Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

When the 1970s oil boom fueled a construction frenzy in the Islamic world, Prince Karim Aga Khan watched in dismay. Anonymous modernist buildings started sprouting across the land, and his society, he felt, was suffering from a poverty of abundance. Many of the structures were bereft of style and cultural context. It is therefore not surprising that the Aga Khan, 61, a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed and spiritual leader of 15 million Ismaili Muslims, found a new calling.

India has bagged three of the seven Aga Khan Awards for Architecture for 1998.

The winning projects are civil engineer-town planner Himanshu Parikh's slum networking project at Indore, architect Charles Correa's Vidhan Bhavan at Bhopal and Norwegian architects Per Christian Brynildsen and Jan Olav Jensen's lepers' hospital in Chopda taluka in Maharashtra's Jalgaon district.