The building houses galleries and a museum, a performance hall, and a library; at the top are located the bank’s publishing company and bookstore. Rather than demolish a 1950s building on the site, the architects instead employed the existing structure that was transformed radically to create a "vertical urban space"; an all-glass façade open to the busy urban plaza encourages interaction between activities inside and out. The existing building was stripped to its concrete frame, and fortified by new concrete structures on the original structural grid; structural steel was used to create the 20x20 metre void of the all-glass façade, and steel cables hold the specially-designed glazing in place.
Source: Aga Khan Trust for Culture
