Tom Payette, who led the design of the Aga Khan University’s Stadium Road campus in Karachi as president of the award-winning, Boston-based architecture firm that bears his name, passed away on November 12 at the age of 90.
“For over 50 years, Tom was at the forefront of healthcare and science design, pioneering ideas and innovations that have transformed these building typologies and molded Payette into the firm it is today,” Payette’s website states. “[His] buildings are friendly and welcoming, simple and humble. Yet they can be grand and monumental when they need to be, as is apparent in the Aga Khan University campus in Karachi, Pakistan, a seminal project for Tom and the firm that started in the early 1970s and continues today through numerous additions and expansions.”
“The AKU campus had a very special place in Tom’s heart,” said Farouk Noormohamed, who served as Payette’s representative in Karachi in the early 1980s, helping to design and oversee construction of the campus. “It was a signature project that Payette could show to the world, something that was very special, done for a very special client, that had a massive impact on the firm, and involved deep research and contextual understanding.”
Payette’s career began in 1960 after he earned his master’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he was deeply influenced by the late-Modern design ethos of Dean Josep Lluis Sert. His graduate thesis, and his early work, focused on hospital design. His first major project, Leonard Morse Hospital in Natick, Massachusetts, was completed in 1969. Despite its modest scale, it earned national prominence for its patient-centered approach and “Yankee Modernism” – “a frugal yet elegant aesthetic [that] is directly tied to fulfilling basic needs,” as the firm puts it.
It was not long after the completion of Leonard Morse that AKU’s founder and Chancellor, His Highness the Aga Khan, engaged Payette – then not yet 40 – to design the Aga Khan University Hospital and campus in Karachi. At His Highness’s insistence, Payette and his colleagues began the design process by embarking on an extensive tour of architectural landmarks across the Islamic world.
In a 1979 speech to the Asia Society in New York, His Highness recalled his directions to Payette: “I told [Tom] that his idiom should reflect the spirit of Islam. How was this to be done? I did not want him to succumb, through nostalgia, to mimicry of the past, adding minarets and domes to his renderings — the sort of bogus orientalism that has produced Alhambra hotels and Taj Mahal bars around the world.”
Payette’s approach therefore drew upon both his Modernist inheritance and fundamental elements of the Islamic design heritage. His Highness articulated some of the latter in his 1979 speech: “In Islamic design the basic forms are balanced and ruled by geometry. There is a sense of stability, tranquility and equilibrium.” There is a desire “to respect and preserve ecological balance” as well as “to bring to this world some of the beauty of the hereafter.” There is also a concerted effort to “construct a physical context for each activity in daily life. There is always a definite delineation between privacy and community…small spaces and large spaces, interiors and exteriors; each is framed and set apart by itself, usually with formality.” Finally, there is “a strong kinaesthetic experience…air currents touching the skin, the sound of moving water, the touch of varied surface textures.”
The study of Islamic architecture that Payette and his colleagues undertook was a “process of discovery,” Payette wrote in a 1988 article. “The results freed us from some of our Western assumptions.”
The Stadium Road campus’s dramatic, marble-clad portals are one of its most iconic features, and among those most obviously influenced by Islamic architecture. But the influence of tradition can also be seen, more subtly, in Payette’s approach to the campus as a whole, which is less concerned with creating isolated, monolithic structures than with carefully orchestrating a procession of differentiated and human-scaled spaces, integrating buildings into the landscape rather than dominating it.
“One of my very favorite spaces is just outside the Dean’s office, when you come from the educational quad, by the entrance to the library, where the portico is,” Payette said in 2010. “There is that little quiet pool. That’s all there is, and you have the quietness of the library on one side, the Dean’s office on the other. It’s just right for setting up the entrance to the courtyard.”
Along with the masterpieces of Islamic architecture he saw on his tour, Payette took inspiration from the bazaars he visited – spaces of interaction and exchange whose influence is apparent in the Stadium Road campus’s courtyards. As he noted in a 2010 interview, “The project…creates spaces for the students so that when they leave class, they can stop, and say ‘do you know what that professor was talking about? How do you feel about that?’”
“Tom Payette was a remarkable architect not only because of his design creativity but also because of his ability to absorb the local context and nuances of culture, and integrate local materials into the final product,” said former AKU President Firoz Rasul. “Tom was particularly adept at finding the balance between international best practice and the latest technology, on the one hand, and local user requirements.”
The relationship between AKU, Payette and his namesake firm did not cease with the opening of the Aga Khan University Hospital in 1985. Over the course of the next 35 years, more than a dozen new buildings were added to the Stadium Road campus, doubling the amount of built space to more than 2 million square feet. Payette and his colleagues remained closely involved in the campus’s design and development. Tom also completed the design of the AKU Faculty of Arts and Sciences campus on Link Road, which remains to be built when conditions allow. Tom and later his firm was also responsible for the design and acceptance of the University Centre, Nairobi and the expansion of the Aga Khan Hospital, Dar-es-Salaam.
“Our relationship with the Aga Khan University has been a cornerstone of the firm we are today, a firm recognized by the American Institute of Architects with the 2019 Architecture Firm Award,” the Payette website states (the award is the highest the Institute bestows on a practicing firm).
For Tom Payette himself, what mattered most were the responses the campus generates in those who use it every day.
“Tom always said that architecture is for people and not for the gratification of the architect,” said Mark Careaga, who worked closely with Payette on numerous AKU projects from 1998 until Payette’s retirement in 2016. “When I was with him on campus, he loved nothing more than watching people occupy and use the space.”
Early in his career, Payette taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and considered becoming an academic. His method as a designer remained that of a teacher – an astute critic who was quick to spot when something wasn’t working, but who would often suggest a new approach rather than dictating a solution, Careaga said.
“He wasn’t the visionary who does a doodle and then tells his minions to make it happen,” Careaga said. “The word that comes to me the most is generosity. He was generous with his time, generous in giving people the opportunity to grow and challenge themselves.”
Noormohamed agreed. “A project the size of Stadium Road is incredibly complex and requires a huge amount of collaboration,” said Noormohamed, who noted that Payette received valuable assistance from Iranian architect Mozhan Khadem. “Tom was the orchestra conductor. One of the things that made the project great was that he was able to find the right person for each job, and that he gave them the freedom and encouragement to do their best work.”
At a tribute to Tom Payette organized by his firm in 2014, former AKU Trustee Bob Edwards spoke to the enduring impact of the campus.
“A sight that always brought tears to my eyes on a warm summer evening were its courtyards and open arcades with their quiet watercourses — filled with families and small children,” Edwards said. “However dire their medical worries, these common citizens of Karachi were finding AKU to be a place of solace, beauty and safety, taking respite on its quiet, green outdoor lawns.”
Reflecting on the Stadium Road campus in 2010, Payette remarked: “It is clear to me that we touched a chord with the people of Pakistan and Karachi, as well as the Ismailis and His Highness.”
“Tom felt he was able to do his best work with AKU, in large part because he was challenged by His Highness,” Careaga said. “There’s a simplicity to the architecture, but there’s a richness that comes from the aggregation of relatively simple forms. To get to that simplicity and elegance is much easier said than done.”
