The Issue of identity in the Islamic Intelligentsia and the Aga Khan architectural awards

The Aga Khan Award For Architecture is a vast field of study with the eight award cycles, dozens of meetings and think-tanks, the periodical Mimar and its education programmes in the Harvard University and MIT and with the archives, that may be the most important part of the whole Trust. This study is concerned with the AKAA in general with its all aspects and tries to explore the interconnections among those. AKAA connects the professionals Who build, think, and study on/in the non- Western architecture somehow, and make them able to communicate one another in many different occasions. AKAA has a big economic power which makes the institution enable to make big organisations and to support the researches. Those peculiarities of the AKAA as an institution guaranteed its unique position in the Muslim world for twenty years. The genesis of an intellectual class emerged especially in the Middle esat, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and in some parts of the Far Esat after the 1970's is quite remerkable.This intellectual movement is consisted of many conflicting fragments and thus it is heteregeneous in character. This movement was aiming at analysing their own social structure at the first step and then precluding the confusions between East and West, by making its own way through its origins at the following. This was a battle against orientalism, to overcome the social paranoia of retardainess. The interesting point is that the foundation of AKAA goes to the same period so it is a result of that cultural search. Within the limits of this study, the three aspects of the discussions in the Islamic intelligentsia became important from the point of being a bridge between the Muslim scholars and the discourse of AKAA the first is postmodernism and its reflections globalism and plurality and the second is the aspiration of Islamic epistemology.The third and the last is the reanimation of ijtihadIV that used to exist in tha classical Islamic tradition which will encourage the creativity in general. The third chapter mainly identifies the problems of the contemporary architecture in the Islamic countries based on search done in the central archives of the AKAA. The buildings selected provide a general panaroma that could not be possible make a literature search on apart from the AKAA archives because of insufficiency of appropriate periodicals and magazines. The problems identified can be summarised as follows: l.The Problem of Creativity _ 2.Foreign Architects and Imported Styles 3. Stereotypes and the Abuse of Modern Construction Systems. 4.Populist interpretations of the past with the problem of kitsch and the vernacular replica The fourth chapter tries to find how AKAA has responsed to these problems in terms of the awards and the discussions in various assambladges. It can be witnessed that AKAA has taken the first steps in order to create an architectural discourse that is freed from its autonomous character. The messages sent by the means of awards have an undeniable influence on Islamic world as excluded and ignored by the scientific and cultural tradition İn the West. Indeed these messages were expected not to be dictating and one-sided but could not be as plural as expected. It is astonishing that AKAA has not shown an anxiety on the issue of foreign architects from its beginning. One of the great contributions of AKAA became in its responses to the question of sustainability by made a discussion possible on the experience of smart buildings in the East in addition to the unindustrialised building technology.