AKAA 2025

AKAA 2025 

Recipients of the 2025 Aga Khan Award for Architecture are:

Bangladesh

Khudi Bari,

Marina Tabassum Architects replicable solution built with bamboo and steel for displaced communities affected by climatic and geographic changes. 

China

West Wusutu Village Community Centre
Inner Mongolian Grand Architecture Design Co., Ltd center built from reclaimed bricks that provides social and cultural spaces for residents and artists, while addressing the cultural needs of the local multi-ethnic community, including Hui Muslims. 

Egypt

Revitalisation of Historic Esna
Takween Integrated Community Development project that addresses cultural tourism challenges through physical interventions, socioeconomic initiatives and innovative urban strategies, transforming a neglected site into a prospering historic city. 

Iran

Majara Residence and Community Redevelopment
ZAV Architects colorful complex whose domes reflect the rainbow island's ochre-rich soils, providing sustainable accommodations for tourists who visit the unique landscape of Hormuz Island.


Jahad Metro Plaza
KA Architecture Studio a once dilapidated station transformed into a vibrant urban node for pedestrians. 

Pakistan

Vision Pakistan
DB Studios multistorey facility boasting joyful facades inspired by Pakistani and Arab craft, while housing a charity that aims to empower disadvantaged youth through vocational training.

Palestine

Wonder Cabinet
AAU Anastas multipurpose, non-profit exhibition and production space built with the input of local artisans and contractors, to become a key hub for craft, design, innovation and learning. 

more at 

https://the.akdn/en/resources-media/whats-new/news-release/winners-of-the-2025-aga-khan-award-for-architecture-announced

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?

1.61803398875 Design Hoax?
Is the Golden Ratio Fact or Fiction? 

I've already posted a video lecture by Stanford Mathematics Professor, Keith Devlin titled Mathematical Thinking, it discussed where the Golden Ration has proved valid and where it was a complete fiction... 

There have been several articles also posted on the subject entailing that the famous Golden Ratio is a complete historical design hoax! that was passed on by many architects, builders and made an ideal of by many throughout history!? With no scientific background what so ever...
Following will embed article share by Co.Design & Arch Daily 
Enjoy...

The Golden Ratio: Design’s Biggest Myth

The golden ratio is total nonsense in design. Here’s why.

BY JOHN BROWNLEE8 MINUTE READ

In the world of art, architecture, and design, the golden ratio has earned a tremendous reputation. Greats like Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí have used the number in their work. The Parthenon, the Pyramids at Giza, the paintings of Michelangelo, the Mona Lisa, even the Apple logo are all said to incorporate it.

It’s bullshit. The golden ratio’s aesthetic bona fides are an urban legend, a myth, a design unicorn. Many designers don’t use it, and if they do, they vastly discount its importance. There’s also no science to really back it up. Those who believe the golden ratio is the hidden math behind beauty are falling for a 150-year-old scam.

WHAT IS THE GOLDEN RATIO?

First described in Euclid’s Elements 2,300 years ago, the established definition is this: two objects are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The value this works out to is usually written as 1.6180. The most famous application of the golden ratio is the so-called golden rectangle, which can be split into a perfect square, and a smaller rectangle that has the same aspect ratio as the rectangle it was cut away from. You can apply this theory to a larger number of objects by similarly splitting them down.

In plain English: if you have two objects (or a single object that can be split into two objects, like the golden rectangle), and if, after you do the math above, you get the number 1.6180, it’s usually accepted that those two objects fall within the golden ratio. Except there’s a problem. When you do the math, the golden ratio doesn’t come out to 1.6180. It comes out to 1.6180339887… And the decimal points go on forever.

“Strictly speaking, it’s impossible for anything in the real-world to fall into the golden ratio, because it’s an irrational number,” says Keith Devlin, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. You can get close with more standard aspect ratios. The iPad’s 3:2 display, or the 16:9 display on your HDTV all “float around it,” Devlin says. But the golden ratio is like pi. Just as it’s impossible to find a perfect circle in the real world, the golden ratio cannot strictly be applied to any real world object. It’s always going to be a little off.

