The Double-Bind of Pluralism: Islamic Modernism and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Aga Khan Award for Architecture as a modern institution of architectural judgment shaped by a productive paradox or “double-bind”: its authority derives from an Islamic ethical horizon, while its pluralist commitments continually extend that horizon beyond fixed definitions of Islamic architecture. Founded in 1977 by Aga Khan IV – the forty-ninth Imam of the Isma’ili Muslims, the Award emerged from a concern that existing architectural discourse could not adequately address the socio-cultural, environmental, and ethical conditions under which architecture in Muslim societies was being made. Its significance lies in the way it has built a framework for evaluating architecture through questions of dignity, repair, continuity, and shared responsibility.The dissertation argues that the Award translates an Islamically grounded philosophy of pluralism into a modern regime of recognition. The methods through which this translation is shown to occur include Award monographs, steering committee briefs, master jury statements, technical reviews, interviews, and analyses of awarded projects. Pluralism, in this account, becomes an ethical and epistemological discipline rooted in religious and spiritual thought, then made operative through institutional procedures. In four chapters, the dissertation traces this movement from ethical formation to architectural evaluation and historiographical consequence. It first situates the Aga Khan’s pluralism within Islamic and Isma’ili traditions of knowledge, interpretation, and responsibility. It then examines awarded projects that treat repair, civic capacity, environmental care, and living heritage as architectural value. A third chapter analyzes the AKAA’s internal procedures as the infrastructure through which pluralist judgment becomes credible. The final chapter turns to pressure cases such as Charles Correa’s Vidhan Bhavan and Li Xiaodong’s Bridge School to theorize the Award’s central double-bind: the same Islamic pluralism that grounds the institution also authorizes its movement across religious, cultural, geographic, and typological boundaries. The implications of this double-bind are architectural, institutional, and historiographical. The AKAA advances a form of Islamic modernism best understood as a disciplined practice of judgment. It also exerts a decanonizing pressure on architectural history by expanding the evidence through which architecture becomes exemplary, from form and authorship to use, care, repair, ecology, public consequence, and ethical life.