Aga Khan Award for Architecture Announces 2022 Jury

Aga Khan Award for Architecture Logo
Aga Khan Award for Architecture Logo
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Aga Khan Award for Architecture Announces 2022 Jury

Aga Khan Award for Architecture Logo
Aga Khan Award for Architecture Logo

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture, which amounts to one million dollar, has announced the names of the Master Jury for 2022.

The nine-member jury will include Nada Al-Hassan, an architect specialized in international cultural and sustainable development policies in Paris, Kader Attia, an artist who lives and works between Berlin and Paris, Frances Kere, Associate Professor of Architectural Design and Participation at the Technical University of Munich, Amale Andraos, Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, and director of the WORKac architecture firm in New York, Dr. Sibel Bozdogan, Visiting Professor of Modern Architecture and Urbanism at Boston University; Nader Tehrani, Dean of the Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York and founding principal of NADAAA, Boston and New York. Mrs. Lina Ghotmeh, founder and principal of Ghotmeh- Architecture in Paris, Anne Lacaton, Founder and Director of the architecture firm Lacaton and Vassal, Paris- Montreuil, and Professor Kazi Khaled Ashraf, Director-General of the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes, and Settlements in Dhaka.

Once the jury selects a shortlist of projects, the projects will be thoroughly examined on sight by independent experts, most of whom are either architects, urban planners or structural engineers. The jurors will then convene for a second time in summer 2022 to study the examinations made on-site and select the final winners of the award.

Selection does only account for the provision of people’s material, social and economic needs, but their ability to stimulate and respond to their cultural aspirations. Particular emphasis is placed on the extent to which the projects use local resources and the appropriate technology in innovative ways that can inspire similar efforts elsewhere.



Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
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Taipei Zoo's Veteran Giant Panda Celebrates 20th Birthday

Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
Panda Yuanyuan enjoys her birthday cake for her 20th birthday at the Taipei Zoo in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)

With politics set aside, well-wishers gathered to wish the Taipei zoo’s senior panda a happy 20th birthday.
Visitors crowded around Yuanyuan's enclosure to take photos of her with a birthday cake in the shape of the number 20.
Yuanyuan was born in China and arrived in 2008 with her partner Tuantuan. He died in 2022 at age 18 but not before fathering two female cubs, Yuanzai and Yuanbao, now 11 and 4 respectively and still living at the zoo.
Danielle Shu, a 20-year-old Brazilian student in Taiwan, said she found online clips of the pandas an enjoyable distraction. “And I just find it really funny and cute,” The Associated Press quoted Shu as saying.
Giant pandas are native only to China, and Beijing bestows them as a sign of political amity. Yuanyuan and Tuantuan arrived in Taiwan during a period of relative calm between the sides, which split amid civil war in 1949. China claims the island its own territory, to be annexed by military force if necessary.
Faced with declining habitat and a notoriously low birthrate, giant panda populations have declined to around 1,900 in the mountains of western China, while 600 pandas live in zoos and breeding centers in China and around the world.