On the top floor of the Ismaili Centre in London there is an architect's model for a building that will one day be built across the Atlantic Ocean: the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
The museum, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, combines Eastern influences with concessions to its host country's climate. It's early days yet - with luck, the museum will open in 2011 - but there are constant discussions about what is possible. The museum's walls, which slope gently out from the ground, might be clad in Norwegian marble. "The plan is for the building to glow," says Benoit Junor of the Aga Khan Foundation.
Eastern influences are evident throughout, from the six-sided dome at one end of the roof to the courtyard at the museum's other end. That courtyard may yet be covered, and the shallow rectangular pools that lie within the museum's gardens will be a magnet for visitors in spring, but in the winter? "Maybe they could be skating rinks," Junor says with a smile.
Downstairs, the treasures that will one day fill the museum are about to go on display for the first time in a show called Spirit & Life: Masterpieces of Islamic Art from the Aga Khan Museum Collection. The exhibit is drawn from the Aga Khan's vast holdings, including everything from paintings and textiles to Koranic scripts, calligraphic instruments to ceramic bowls.
The London show will be opened tomorrow by the Aga Khan, one day after he begins the celebration of his Golden Jubilee. The spiritual leader of the world's Ismaili Muslim community, Prince Karim Aga Khan became the 49th imam in 1957.
Amassing treasures for his cultural foundation may have been easier for the Aga Khan than for some - as he points out in the catalogue accompanying Spirit & Life, his family has been collecting for more than 1,000 years (his uncle Prince Sadruddin is a particularly passionate collector of Islamic art). "Many questions are currently being raised in the West about the Muslim world, with countless misconceptions and misunderstandings occurring between our contemporary societies," he writes. The exhibit, he says, is an opportunity for a more enlightened encounter.
Such encounters form a small but important part of Spirit & Life. One of the exhibit's centrepieces is a segment of The Canon of Medicine by Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna), which was a primary medical text through the Middle East and Europe for 500 years. A painting of Iran's Fath' Ali Shah shows the ruler taking pride of place over ambassadors from European courts, who are decidedly less grand in dress and stature.
There's also a series of exquisite illustrations from the 16th-century Persian Shahnama, or Book of Kings. The manuscript was split apart in the 20th century and about 30 years ago, according to Alnoor Merchant of the Ismaili Centre, the Iranian government traded a Willem de Kooning nude to retrieve some of the drawings.
"The whole scope in Islamic art is represented here," Merchant said, before leading a tour of the exhibit, which is divided into two themes, The Word of God and The Power of the Sovereign. In the first, Koranic texts - from a tiny, almost illegible script on a 21-foot scroll to a striking gold-and-blue fragment of verse - sit next to paintings of Sufi mystics and the tools they used (a dervish's brass begging bowl looks too large for one fellow, who presumably doesn't eat very much, to carry around all day.) The show's second half focuses on the reign of kings and more earthly pursuits, from musical instruments to calligraphic tools to a beautiful lacquered archer's bow painted with scenes from a hunt. In all, there are more than 160 objects in the show, spanning a period of 1,000 years.
After it closes in London at the end of August, the Spirit & Life exhibit will move to the Louvre, and possibly other European destinations, before landing in its permanent home in Toronto's Aga Khan Museum. The 10,000-square-metre museum is slated for a site in Don Mills, northeastern Toronto, on a lot that used to house the headquarters of Bata Shoes. The Toronto site was announced in 2002, after two attempts by the Aga Khan Foundation to find suitable London properties failed.
There are about 70,000 Ismaili Muslims in Canada, with about half that number in Ontario. Toronto might not seem the most obvious home for the Aga Khan museum, but according to Luis Monreal, head of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, it's perfectly situated, within easy travel distance of the large metropolitan hubs in southern Canada and the northeastern United States.
As well, Monreal says, the museum will be "a real signature building," yet another attraction for culture vultures drawn to the city by all the big-name architects working on projects there.