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| Aga Khan Museum: North America finally gets a home for Islamic art | Aga Khan Museum: North America finally gets a home for Islamic art |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| There were lustrous ceramics, shimmering skeins of silk, finely carved ivory, illuminated texts and all the latest medical instruments. Lavishly paraded through the streets of 10th-century Cairo, the Fatimid caliphs used the public display of royal bounty to help cement their new capital as the most important cultural centre of the Islamic world. Masters of stagecraft and the symbolic power of art, they developed a culture of exhibiting private treasures in public long before museums began in the west. Now, 1,000 years later, one of their descendants is continuing the tradition – in a business park on the edge of Toronto. | There were lustrous ceramics, shimmering skeins of silk, finely carved ivory, illuminated texts and all the latest medical instruments. Lavishly paraded through the streets of 10th-century Cairo, the Fatimid caliphs used the public display of royal bounty to help cement their new capital as the most important cultural centre of the Islamic world. Masters of stagecraft and the symbolic power of art, they developed a culture of exhibiting private treasures in public long before museums began in the west. Now, 1,000 years later, one of their descendants is continuing the tradition – in a business park on the edge of Toronto. |
| With faceted white walls that gleam in the afternoon sun and strange crystalline domes poking up above the trees, the new $300m (£168m) Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre are startling additions to this stretch of suburban North America, at the roaring junction of two six-lane expressways. The museum is a monolithic shed, its canted walls giving it the look of a gigantic packing box that has been flipped open, with sharply chiselled skylights sliced into its crisp limestone skin. Across a vast pond-studded courtyard, the Ismaili Centre is a cluster of low-slung sandstone buildings, from which emerges a translucent pyramidal roof, ramping up at an angle as if pointing towards the stars. Together, they form an enigmatic complex that has the look of a cosmic observatory, or some mysterious lunar fortress. Like Hugh Casson’s Ismaili Centre in South Kensington, they are at once timeless and futuristic, somewhat unearthly and, like their Fatimid predecessors, have a heavily fortified air. | With faceted white walls that gleam in the afternoon sun and strange crystalline domes poking up above the trees, the new $300m (£168m) Aga Khan Museum and Ismaili Centre are startling additions to this stretch of suburban North America, at the roaring junction of two six-lane expressways. The museum is a monolithic shed, its canted walls giving it the look of a gigantic packing box that has been flipped open, with sharply chiselled skylights sliced into its crisp limestone skin. Across a vast pond-studded courtyard, the Ismaili Centre is a cluster of low-slung sandstone buildings, from which emerges a translucent pyramidal roof, ramping up at an angle as if pointing towards the stars. Together, they form an enigmatic complex that has the look of a cosmic observatory, or some mysterious lunar fortress. Like Hugh Casson’s Ismaili Centre in South Kensington, they are at once timeless and futuristic, somewhat unearthly and, like their Fatimid predecessors, have a heavily fortified air. |
| The project is a particularly unusual arrival to Toronto’s Don Valley, a green “edgeland” north-east of the city, for being the work of two of Asia’s greatest living architects. The 86-year-old Japanese Pritzker winner, Fumihiko Maki, was responsible for the museum, while the Ismaili Centre was designed by the 84-year-old titan of Indian modernism, Charles Correa. Their patron is equally esteemed: the Aga Khan, Prince Shah Karim Al Husseini (or “K” to his friends), is the 49th hereditary imam of the estimated 15 million Nizari Ismaili Muslims – a branch of Islam that reached its peak during the Fatimid empire – whose followers believe him to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Among the beer stores and office parks, something sacred has landed. | The project is a particularly unusual arrival to Toronto’s Don Valley, a green “edgeland” north-east of the city, for being the work of two of Asia’s greatest living architects. The 86-year-old Japanese Pritzker winner, Fumihiko Maki, was responsible for the museum, while the Ismaili Centre was designed by the 84-year-old titan of Indian modernism, Charles Correa. Their patron is equally esteemed: the Aga Khan, Prince Shah Karim Al Husseini (or “K” to his friends), is the 49th hereditary imam of the estimated 15 million Nizari Ismaili Muslims – a branch of Islam that reached its peak during the Fatimid empire – whose followers believe him to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad. Among the beer stores and office parks, something sacred has landed. |
| Arriving at the site with Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, flanked by substantial security, the 77-year-old Aga Khan looks more businessman than spiritual leader. He has swapped his ancestors’ Cairene courts for a chateau in France and the regal retinue for a playboy lifestyle of thoroughbred race horses, luxury yachts, private jets and beautiful women. A Swiss-educated British business magnate, he has amassed an estimated fortune of roughly £8bn, making him one of the richest royals in the world – he’s also one of the most philanthropic. The business empire of his Fund for Economic Development, ranging from airlines and hotels to food and telecoms, generates revenues of £1.4bn annually, the profits of which are ploughed back into the Aga Khan Development Network, which employs 80,000 people working to improve health, education and economic development across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Middle East. “We have no notion of the accumulation of wealth being evil,” he said in a rare recent interview, commenting on the 10% tithes that all Ismailis pay him. “It’s how you use it.” | |
