Farshid Moussavi

Farshid Moussavi
Farshid Moussavi
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Born	1965; Shiraz, Iran
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Harvard University; Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; Dundee University
Occupation	Architect
Practice	Farshid Moussavi Architecture
Buildings	Ōsanbashi, International Passenger Terminal, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan; John Lewis complex, Leicester, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio; Victoria Beckham Flagship Store, London, UK
Projects	The Function of Ornament; The Function of Form; The Function of Style

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Farshid Moussavi RA RIBA is an architect, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) and Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was co-founder and co-principal of Foreign Office Architects (FOA) until June 2011.

Early career

Moussavi was born in 1965 in Iran and immigrated to London in 1979. She trained in architecture at the Dundee School of Architecture, University of Dundee, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and graduated with a Masters in Architecture (MArch II) from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Moussavi first came to prominence with FOA, the practice she co-founded in 1995. Previously she had worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) before moving back to London to teach at the Architectural Association and start her own practice, Foreign Office Architects (FOA). At FOA, Moussavi co-authored the design for the award-winning Yokohama International Ferry Terminal in Japan (which was subject to an international design competition in 1995) and was part of the United Architects team who were finalists in the Ground Zero competition. She also completed a wide range of international projects including the John Lewis complex in Leicester, England and the Meydan retail complex in Istanbul, Turkey.

Later career

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Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland

In June 2011, Farshid Moussavi announced the opening of her new practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), based in London. In October 2012, FMA's first museum building and first building in America - the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, in the USA - opened to the public and in August 2012, its installation, titled ‘Architecture and Affects’, featured at the 13th edition of Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy. FMA has also designed Victoria Beckham’s Flagship Store in London which opened in September 2014. The practice is currently working on number of international projects including, in France, residential complexes in Montpellier and La Défense district of Paris, and a department store in Paris, as well as an office tower in London, UK. The practice was a finalist for the Museum and Educational Centre of the Polytechnic Museum and Lomonosov Moscow State University competition and joint winner of the international competition for the new headquarters of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne.

Farshid Moussavi has served on numerous design committees including the Mayor of London’s Design for London Advisory Group and LDA International Design Committee, the RIBA Gold and Presidents Medals, the Stirling Prize and the Venice Architecture Biennale. She was Chair of the Master Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, and a member of the Award’s Steering Committee between 2005-2015. She was an External Examiner for the Royal College of Art in London from 2010-2013 and is currently an External Examiner for Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, and The Architectural Association in London. In 2009, Moussavi became a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery as well as the Architecture Foundation in London. Moussavi is also a columnist for the Architectural Review magazine.

Research

Farshid Moussavi at the Tate Gallery

Alongside her professional practice, Moussavi has held a longstanding commitment to research across the academic and professional field of architecture. Since 2005, she has been Professor in Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Previously, Moussavi taught at the Architectural Association in London for eight years (1993–2000) and was subsequently appointed and Head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2002–2005). She has been a visiting professor of architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Hoger Architectuur Instituut Sint-Lucas in Gent, and in the USA, at UCLA, Columbia University and Princeton University.

Moussavi’s research, which began while teaching at the Architectural Association in the early nineties, has aimed to identify the instruments that allow architectural design to embed built forms with intelligence and creative possibilities. Instead of importing external theoretical models, from other fields Moussavi has focused on those that are specifically architectural, exploring the potentials of the diagram, information technology, landscape, iconography, new construction technologies, blank envelopes and tessellation as tools that could be used to develop alternative theoretical models for the practice of architecture.

Installation exploring affect for Common Ground at 13th Venice Biennale

Since 2004, Moussavi’s research has focused predominantly on how architecture involves the intellectual assembly of matter, providing each built form with inherent affects and sensations. Her work in aesthetics is influenced by a range of philosophers, notably Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Following from Gilles Deleuze’s work on affect, she proposes that built forms’ affects play a critical role in the daily experiences of individuals and the cultures which develop from them. Like active forces, they affect patterns of thinking and behaving. Moussavi argues that, in order for culture to evolve, architects need to produce novel affects. It is not what built forms represent but how they function affectively that makes architecture a critical cultural practice.

Moussavi has published three books, "The Function of Ornament", "The Function of Form" and "The Function of Style" in conjunction with her teaching at Harvard, all of which investigate the role of affect in contemporary architecture.

