Take a closer look at The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada. Housing the collection of Aga Khan, the imam of the Ismaili community, the museum has recently been opened to the public.
Updated: September 21, 2014, 12:00 AM
In pictures: Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada
Clad in Brazilian granite, it houses the collection of the Aga Khan, the imam of the Ismaili community, in a structure designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. Photo by Tom Alban
Across an ensemble of pools and trees stands the Ismaili Centre, a mosque and other community offices designed by Charles Correa, the dean of Indian architects, who collaborated with Le Corbusier decades ago on the modernist buildings of Chandigarh in India. Photo by Tom Alban
The architectural ensemble, a US$300 million (Dh1.1 billion) project realised without any state funding, is a gift from Canada’s Ismaili community, which numbers about 100,000, more than half of whom live in the Toronto area. Photo by Tom Alban
Ismaili ties to Canada were strengthened in 1972, when the North American country absorbed many families expelled from Uganda by the then-president Idi Amin.
The Aga Khan has called Canada a global model for diversity.
Contemporary art is also part of the museum’s mission. Some works have been commissioned and some were being created as the buildings received their finishing touches.
Hanging from the ceiling in the museum’s wide atrium, where light filtered through mashrabiya patterns on the glass walls, is a carpet decorated with 1.2 million gold and silver pins, all of which were placed by hand.
When asked “Why Toronto?”, the museum’s director, Henry Kim, a numismatist hired away from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has a simple response: “Why not?”