To mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Aga Khan succeeding to his position, the American art historian Philip Jodidio has brought out a new book portraying the Imam, who was born in 1936, together with his ramified network of foundations and endowments. Jodidio states that he interviewed more than 50 friends and associates of the Aga Khan for “Under the Eaves of Architecture”. In eight chapters he paints a picture of the Aga Khan’s varied activities, which range from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture and the Aga Khan Historic Cities program (a fund for the restoration of historic buildings and monuments in the Arab world), to the Aga Khan University in Karachi and the Aga Khan Museum, which will be built over the next few years in Toronto to the designs of Fumihiko Maki.
Why this extraordinary interest in architecture? In a very readable interview he gave to Jodidio, the Aga Khan gives the following explanation: “The first indicator of a community’s poverty [...] is the physical context in which they live. Therefore, my interest in architecture was driven [...] by the question of what to do to improve the quality of life of the ultra-poor.”
“This book is not about architecture” is the book’s first sentence. Of course, that is not quite true, but initially the author does give architecture a wide berth, starting his book with a somewhat wordy disquisition on the history of the Ismaili Muslims and the Aga Khan’s career. Where Jodidio’s account always comes to life is when he allows former friends and companions of the Aga Khan – or the Aga Kahn himself – to have their say. Then the Aga Khan shows himself to be an unconventional thinker opposed to the mainstream; in his projected new buildings in Dubai, for example, where he consciously weighs against the deplorable excrescences of the local architecture: “The whole debate about the tallest building in the world concerns ambition, vanity, pride, or whatever you want to call it. These are not particularly strong forces in our value system. I wanted a building there that was historically correct, and, secondly, I wanted it to be on a human scale.” Although certain passages would have benefited from some pruning, “Under the Eaves of Architecture” is, in the final instance, a successful portrayal of a man who, in addition to hospitals and universities, wanted above all to build one thing: bridges of reconciliation between people and cultures.