| Almost 20 years in the making, the Toronto site is the work of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture which, like a mini Unesco, runs an impressive programme of historic conservation of Islamic architecture around the world and a respected triennial architecture award. The 10,000-square-metre building is the new home for the Aga Khan’s spectacular hoard of Islamic art, more than 1,000 artefacts spanning three continents over 10 centuries, and is the first museum in North America dedicated to the subject. | Almost 20 years in the making, the Toronto site is the work of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture which, like a mini Unesco, runs an impressive programme of historic conservation of Islamic architecture around the world and a respected triennial architecture award. The 10,000-square-metre building is the new home for the Aga Khan’s spectacular hoard of Islamic art, more than 1,000 artefacts spanning three continents over 10 centuries, and is the first museum in North America dedicated to the subject. |
| The project was originally planned for London, on a prime site opposite the Houses of Parliament and beside St Thomas’ hospital, but the land went to the NHS after a vitriolic campaign that ended with accusations of blackmail and skulduggery – and the princely imam taking his treasures elsewhere. Correa’s Ismaili Centre, meanwhile, had long been planned for the Toronto site, and the sale of an adjacent plot of land in 2002 provided an expedient solution to house the museum. Although it was not necessarily the wisest location, being a good 20-minute drive from downtown Toronto’s main cultural attractions. | The project was originally planned for London, on a prime site opposite the Houses of Parliament and beside St Thomas’ hospital, but the land went to the NHS after a vitriolic campaign that ended with accusations of blackmail and skulduggery – and the princely imam taking his treasures elsewhere. Correa’s Ismaili Centre, meanwhile, had long been planned for the Toronto site, and the sale of an adjacent plot of land in 2002 provided an expedient solution to house the museum. Although it was not necessarily the wisest location, being a good 20-minute drive from downtown Toronto’s main cultural attractions. |
| The project’s piecemeal evolution is evident: designed almost a decade apart, the two buildings sit uncomfortably in each other’s presence. Facing off across the courtyard – which is scaled to the 100-metre-width of the Great Mosque of Isfahan – Maki’s museum attempts to set up an axial arrangement, with a grand double-height portal that comes complete with a flip-down canopy, giving it the look of an entrance to a spaceship. It is met, however, by the blank frontage of Correa’s circular prayer hall. To get in, you have to navigate up some steps and around the corner. | The project’s piecemeal evolution is evident: designed almost a decade apart, the two buildings sit uncomfortably in each other’s presence. Facing off across the courtyard – which is scaled to the 100-metre-width of the Great Mosque of Isfahan – Maki’s museum attempts to set up an axial arrangement, with a grand double-height portal that comes complete with a flip-down canopy, giving it the look of an entrance to a spaceship. It is met, however, by the blank frontage of Correa’s circular prayer hall. To get in, you have to navigate up some steps and around the corner. |
| Such ground-level niggles will matter little in Canada, where most visitors are expected to arrive by car and will be funnelled up from the 800-space underground car park. From here, the museum’s majestic triple-height atrium tracks around a glazed cubic courtyard and leads to a series of galleries, masterminded by Adrien Gardère, the Louvre Lens exhibition designer, as an airy stroll through the prolific output of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids and Mamluks. “We wanted to avoid the common jewellery box approach of having precious objects spotlit in the gloom, and the overcrowded feeling you find in many galleries,” says Gardère. There is a great luxury of space, but it all feels a bit empty, like an echoing airport terminal – complete with a VIP lounge upstairs. | Such ground-level niggles will matter little in Canada, where most visitors are expected to arrive by car and will be funnelled up from the 800-space underground car park. From here, the museum’s majestic triple-height atrium tracks around a glazed cubic courtyard and leads to a series of galleries, masterminded by Adrien Gardère, the Louvre Lens exhibition designer, as an airy stroll through the prolific output of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids and Mamluks. “We wanted to avoid the common jewellery box approach of having precious objects spotlit in the gloom, and the overcrowded feeling you find in many galleries,” says Gardère. There is a great luxury of space, but it all feels a bit empty, like an echoing airport terminal – complete with a VIP lounge upstairs. |
| The collection doesn’t come close to the vast Islamic holdings of the British Museum or the V&A, nor the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, But as museum director, Henry Kim, fresh from leading the transformation of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, puts it: “It is a connoisseur’s collection. There may not be many pieces, but they are some of the best.” | The collection doesn’t come close to the vast Islamic holdings of the British Museum or the V&A, nor the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, But as museum director, Henry Kim, fresh from leading the transformation of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, puts it: “It is a connoisseur’s collection. There may not be many pieces, but they are some of the best.” |
| They range from the earliest surviving manuscript of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, the text that kept ancient Greek thought alive while the west plunged into the dark ages, to a 14th-century Andalusian astrolabe, inscribed in Arabic, Latin and Hebrew, along with exquisite 16th-century paintings from the Persian Book of Kings. There are textiles and miniatures, tiles and musical instruments, and moralistic Iranian pottery from the 10th-century, including a plate with calligraphic script that reads: “Beware of the imbecile: do not socialise with him.” An adjoining restaurant provides the setting for such occasions, replete with fittings from a Damascus mosque, uncomfortably jammed into suspended ceilings in a way that feels more Starbucks than priceless museological collection. | They range from the earliest surviving manuscript of Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, the text that kept ancient Greek thought alive while the west plunged into the dark ages, to a 14th-century Andalusian astrolabe, inscribed in Arabic, Latin and Hebrew, along with exquisite 16th-century paintings from the Persian Book of Kings. There are textiles and miniatures, tiles and musical instruments, and moralistic Iranian pottery from the 10th-century, including a plate with calligraphic script that reads: “Beware of the imbecile: do not socialise with him.” An adjoining restaurant provides the setting for such occasions, replete with fittings from a Damascus mosque, uncomfortably jammed into suspended ceilings in a way that feels more Starbucks than priceless museological collection. |
| While Maki’s glacial museum speaks of institutional weight, Correa’s Ismaili Centre has a warmer municipal feel, its prayer hall and meeting rooms joined by what he calls “a fluid space that connects the religious, social, community functions, with no divide”, as well as a roof terrace that has, “a Mussolini balcony for His Highness to stand on”. It was intended to be built in rough-cast concrete, the material in which Correa works best, but wasn’t deemed sufficiently regal. The resulting beige stone, lined with Canadian maple and red carpets, feels a bit insipid. | While Maki’s glacial museum speaks of institutional weight, Correa’s Ismaili Centre has a warmer municipal feel, its prayer hall and meeting rooms joined by what he calls “a fluid space that connects the religious, social, community functions, with no divide”, as well as a roof terrace that has, “a Mussolini balcony for His Highness to stand on”. It was intended to be built in rough-cast concrete, the material in which Correa works best, but wasn’t deemed sufficiently regal. The resulting beige stone, lined with Canadian maple and red carpets, feels a bit insipid. |
| So what are the sources for constructing an Ismaili architectural identity, for a diaspora with no nation to call their own? “There is no Ismaili architecture,” says Luis Monreal, art historian and director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. “The history of Islamic architecture from the ninth century onwards has always been a process of copying and absorbing the local context, creating regional difference.” While the buildings here appear to riff on North American rural sheds (inflected with a cosmic touch), it will be interesting to see what emerges in central London. Although the Aga Khan’s UK ambitions might have been thwarted before, a cultural complex is being planned for King’s Cross, which will comprise a 9,000-square-metre Islamic cultural centre and a new home for the Aga Khan University – both designed by Maki – as well as a 200-bed student accommodation block. The details, says Monreal, are confidential. “But I can tell you it won’t be neo-Mamluk. Our architects are forbidden to go to the past.” | So what are the sources for constructing an Ismaili architectural identity, for a diaspora with no nation to call their own? “There is no Ismaili architecture,” says Luis Monreal, art historian and director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. “The history of Islamic architecture from the ninth century onwards has always been a process of copying and absorbing the local context, creating regional difference.” While the buildings here appear to riff on North American rural sheds (inflected with a cosmic touch), it will be interesting to see what emerges in central London. Although the Aga Khan’s UK ambitions might have been thwarted before, a cultural complex is being planned for King’s Cross, which will comprise a 9,000-square-metre Islamic cultural centre and a new home for the Aga Khan University – both designed by Maki – as well as a 200-bed student accommodation block. The details, says Monreal, are confidential. “But I can tell you it won’t be neo-Mamluk. Our architects are forbidden to go to the past.” |
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