Courtesy Abbas Yasin, Assad Yasin and Abizer Yasin
The decades-long quest to bring the first-ever U.S. location of a massive religious center to Houston is almost complete.
Ismaili Center Houston, a five-story, 11-acre religious center for Ismaili Muslims, is poised for a grand opening ceremony next month on Allen Parkway and Montrose Blvd. When the center opens, it will be the first Ismaili center in the United States and just the seventh in the world. It will be open to the public, serving as a community space for Ismaili Muslims to pray, socialize, and gather.
“The Center’s aim is to foster mutual understanding between different communities and cultures: to invite Ismailis and non-Ismailis to connect through shared events such as lectures, conferences, music recitals, and art exhibitions that nurture curiosity, celebrate difference, and encourage conversation,” Omar Samji, a spokesperson for the Ismaili Center, said in a statement last week.
Designed by the firm of Iranian, UK-based architect Farshid Moussavi, the Ismaili Center will feature a cafe, a black box theater, a library, public art and green space. It will span 150,000 square feet, and designers said the center will fit in with nearby Buffalo Bayou, which is across the street. The massive, meditating human figures found along Allen Parkway in the park were funded partially by the Ismaili Aga Khan Foundation, an international development agency founded by Karim al-Hussaini Aga Khan IV (the spiritual leader of the world’s Shia Ismaili Muslims who died earlier this year).
“The Ismaili Center gardens reinterpret Islamic landscape traditions while grounding the Center in Texas’s diverse ecologies and addressing flood risks,” said Thomas Woltz, a landscape architect on the project.
Houston’s Ismaili Center has been nearly two decades in the making. In 2006, the Aga Khan Foundation and the late Aga Khan IV announced that Houston had been selected as the site for the first Ismaili Center in the United States. The foundation paid an undisclosed sum for the land on Allen Parkway, replacing the former historic Sears warehouse on the spot.
“We hate to lose an important historic building like that, but at least this time there is a chance that some very good architecture is going to be built on that site,” David Bush, a spokesman for the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, said of the project’s approval in 2006.
See here for the last update, which promised that the center would be opened by the end of the year. Isn’t it nice when something arrives on time? I’m excited to see what this looks like up close. I intend to visit at my first opportunity. ENR Texas & Southeast and Community Impact have more.