architect, researcher, and educator. He leads the research and aesthetic direction of Cave_bureau that charts explorations into architecture and urbanism within nature. In 2025, he will be co-curating the British Pavilion for the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale.
Yacouba Konate is a curator, writer and art critic. Hassan Radoine is an architecture curator, critic, educator, author and expert-consultant. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, University of Sharjah and the American University of Sharjah, among other academic centres. Mun Summ Wong is a professor in practice at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Architecture and co-directs the Integrated Sustainable Design Masters Studio. Following the selection of the shortlist, projects will undergo on-site reviews by independent experts, the majority of whom are architects, conservation specialists, planners or structural engineers. The jury will meet for a second time in summer 2025, to examine the on-site reviews and select the final winners.
The selection process looks into architecture’s role that as something not only providing for people’s physical, social and economic needs, but also as a catalyst for their cultural aspirations. Attention is given to projects that use local resources and innovative technology, and to projects likely to inspire similar efforts elsewhere. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is governed by a Steering Committee chaired by the Aga Khan. Other members of the Steering Committee are Meisa Batayneh, Principal Architect, Founder, maisam architects and engineers, Amman, Jordan; Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor in the departments of French and Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA; Lesley Lokko, Founder & Director, African Futures Institute, Accra, Ghana; Gulru Necipoglu, Director and Professor of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA; Hashim Sarkis, Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA; and Sarah M. Whiting, Dean, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. Farrokh Derakhshani is the Director of the award.
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is part of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which integrates cultural heritage into development strategies. AKTC works to preserve and promote the cultural and material heritage of Muslim societies, and their features which provide hope to vulnerable communities. Its programmes include the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, which works to revitalise historic cities in the Muslim world. For three decades, it has been engaged in the rehabilitation of historic areas in Cairo, Kabul, Herat, Aleppo, Delhi, Zanzibar, Mostar, northern Pakistan, Timbuktu and Mopti, working on their cultural and economic aspects.
The programmes of AKTC also include the Aga Khan Music Awards, an interregional music and arts education programme with worldwide performance, outreach, mentoring and artistic production activities; the Education Programme, which promotes awareness among young people of the philosophy and values of the Trust; and the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, which provides visitors with a window into the artistic, intellectual and scientific contributions of Muslim civilisations to world heritage. The Trust supports the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as www.ArchNet.org, a major online resource on Islamic architecture.