Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

Standing in the heart of Roman Constantinople, next to Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and its open air market of secondhand books and manuscripts, the Beyazit State Library demonstrates that a 19th-century Ottoman edifice can retain its character and still serve the public on a daily basis.

Shelters built from earth-filled plastic sacks joined together with barbed wire and plaster would hardly be the obvious choice to win an Islamic architecture prize. But for the judges of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture - as rooky architects at the American University of Sharjah learned this week - there is a lot more to Muslim monuments than minarets.Last year's winners of the triennial award included the Petronas Towers in Malaysia, a primary school in Burkina Faso and the earthquake-proof sandbag shelters of US-based Nader Khalili.

The National Building Museum in Washington features a colossal hall with Corinthian columns measuring 75 feet high and eight feet wide -- they are among the tallest interior columns in the world. This is where American veterans once lined up to receive their pensions and where most of the presidential inaugurations have taken place since the late 1800s. But, recently, the who's who of architecture gathered in the Great Hall to honour one man and his profound impact on architecture.

The National Building Museum has awarded its Vincent J. Scully Prize to His Highness the Aga Khan. The prize recognizes individuals who raise awareness of the built environment.
'The Aga Khan is the perfect recipient of this award,' says David Schwarz, chairman of the prize jury. 'Our prize is dedicated to rewarding, recognizing, and publicizing people who have made a significant intellectual contribution to the built environment. It's meant to encourage people to talk about the built environment as a whole, not just about buildings.'

Prince Karim Aga Khan IV received the fifth Vincent Scully Prize in recognition of his decades of work to re-energize design in the Islamic world and to preserve historic sites. The Vincent Scully prize, named for a professor of architecture at Yale University, was established in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design.