Jamatkhana, Burnaby, BC

In 1991 the Koc Family, one of the most prominent families in Turkey, decided to build a private university in that country. They conducted a search for finding an architect who could respond to their objectives. They decided to conduct an architectural competition between three architectural offices: Khadem Design Studio at Payette in Boston, MA, Architects Collaborative in Boston, MA, and Ove Arup in London, England.

The American University in Cairo (AUC) was designed to relocate its main campus from El Tahrir Square, in the heart of the city, to the planned community of New Cairo, where the university would be one of the largest landowners and employers. The built area of the campus comprised some 300,000 square meters, set on a 260-acre site, with an estimated budget of substantially over $400mil for construction. At the time of the initiation of this project, AUC occupied 100,000 square meters of owned and rented space on approximately 7 acres in several locations in downtown Cairo. AUC’s new campus is located some 35 kilometers to the east of downtown Cairo in the planned community of New Cairo, a development with a projected population of 2 to 3 million people in a desert characterized by petrified forest remnants.

After a long international search, In 1971, H.H. The Aga Khan selected Mozhan Khadem as the Design Consultant for the Aga Khan University in Karachi and Payette Associates as the technical hospital consultant. As the design leader, Mozhan Khadem conceptualized the Aga Khan University and hospital as “the architecture of continuous interior spaces that surrounds the observer”– consistent with the tradition of Indo-Persian and Mughal architectural heritage of Pakistan. In order to familiarize the architectural and engineering design teams, with the blessing of the Aga Khan, Mozhan organized a tour of over one-month duration through countries under Islamic influence, including Spain in Europe; Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt in North Africa; and Iran, Pakistan, and India in Asia, where the design team could become familiar with the important historic architectural monuments in Islamic countries and could understand the basic architectural concept Mozhan Khadem was advocating for in the design of the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan.