Courses, lecture series and workshops
Through a series of courses, lectures and workshops, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Education Programme aims to promote broader and deeper awareness among young people of the philosophy and values that underpin the efforts of the Trust. The Trust partners with educational institutions to generate dedicated elective courses, field schools and workshops.
In collaboration with AKTC Education, the School of Architecture, Building and Design at Taylor’s University, Selangor, Malaysia offered 13 Masters of Architecture students an elective course entitled “Analysing Architecture” during the autumn semester of 2020.
The students focused upon the positive long-term cultural, economic and social impacts of the buildings. They also learned how to utilise the Award’s voluminous archives. They re-visited the buildings themselves, interviewed the architects, and examined how the initial visions of the latter have been either sustained or transformed -- in other words, how each building has withstood the test of time and has impacted its user community, as well as society as a whole. For the 2021 spring semester, if the situation permits, the course will continue to study the social impact of AKAA projects in Malaysia focussing on architectural mappings as well as fieldwork.
In February 2020, a Winter School entitled “Off-Seams” was organised in Cairo by the Architecture and Urban Design Programme at Nile University, under the aegis of the Education Programme. The event was also among the outputs of the European Union’s three-year “Integrative Multidisciplinary People-centered Architectural Qualification & Training (IMPAQT)” project.
The outputs of the Winter School were twofold. Site sketches, mapping of activities and identification of flows were part of the analysis carried out in teams. Each team delivered a graphic poster that represented the strategy of intervention and its components for validation; each team also developed one aspect of its strategy in concrete detail. An exhibition of this work was presented to the IMPAQT project experts and other academics and was followed by a panel discussion on the process that was attended by students and faculty from other Egyptian universities.
15 young people aged 15-17 from Dubai, Muscat and Riyadh explored the importance of the built environment in relation to the quality of life during a three-day discovery field trip to Oman that was organised in October 2019 in co-operation with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Education Programme.
The case studies they examined included Stone Town in Zanzibar, Darb al Ahmar in Cairo, and Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. On-site visits included the Muttrah Fish Market – a project shortlisted for the 2019 Aga Khan Award – and the Omani sites of Harat al Bilad, Misfat al Ibriyin and Nizwa Fort. In addition, the trip was also facilitated by researchers from the Centre for the Study of Architecture and Cultural Heritage of India, Arabia and the Maghreb (ArCHIAM) at Liverpool University, which is an active contributor to AKTC’s Education Programme.
The field trip enabled this highly motivated group to understand at first-hand the importance of context-sensitive architecture and heritage conservation, particularly in small traditional settlements.
In the autumn semester of 2019, in collaboration with AKTC Education, two courses on integrated urban rehabilitation were offered by the Department of Architectural Engineering & Environmental Design at the Faculty of Engineering & Technology of The Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT), Smart Village Campus, Cairo.
AASTMT designed the two courses with a view to minimising the gap between academic learning and practice in the field of urban conservation. Both courses allowed students to test academic research findings concretely, on-site, as well as learn from the AKHCP’s methodology for community revitalisation in physical, cultural, economic and social terms, as applied in the Al-Darb Al-Ahmar area of historic Cairo.
The School of Architecture and Planning of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE – known previously as Manipal University) at Udupi in Karnataka, India recently organised a multi-disciplinary workshop for dissertation level students that explored anthropological understandings of the built environment.
The workshop brought together students and faculty from various departments of MAHE: Architecture, Fashion Design, Interior/Product Design, Humanities, Liberal Arts & Language Studies and Philosophy. In the first phase of the workshop, held in July 2019, 44 students working on dissertation papers interacted with AKTC consultant Dr A.G. Krishna Menon as well the well-known senior architect M.N. Ashish Ganju, together with MAHE faculty to define research topics and methods.
Their reflections were guided by the experience of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme (AKHCP). In the second phase, completed in October 2019, students presented dissertation papers in the presence of their faculty and external mentors/reviewers.
In January 2019 the Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, published a handsome 152-page publication entitled Indore: Dialogues in Existence, based on a workshop for the 4th-year design studio on community architecture sponsored by AKTC Education and carried out in late 2018.
In January 2019, the Institute for Public and Social Policies of the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL) organised with the support of AKTC Education a Winter School entitled "The Place of the City".
A workshop entitled “Frontiers: Multimedia and Urban Conservation Dialogue in India” was organised in Mumbai in October-November 2018 for 37 first-year students in the M. Arch in Urban Design and Conservation at the Kamala Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environment (KRVIA).
The project emerged from KRVIA’s own reflections on its research and teaching methods, combined with a close reading of the principles and procedures underpinning the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme. The students worked in small groups at three sites located on the urban margins of Mumbai. Their enquiry encompassed local building practices, how stakeholders maintain historic sites, how they recognise heritage and how they frame local history. Basic training in film-making was given to all the participants. Lectures by experienced practitioners, including one by Ratish Nanda, CEO of AKTC India, provided different analytical perspectives on the issues involved.
The workshop yielded nine films of around eight minutes each. The filming process raised questions that go beyond traditional urban conservation practice and required the inputs of diverse stakeholders, while the use of film as a documentation tool enabled a more nuanced narrative of urban spaces to be generated. By interacting directly with residents, the students were able to discern how communities themselves associate with the built form. Film-making allowed them to better articulate questions and describe on-the-ground conditions, bringing film together with drawings, text notes and audio.
In the autumn of 2018, in the Masters of Architectural Design course at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, 22 students benefited from a seminar course entitled “Contemporary Architecture: Practices and Processes”.
In July 2018, under an Elective Course organised at the Goa College of Architecture, by the distinguished conservation architect Prof. A.G.K. Menon, 35 students explored the archives of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in order to select a premiated project -- related to their own research topics, which they were asked to analyse in depth.
The faculty members who had engaged systematically with the AKAA archives in order to prepare the course have underlined the positive impact this exercise has had on student research and writing capacities. It has also taught them to value the significance of working with the local cultural and environmental contexts in the development of their own projects. The College plans to continue giving this course as an integral part of its curriculum.
The Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology conducted the first field workshop in the historic town of Gulbarga, Karnataka, India. Entitled ‘Culture of Resilience’ the workshop, held from 28 February to 16 March 2018, drew on learnings from the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme.
On the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), the Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai, initiated in June 2018 the preparation of a workshop on community architecture based on two Award-winning projects in Indore, India: the Aranya Community Developing Project designed by the celebrated architect Balkrishna Doshi and the Slum Networking of Indore City Project designed by the architect Himanshu Parikh.
On the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), the Bengal Institute for Architecture in Dhaka, Bangladesh, organised a one-month course in September 2018 for 24 senior undergraduate students and young professionals on the architectural design lessons from Aga Khan Award winning projects in the region.