HH: The Aga Khan IV
Recalling Paradise: The Aga Khan Garden and The Diwan, Devon, Alberta
A jewel-like pavilion completes the world’s northernmost Islamic-inspired garden.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS (Aga Khan Garden) Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects
ARCHITECTS (Diwan) AXIA Design Associates (Design Architects), Arriz + Co. (Architectural & Interior Design), and Kasian Architecture, Interior Design, and Planning (Executive Architects)
TEXT David Down
Carved out of a boggy Alberta forest outside the rural town of Devon, south of Edmonton, the Aga Khan Garden with its new pavilion, known as The Diwan, is a design revelation of exceptional grace, tranquility, spirituality and precision of execution. Masterfully balancing cultural and historical references with local topography, climate, vegetation and materials, both the garden and the building sit perfectly composed in their unexpected context. Together, they comprise the world’s northernmost Islamic-inspired garden, rooted in an ancient and distant culture, yet completely connected to their Canadian home.
Located within The University of Alberta Botanic Garden, the 4.8-hectare Aga Khan Garden was gifted to the University of Alberta in 2018 by His Highness the Aga Khan. The gift nods to Canada’s historic welcoming of Ismaili Muslims in 1972, and is part of the work of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which has created and restored important gardens around the world, including Aga Khan Park in Toronto. The Aga Khan himself speaks of gardens as a central element in Muslim culture—places where human creativity and divine majesty are fused, and our responsibility to nature and stewardship of the natural world are put into action. "
AGA KHAN GARDEN ALBERTA
CANADA
The Aga Khan Garden is a gift to the University of Alberta from His Highness the Aga Khan. It brings to life the principle of pluralism in a 4.8-hectare Mughal-inspired space where traditional Islamic landscape design takes on strikingly contemporary features.
"Elements inspired by gardens from the Muslim world are interspersed with distinctively Canadian features, from Alberta’s wild rose beds to Canadian-quarried stonework.
The Garden provides a stunning example of Islamic landscape architecture that explores the beauty and boundaries of vegetation, light, water, geometry, symmetry, adaptation and human scale. The serenity of nature highlights each of the design elements including secluded forest paths, granite and limestone terraces, still pools that reflect the prairie sky and a waterfall that tumbles over textured stone.
The Aga Khan Garden is laid out in three parts: woodland valley, central court and pond framed by an orchard. It unfolds in rectangular terraces down to the Calla Pond. On the highest point stands a pavilion that enjoys a vista over the Garden. From this plaza, water emerges and runs through a stone-lined channel from one terrace level to the next and then falls gently into Calla Pond.
At that moment, the Aga Khan Garden transitions from a structured scheme to a looser, curving, more naturalistic design of the bustan, a fruit orchard that extends around the Calla Pond. The Garden contains more than 25,000 trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals and wetland plants, selected for fragrance, beauty and the ability to thrive in Alberta’s climate. Twelve water features and fountains are sprinkled around the Garden.
Speaking at the inauguration, His Highness spoke of the place, throughout history, of the Islamic garden in reminding us of the notion of good stewardship of the earth and “our responsibility to honor, to protect, and to share the gifts of the natural world”. In considering the role that such green spaces may play, His Highness spoke of the Garden as a social space, “a place for learning, for sharing, for romance, for diplomacy, for reflection on the destiny of the human race”."
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