THE GOLDEN RATIO AS MOZART EFFECT

It’s pedantic, sure. Isn’t 1.6180 close enough? Yes, it probably would be, if there were anything to scientifically support the notion that the golden ratio had any bearing on why we find certain objects like the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa aesthetically pleasing.

But there isn’t. Devlin says the idea that the golden ratio has any relationship to aesthetics at all comes primarily from two people, one of whom was misquoted, and the other of whom was just making shit up.

The first guy was Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar who wrote a book called De Divina Proportione back in 1509, which was named after the golden ratio. Weirdly, in his book, Pacioli didn’t argue for a golden ratio-based theory of aesthetics as it should be applied to art, architecture, and design: he instead espoused the Vitruvian system of rational proportions, after the first-century Roman architect, Vitruvius. The golden ratio view was misattributed to Pacioli in 1799, according to Mario Livio, the guy who literally wrote the book on the golden ratio. But Pacioli was close friends with Leonardo da Vinci, whose works enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in the 19th century. Since Da Vinci illustrated De Divina Proportione, it was soon being said that Da Vinci himself used the golden ratio as the secret math behind his exquisitely beautiful paintings.

One guy who believed this was Adolf Zeising. “He’s the guy you really want to burn at the stake for the reputation of the golden ratio,” Devlin laughs. Zeising was a German psychologist who argued that the golden ratio was a universal law that described “beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art… which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.”

He was a long-winded guy. The only problem with Zeising was he saw patterns where none exist. For example, Zeising argued that the golden ratio could be applied to the human body by taking the height from a person’s navel to his toes, then dividing it by the person’s total height. These are just arbitrary body parts, crammed into a formula, Devlin says: “When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it’s easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6.”

But it didn’t matter if it was made up or not. Zeising’s theories became extremely popular, “the 19th-century equivalent of the Mozart Effect,” according to Devlin, referring to the belief that listening to classical music improves your intelligence. And it never really went away. In the 20th century, the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier based his Modulor system of anthropometric proportions on the golden ratio. Dalí painted his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper on a canvas shaped like a golden rectangle. Meanwhile, art historians started combing back through the great designs of history, trying to retroactively apply the golden ratio to Stonehenge, Rembrandt, the Chatres Cathedral, and Seurat. The link between the golden ratio and beauty has been a canard of the world of art, architecture, and design ever since.

YOU DON’T REALLY PREFER THE GOLDEN RATIO

In the real world, people don’t necessarily prefer the golden ratio.

Devlin tells me that, as part of an ongoing, unpublished exercise at Stanford, he has worked with the university’s psychology department to ask hundreds of students over the years what their favorite rectangle is. He shows the students collections of rectangles, then asks them pick out their favorite one. If there were any truth behind the idea that the golden ratio is key to beautiful aesthetics, the students would pick out the rectangle closest to a golden rectangle. But they don’t. They pick seemingly at random. And if you ask them to repeat the exercise, they pick different rectangles. “It’s a very useful way to show new psychology students the complexity of human perception,” Devlin says. And it doesn’t show that the golden ratio is more aesthetically pleasing to people at all.

Devlin’s experiments aren’t the only ones to show people don’t prefer the golden ratio. A study from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley found that, on average, consumers prefer rectangles that are in the range of 1.414 and 1.732. The range contains the golden rectangle, but its exact dimensions are not the clear favorite.

MANY OF TODAY’S DESIGNERS DON’T THINK IT’S USEFUL

The designers we spoke to about the golden ratio don’t actually find it to be very useful, anyway.

Richard Meier, the legendary architect behind the Getty Center and the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, admits that when he first started his career, he had an architect’s triangle made that matched the golden ratio, but he had never once designed his buildings keeping the golden ratio in mind. “There are so many other numbers and formulas that are more important when designing a building,” he tells me by phone, referring to formulas that can calculate the maximum size certain spaces can be, or ones that can determine structural load.

