Your Highness Sayyid Theyazin Bin Haitam Al Said,

Princess Zahra Aga Khan,

Your Highnesses, Excellencies,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s prize-giving ceremony.

Since the first Award ceremony in 1980, we have celebrated the winners of each triennial cycle all over the world, in places where Muslims are present or where they have enriched cultural heritage. These include the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the Alhambra in Granada, Registan Square in Samarkand, as well as many places in important sites in Pakistan, Morocco, Syria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Qatar, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, and now in the Sultanate of Oman.

It is a great honour that today we gather here in Oman, in a country steeped in history, rich in culture and where tradition is the foundation for the future.

In this beautiful opera house, whose architect won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1983 for a project in Malaysia. We bring together the world’s attention to six exemplary projects that showcase the power of architecture to bring people together, to inspire communities, to make physical the aspirations of societies and to improve the quality of life.

Architecture is a collective enterprise that entails the creativity, innovation, vision and input from each host of players – from architects and clients, to fabricators, masons and craftspeople. We see in the six projects we celebrate this evening a spirit of inclusivity and pluralism that is the essence of the Award in its ongoing mission to recognise excellence in architecture.