The Function of Ornament

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The Function of Ornament by Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo

In the Function of Ornament (2006), Moussavi proposes that ornament has always carried a function, and that function is aesthetic and cultural production. In this book, she argues against definitions of ornament as a being symbolic and functioning through the representation of something else rather than through its own actuality. She proposes that in order for built forms to contribute to how culture evolves, its ornament should not be seen as a set of superficial and decorative elements which are introduced to a building to associate it to an existing artistic and cultural realm, but should be conceptualized as the sum of those elements of any built form which define its inherent aesthetic and artistic contributions. Ornament is that which makes the actuality of one form distinct from another, a distinction which is the result of the architect’s activity rather than something imported from an ‘external’ artistic or cultural realm.

Redefined as such, ornament is integral to each built form and can engage a variety of depths depending on the way in which the architect assembles the form’s particular set of concerns or materials. Ornament may perform through the entire form of a building, the depth of its external envelope or the superficial face of its external envelope in the form of colour, texture or pattern.

Rather than functioning through symbol and meaning, this notion of ornament functions by transmitting novel affects and sensations. The non-representational nature of these affects allows built forms to be perceived differently by different individuals, generating in them different types of affections such as moods, feelings, meanings, or thoughts. Unlike symbolic definitions of ornament, which are rooted in a homogeneous concept of society, Moussavi’s definition of ornament argues that in a contemporary plural society – which lacks a common cultural memory – built forms can connect with different individuals in different ways through their affects, thereby producing different subjectivities. This allows the built environment, like movies, music and art, to be imagined as a social fabric and thus highlights a contemporary cultural role for ornament.

The Function of Form

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The Function of Form

In The Function of Form (2009), Moussavi further explores non-representational forms. Where the ornament research proposed the function of ornament beyond the symbolic, her form research proposes a new theory of form away from the limitations of representation (symbolism), towards repetition and differentiation in order to nurture multiplicity within culture.

Fundamental to Moussavi’s proposal is that, due to the speed at which technology, the environment and culture are changing, the rate of change in contemporary architecture has shifted from a process of overhaul and replacement to a mode of continuous and incremental change. This rapid rate of change is the consequence of multiple intersecting causes which are rooted in human (social, subjective, sensorial) as well as nonhuman (natural, objective, technical) spheres. In order to be compatible with these mutant and diverse values, architecture cannot be limited to the representation of a-priori concepts or singular causes and must evolve through constantly producing, enriching and reinventing its environment.

Moussavi posits that, by working with affect, architecture achieves this capacity to evolve and reinvent the environment. She revisits the relationship between function and form and proposes that – rather than being read simply as the outcome of epochal movements – the history of form contains a continuous thread in which historical ideas have been evolved and transformed to produce novel forms. By decomposing forms into their affects, The Function of Form shows how physical structures which used to be synonymous with specific concepts can be freed from their attendant cultural and other significances. Particularised and differentiated in this way, these physical structures become mutable and can be re-appropriated and transformed without prejudice, to produce singular affects. These affects are processed by individuals into different types of subjectivity which encourage the environment to evolve as a multiplicity.

The Function of Style

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The Function of Style

The third volume in Moussavi's Function series, The Function of Style (2015) interrogates what the function of style is today. If the 1970s were defined by Postmodernism and the 1980s by Deconstruction, how do we characterize the architecture of the 1990s to the present? Some built forms transmit affects of curvilinearity, others of crystallinity; some transmit multiplicity, others unity; some transmit cellularity, others openness; some transmit dematerialization, others weight. Does this immense diversity reflect a lack of common purpose?

In this book, Moussavi argues that the diversity of contemporary architecture should not be mistaken for an eclecticism that is driven by external forces. The Function of Style presents the architectural landscape as an intricate web in which individual buildings are the product of ideas which have been appropriated from other buildings designed for the different activities of everyday life, ideas which are varied to produce singular buildings that are related to one another but also different. Moussavi argues that, by embracing everyday life as a raw material, architects can change the conventions of how buildings are assembled, to ground style, and the aesthetic experience of buildings, in the micro-politics of the everyday.

Selected projects

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Residential Complex in La Defense Nanterre