Usually representing spirits, ancestors or the primordial couple, these figures were placed in shrines and treated with great respect. Through a wide range of style, scale, belief and function the couples depicted share a timeless, serene equality necessary to the continuity of their societies.

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2016 13th Cycle Aga Khan Award for Architecture Winners Announced

Zaha Hadid Architects concrete beauty in the Beirut based , BIG’s “baby proofed park” Superkilen in Denmark and a comprehensive brick structure in Bangladesh’s Bait Ur Rouf Mosque were among the 6 winners of the Aga Khan awards announced earlier yesterday. The other winders were Cha'er Hutong Children's Library and Art Centre in Beijing, China by ZAO, standardarchitecture and Zhang Ke, A place ...

Al Alfy House / Shahira Fahmy Architects

Located on the coast, the 25-year-old main house is within a gated community that faces the ocean waters of Egypt's Al ‘Alamayn. It is alaboured effort towards rejuvenating an existing house and giving it permanence and relevance in contemporary architecture, something that has been at the forefront of guiding the styles of the day. While architecture cannot be solely spoken of as emphasis on s...

Technology School of Laayoune/ Driss Ketani, Saad El Kabbaj & Mohamed Amine Siana

The project of the School of Laayoune Technology is part of the policy of decentralization of educational centers in different regions of Morocco and responds to a request from local graduates. The program is built around lessons spaces (classrooms, TP, amphitheater), documentation, administrative, educational and services like workshops and staff accommodation

2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture 13th Cycle Shortlist Announced

The 19 shortlisted projects for the 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture were announced today. The projects, which were selected by the Master Jury from amongst 348 projects nominated for the 13th Award cycle, will be competing for US$ 1 million in prize money. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture selects projects that not only exhibit architectural excellence but also improve the quality of li...

Residence Andalous / Serge Santelli and Cabinet Gerau

Traditional Tunisian domestic architecture consists of one- or two-level houses arranged around courtyards or patios. To achieve a contemporary expression of these indigenous arrangements for this hotel, the architect created an ordered series of symmetrical interior courtyards connected along a main longitudinal axis, from which secondary axes open. The hotel courtyards are paved, and are ente...

Ramses Wissa Wassef Arts Centre / Ramses Wissa Wassef

Near the pyramids at Giza, the centre was founded in the early 1950s by the late architect Ramses Wissa Wassef as a weaving school. It has since evolved to comprise workshops and showrooms, a pottery and sculpture museum, houses and farm buildings, constructed entirely of mud brick. For Wissa Wassef, vaulted and domed mud brick structures represented something quintessentially Egyptian as these...

9 of the Best : Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2014-2016 Cycle Master Jury Announced

With the recent closing of Nominations for the 2014-2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture cycle, The Steering Committee and the Master Jury have been announced putting together an ensemble cast for the three year prestigious award cycle by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture Network. The Aga Khan Award for Architecture is given every three years to projects that set new standards of excellence i...

Nyala Emergency NGO Paediatric Clinic / TAMassociati

Sustainability stands for simplicity. This statement links last tamassociati research in building practise. Sustainability deals directly to three contemporary issues for our societies: effective politics, responsible design, appropriate technologies. Tamassociati had focused its work on a creative interaction among these three aspects: politics, design, technology; trying to find innovative so...

Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre / Peter Rich Architects

How do you design for fallen glory? For a people who were once the most sophisticated and dominant force in culture and social system, to modernize their way of living but still maintain a sense of arterial connection to their roots? Peter Rich, the man known for domed brick architecture, carefully maneuvered the intricacies of cultural intonations and sustainable mantra to build the Mapungubwe...

Port Sudan Pediatric Center, Red Sea State / TamAssociati

The Port Sudan Pediatric center is essentially a link, one that ties the elements of purpose in medicine via vis aspects of freedom. Freedom not in the sense of the physical institution but in hope and care, on e that only medicine can bring. For mercy architecture is essentially that, the ability to offer extensive comfort and care to areas that know none and although the built merits f the ho...

Kaedi Regional Hospital / Association Pour Le Développement D'une Architecture Et D'un Urbanisme Africains

The Kaedi hospital comprises of a 120 bed extension to a regional hospital in the frontier town of Kaedi serving the remote population of Gorgol province in Southern Mauritania. The architects were not to replicate the earlier hospital's conventional concrete-frame buildings; their brief was to house the planned facilities by developing new low-cost techniques of construction employing local ma...

Goderich Surgical Center / TAMassociati

It is a universal belief that architecture can be practiced everywhere. Good Architecture. We look at a hospital in Goderich, an elemental aspect of health and dignity infused within a 10 year old existing architectural scope, and the result is not only a contemporary look at cost efficiency and primeval distinction, but also a though provoking piece that goes to show just how much the tiniest ...

Datum Antique: Hassan Fathy's New Barris Village

"No other project dominates this mature phase of the architect's work as much as the village of New Baris, in a way that is comparable to the notoriety of New Gourna twenty years before. There are so many contrasting factors between the two projects that it is beneficial to examine the parallels between them. Discovery of a large water well sixty kilometers south of the Kharga Oasis in 1963, wh...

Koudougou Central Market / Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation + Laurent Séchaud

Designed as an urban community project, the mission and end goal of the design was to improve the human spirit by responding to the growing need for clean water, power, shelter, healthcare and education. Being an Aga Khan Award-winning design, the Central market in Koudougou involved not just the construction of a physical urban infrastructure, but also the elaboration and implementation of a p...

Mopti Centre For Earth Architecture / Kere Architecture

The Centre for Earth Architecture is part of a series of developments the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) has carried out in Mopti. Others included the restoration of a dilapidated mosque and the construction of a new sewerage system for the town. This beautiful mud-brick building is situated dramatically on the edge of a lake and aligned with the mosque in the rear. The waterfront was backfi...

Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research / DHK Architects

The Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Islamic Studies and Research, commonly referred to as Ahmed Baba Institute, is a library and research complex located in Timbuktu, Mali. Its location in Timbuktu, is an ancient town with rich history dating back to the Trans-Saharan Trade, required the architects to come up with a design that would respect its unique context. The result was a building construc...

Embassy of the Netherlands / Dick Van Gameren and Bjarne Mastenbroek

The new Embassy of the Netherlands is a building that thrives within its environment, seeking new ways to deal with both the thermal nemesis and the contextual significance of a growing architectural language in Ethiopia's stone architecture. It is a vision that is intended to set an example for a sensitive and sustainable approach towards existing natural and landscape values in Ethiopia

Abdel Wahed El-Wakil / The Benefits of Traditional Construction in Contemporary Architecture

One of the foremost students of Hassan Fathy, Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil is an Egyptian architect, who is the recipient of two Aga Khan Awards for Architecture as well as the prestigious 2009 Driehaus Prize. He is considered the foremost practitioner of masonry construction in Islamic architecture today. His commitment to the traditions of construction as an integral component of contemporary archite...

Courtyard Houses / Jean-François Zevaco

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture winning Courtyard Houses by Jean-François Zevaco were commissioned by the Moroccan Ministry of Interiors on a site which is 5,200M2 of flat terrain in the very centre of Agadir. Agadir is a Moroccan City on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, near the foot of the Atlas Mountains.