Alisa Andrasek, the designer behind Biothing, an online repository of computational designs, agrees. “In my own work, I can’t ever recall using the golden ratio,” Andrasek writes in an email. “I can imagine embedding the golden ratio into different systems as additional ‘spice,’ but I can hardly imagine it driving the whole design as it did historically… it is way too simplistic.”

Giorgia Lupi of Accurat, the Italian design and innovation firm, says that, at best, the golden ratio is as important to designers as any other compositional rule, such as the rule of thirds: maybe a fine rule-of-thumb, but one that good designers will feel free to reject. “I don’t really know, in practice, how many designers deliberately employ the golden ratio,” she writes. “I personally have never worked with it our used it in my projects.”

Of the designers we spoke to, industrial designer Yves Béhar of Fuseproject is perhaps kindest to the golden ratio. “I sometimes look at the golden ratio as I observe proportions of the products and graphics we create, but it’s more informational than dogmatic,” he tells me. Even then, he never sets out to design something with the golden ratio in mind. “It’s important as a tool, but not a rule.”

Even designers who are also mathematicians are skeptical of the golden ratio’s use in design. Edmund Harriss is a clinical assistant professor in the University of Arkansas’ mathematics department who uses many formulas to help generate new works of art. But Harriss says that the golden ratio is, at best, just one of many tools at a mathematically inclined designer’s fingertips. “It is a simple number in many ways, and as a result it does turn up in a wide variety of places…” Harriss tells me by email. “[But] it is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty.”

WHY DOES THE MYTH PERSIST?

If the golden ratio’s aesthetic merit is so flimsy, then why does the myth persist?

Devlin says it’s simple. “We’re creatures who are genetically programmed to see patterns and to seek meaning,” he says. It’s not in our DNA to be comfortable with arbitrary things like aesthetics, so we try to back them up with our often limited grasp of math. But most people don’t really understand math, or how even a simple formula like the golden ratio applies to complex system, so we can’t error-check ourselves. “People think they see the golden ratio around them, in the natural world and the objects they love, but they can’t actually substantiate it,” Devlin tells me. “They are victims to their natural desire to find meaning in the pattern of the universe, without the math skills to tell them that the patterns they think they see are illusory.” If you see the golden ratio in your favorite designs, you’re probably seeing things.

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3044877/the-golden-ratio-designs-biggest-myth

Is the Golden Ratio Design's Greatest Hoax?

• 12:00 - 15 April, 2015
 
• by Patricia Arcilla

For more than 150 years, the Golden Ratio has been one of the main tenets of design, informing generations of architects, designers, and artists. From Le Corbusier to Apple, Vitruvius to Da Vinci, the ratio purportedly dictates which forms will be found aesthetically pleasing.  Yet mathematicians and designers have grown skeptical of the practical applications of the Golden Ratio, with Edmund Harriss of the University of Arkansas' mathematics department putting it at its most simple: "It is certainly not the universal formula behind aesthetic beauty." Writing for Fast Co. Design, John Brownlee collates sources as diverse as the mathematics department at Stanford University to Richard Meier, laying out the case against what may just be design's greatest hoax. Read the full article here.

https://www.archdaily.com/619965/is-the-golden-ratio-design-s-greatest-hoax?ad_medium=widget&ad_name=most-visited-article-show

embracing it...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK90s8wMyyo&index=3&list=PLABE41A0C254CD1D5

BBC Universe Documentary The Great Math Mystery BBC Documentary

Fibonacci Melody: Greg Sheehan at TEDxSydney

Greg Sheehan is one of Australia's premier and most innovative percussionists widely regarded internationally as a leader in his field. As a performer, he is significantly represented in the last three decades of Australian contemporary music as both a live band member and studio musician on hundreds of recordings. Greg has created a melody from the first 8 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence and performs it in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House for TEDxSydney 2013. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

The Secret Mathematicians - Professor Marcus du Sautoy

Professor du Sautoy examines the way that Mathematics has overtly and covertly inspired some of the greatest artists. He examines how they might be considered as secret mathematicians: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... From composers to painters, writers to choreographers, the mathematician's palette of shapes, patterns and numbers has proved a powerful inspiration. Artists can be subconsciously drawn to the same structures that fascinate mathematicians as they hunt for interesting new structures to frame their creative process.

