Courses, lecture series and workshops

Twenty-five participants of different levels of expertise and architectural education experience worked over seven days with national and international faculty and an Aga Khan Award for Architecture winner. Key learnings from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture were introduced to the participants on the first day of the Winter School. Subsequently, the participants engaged an architectural conversation with two significant Cairo spaces, the Opera and Attaba squares, both located at urban seams that are temporal as well as spatial and have evolved within the urban fabric on multiple scales. 

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.

The trip was organised by youth facilitators from the United Arab Emirates (These facilitators have been trained at the Institute of Ismaili Studies and University College London to teach within the wider Aga Khan Network of Institutions.) The participating youngsters gained an understanding of the role of architecture and architectural conservation, as reflected in the efforts of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Aga Khan Historic Cities 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.

Both courses drew upon the experience and methodology of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme (AKHCP). The first course, taken by 20 undergraduates, was “Introduction to Urban Design: Impact of Cultural Heritage on Human Well Being,” while the second, entitled “Conservation of Architectural Heritage: Urban Revitalisation & community Development,” was offered to 18 graduate students.

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 workshop was inspired by the need to see architecture beyond the idea of ‘creation’, to uncover and analyse the close links between humankind and the spaces people inhabit, to understand heritage and its cultural and social meanings beyond purely technical or constructional aspects. To facilitate this different way of seeing, the students were encouraged to consult the archives of both the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme. 

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. 

The publication was designed, written and produced entirely by the students and faculty involved.  Sixty students revisited Balkrishna Doshi’s Aranya Community Housing and Hemanshu Parikh’s Slum Networking of Indore City projects, which received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995 and 1998 respectively. The students looked at how the visions of the architects have been either sustained or transformed; they also documented lifestyles, conducted in-depth interviews in the two communities, did measured drawings and mapped the open and public spaces as well as the supporting infrastructure. Their inquiry revealed the shifting yet consistently inadequate governmental stances towards housing for the urban poor:  as Indore has grown exponentially, there has been scant concern for meeting their needs. The research also revealed how policies shape cities and people’s lives in hard reality – as against the idealistic visions of the architects. The Slum Networking area was once at the fringes of the city but is now centrally located and has high market value, yet the project itself is largely forgotten and the concerns it addressed largely ignored.  Doshi’s Aranya Community Housing still refers to the architect’s original master-plan, but not to the idea of increment that it intended. The tasks carried out by the students, together with their interactions with urban designers, architects and engineers, generated intense debate on various aspects of urban housing, both formal and informal. Eminent experts who contributed included B.V. Doshi himself. 

This training workshop, in which 27 participants and 33 speakers from Brazil, Italy and Portugal took part, examined the predicament of the Bairro da Mouraria, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Lisbon, which is currently an ethnically plural space (home to a large Muslim immigrant population) but one that is increasingly subjected to the strong threat of gentrification due to pressures from the tourism and real estate industries. Improving public policy skills that can benefit communities living in such historic centres where urban rehabilitation is being undertaken and the threat of gentrification looms was a key focus of the programme. Using inter alia the approach and methodology of the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, the Winter School brought the insights of architecture and urban conservation to bear on the challenges of planning, executing and evaluating concrete measures to increase the quality of life of the communities concerned. Theory and reflection were combined with the analysis of urban development models that foster cultural diversity and social cohesion of residents. The intensive two-week programme consisted of master classes and in in situ workshops involving fieldwork and community interactions; it concluded with an exhibition and public presentation. The Santa Maria Parish, where Bairro da Mouraria is located, was a partner as well as the Lisbon City Council, while the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa provided 10 grants for participants.

The workshop was innovatory in its exploration of multimedia as a mode of inquiry and as a story-telling tool that can provoke public dialogue around conservation challenges. 

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.

The students worked on the archives of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture as well as those of the magazine Domus India, whose Editor Dr. Kaiwan Mehta, a leading architectural scholar and critic, was their instructor. Each student prepared an annotated photo-essay for the course. Informed reading of Aga Khan Award Master Jury reports (as well as review essays in Domus) gave the students a studied approach to the projects, rather than relying on random search or texts written by architects themselves. The process enabled students to understand by observation how a building/project is approached and studied. The structured nature of the AKAA archives also taught the students what responsible research and analysis of architectural projects actually entails. This course is slated to be repeated in 2019-20. 

Each student was required to go through the relevant project report, to read and digest the Master Jury citation, as well as other materials, and to write a two-thousand-word paper critically analysing the project. A second outcome was a set of 13 posters, one for each cycle, which was exhibited at the College in September-October and inaugurated by the Vice-Chancellor of Goa University.

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. 

Twenty-five students from a range of disciplines explored the cultural landscape of Gulbarga as well as its communities of inhabitants and their everyday lives, each developing her or his own project at the site. Gulbarga was the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate of the Deccan in the 14^th century CE.  The workshop was integrated with the 16-week undergraduate thesis project studio offered by Srishti in partnership with Team YUVAA (Youth United for Vigilance, Awareness & Action), an NGO in nearby Bidar.

During the workshop, which will run through December 2018, students will visit the respective communities, document the lifestyles of the inhabitants, carry out measured drawings and map the open and public spaces as well as the supporting infrastructure.  The workshop findings will then be incorporated into a fourth-year housing design studio.

Drawing directly on the experience of Award-winning architects and the communities within which the projects were placed, the course has covered the topics of community building, public spaces, urban regeneration and landscape design and architectural conservation.