Since the IV Aga Khan created the foundation that bears his name in 1967, the imam of the Ismaili community has built hospitals, homes, schools and religious and cultural centers in cities around the world such as London, Toronto, Lisbon and Dubai. The last of these Ismaili centers has just been inaugurated in Houston (Texas) and is designed by an architect born in Shiraz (Iran) and a British citizen, Farshid Moussavi.
The IV Aga Khan passed away in February this year. The title was inherited by his son, Prince Rahim, who has since become the new Imam of the Ismailis, the V Aga Khan and the person who inaugurated the new Houston Center earlier this month. “This building is called the Ismaili Center, but it is not just for Ismailis, it is for all Houstonians to use. This is a place open to those who seek knowledge, reflection and dialogue,” he said then. What should a building with that ambition be like?
The father of the current Aga Khan began purchasing the land overlooking Buffalo Bayou Park, where the property was built, in 2006. This planning is essential when building a garden. And that is, to a large extent, what this center offers to the city of Houston. Today those 4.5 hectares—about 45,000 square meters—are a network of flower beds and groves with fountains, ponds, pergolas and lattices that refer to the Islamic architectural tradition, which relies on the five senses to build memorable buildings. Thus, the gardens lead to a bright building, framed by terraces, fountains and rows of trees. A building that splits a central patio into entrances and walkways.
Farshid Moussavi, its architect, speaks of a civic sanctuary, a meeting place between people and nature. Making a moment of serenity possible is one of the objectives of the center that updates the Islamic tradition of patios and lattices to deal with the sun by creating shade. This historical tradition is built with patios, terraces and lattices and decorated with repeated geometric ornaments. To that character, Moussavi—who already signed the Cleveland Museum of Art—has added lightness to a building that is as current as it is difficult to date in time. That topicality is a message as powerful as the authorship of the property itself, in the hands of a woman.
Thus, as tradition dictates, the boundaries between the interior of the building and the exterior are porous. To do this, Moussavi and his team have used wide thresholds that make the building a paradoxical architecture: blurred, despite its geometric character, and rooted in its lightness. Materially, on the façade the lattice and mosaic – which also refer to tradition – coexist with the interior glass, concrete, wood and steel. The central patio in front of the prayer room is crowned by an oculus that bathes the space with natural light.
The exterior speaks of logic and naturalness, those used to update the Islamic landscape in the 21st century. The author of this landscaping, Nelson Byrd Woltz, had already worked for the Aga Khan Foundation, and received the commission for the landscaping three decades ago, in 2011. He then began a trip through Spain and Egypt to study the sound of water, the scale of the flower beds, the rhythm of geometry and the symbolism in Islamic gardens. With that information, their challenge was to update that tradition by reducing water consumption thanks to engineering—signed by Londoner Hanif Kara from the company AKT II—. Thus, each garden path, each alignment of trees and each fountain have been designed to mitigate outside noise and to promote its maintenance.
Woltz has spoken of bringing Islamic tradition to Texas using cacti and agave and other local species to build an ecosystem that welcomes the visitor and protects itself. This is what this building is like, a property that safeguards a tradition by taking risks: sharing it, updating it and expanding it.