Professor du Sautoy will explore the hidden mathematical ideas that underpin the creative output of well-known artists and reveal that the work of the mathematician is also driven by strong aesthetic values. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and... Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,500 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege

The City might Win!

The City might win after all, if it doesn't follow after Damascus Urban Organisational Planning Model! If one can make such a description 
(Praying, that God might help Middle-Eastern cities) 
I'm sharing a session on Rethinking the City of Aleppo post-war future, and hopeful civic thinking, enjoy... 


Rethink Aleppo: The City Always Wins (EN) from Pakhuis de Zwijger on Vimeo.
Imagining and designing a city of the future. With talks, a variety of workshops and an Eat to Meet 'vrijheidsmaaltijd'.

Aleppo is one of the oldest cities in the world and has been rebuilt many times before. We will dive into history and the elements that make Aleppo, a distinct city with AlHakam Shaar from The Aleppo Project and Dutch Historian Geert Mak. Then we look into historical examples of rebuilding cities from Afghanistan to Macedonia. After that, young Syrian designers will share their sense of design of Syrian homes. We are then ready to imagine future scenarios for Aleppo. You can choose one of three workshops on future city making. Join us and contribute to cutting edge ideas, disruptive innovations, out of the box efforts, hardcore research and diverse networks about place making and building future cities. Naturally, exercises in hopeful futures include music, films, beauty and dinner!


https://dezwijger.nl/programma/the-city-always-wins

Architecture of Refugees II W.A.Ve 2017

W.A.Ve 2017 Syria





on Ethics of Intervention and Insta follow-up

Save the date: 07/07 12:00 Auditorium #cotonificio Nasser Rabbat MIT - Aga Khan #wave2017 @iuav_venezia @iuav_architettura

A post shared by IUAV WAVe 2017 (@wave2017syria) on Jul 7, 2017 at 12:41am PDT

VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION 

Published on May 12, 2017  

https://issuu.com/w.a.ve2017/docs/venice_charter_issuu

The VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION aims at the establishment of clear guidelines for post-war development. Though generated in response to the Syrian conflict, the charter aims to be useful in any other similar possible scenarios. The nature of modern conflicts challenges our understanding of conventional war: they manifest as permanent, asymmetric local and mobile wars between numerous transnational actors, and they extend beyond geographical boundaries. The Syrian case presents an example of how local conflicts involve the whole international community: epochal migrations, global terrorism and widespread violence affect globally every person regardless of any economic, social and religious boundaries.

The Architecture of Refugees I

The Architecture of Refugees: The Question of Ethics

Uploaded on May 12, 2017

Hosted by the MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

Significant transformations in the world's political landscape are signaling the emergence of a new world order that undermines the
certitudes established at the end of World War II. At the core of such discussions, the concept of human rights is significantly challenged, calling for a discussion at the core of ethics for the revisions of the principles and mechanisms of intervention. In reaction to these new transformations some have called for a World Parliament representing the people and not governments to replace the UN General Assembly.

The workshop addresses the agency of architecture and design in a context where the disrespect of human rights is aggravated by
the incapacity of global institutions to react efficiently. What are the ethical questions regarding the architecture of refugees? What timescales, short or long terms, represent a priority for architecture and through which agenda – refugee relief, historical preservation, camp upgrades and daily life, or rebuilding and resettlement? What is the role of design in front of the degradation and destruction of cultural artifacts? How can design be channeled towards peace building objectives and possible resettlement projects? What are the material, technological, systemic responses to address emergency needs in the context of refugee camps?

Speakers:

Ethics of International Law as a Framework for Displacees and Refugees
Balakrishnan Rajagopal

Ethics and Politics of Post-Conflict Repair
Delia Wendel

Material Culture and Historical Conservation
Admir Masic

After Belonging
Carlos Minguez Carrasco

Architecture of Exile: The Permanent Temporariness of Refugee Camps
Alessandro Petti

Panel Discussion moderated by El Hadi Jazairy