Monday, June 15, 2009


The Aga Khan University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (AKU-FAS) Master Plan establishes a framework for a new campus on arid scrubland 30 kilometers outside Karachi, Pakistan for institutional development over the next 100 years. AKU-FAS will be the major component of Education City, a regional development of schools and institutes that will eventually cover 8,000 acres. The AKU-FAS site consists of 560 acres, part of 1,100 contiguous acres controlled by AKU.

The project is about architecture, city planning, campus planning, and academic programming, growing a university and a town. It is fundamentally an urban gesture firmly rooted in the culture of Islam and South Asia.

It envisions the campus as an integrated network of courtyards, pedestrian streets, and buildings and verandas, reflecting on history, culture, and climate. The first phase establishes two major courtyards—the Convocation Green and the Academic Green.

The Plan observes physical experience in the culture of building; including how people inhabit their climate, and how they manifest social norms or civil society through their built environment. The Plan applies materials, dimensions, and morphology to define a contemporary cosmopolitan project. Continuity is sought in the utility, comfort and memory of the built heritage.

Sustainability and infrastructure strategies included passive systems such as solar shading and an exterior veranda access system, stormwater management, on-site treatment of sewage, calibration of water fountains, pools, and irrigation, solar domestic hot water, wind energy resource and natural ventilation.

The Spine and Fingers concept is based on a sequence of large courtyards intersected by a cross-grain of pedestrian streets. This open space and circulation network is organized into clusters of buildings and smaller courtyards that both engage and define the underlying structure. This campus morphology is based on historic Islamic city form and establishes a continuum of experience, from the courtyard to the veranda to the building interior.

The Plan maximizes and intensifies interface between campus and town, and develops urban spaces and gateways. This is accomplished by an inhabited wall in which city gates are used as primary markers of entry and significance, uniting students, faculty, and staff with townspeople and merchants.

The Plan sets a water standard for water balance through on-site sewage treatment, effluent re-use, and stormwater management. Landscape design is derived from traditional arid-climate strategies.
The jury said, “This project is pretty powerful since all of the developments by Aga Khan are extremely attuned to cultural and local existing vernacular.”

No comments:

Post a Comment