Farshid Moussavi’s Open-ended Architecture Comes to the U.S.

Prior to establishing FMA, Moussavi—an elected member of London’s Royal Academy since 2015, a professor in practice at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a recipient of the 2022 Jane Drew Prize for women in architecture—ran a collaborative practice called Foreign Office Architects (FOA). Earlier works completed in this partnership, like the Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002), reveal both a striking material sophistication and a deep understanding of the aliveness of architecture, qualities that have flourished in her later practice

Speaking over Zoom from her studio in London, Moussavi describes this aliveness in two phases—the design process, in which “chaotic flows of desire” like financial constraints, client expectations, and social conditions must be mapped together; and the “micropolitics” that play out after each project’s completion. Moussavi defines these as nuanced and evolving relationships between users and the building. 

The architect’s latest publication—an almost-600-page monograph titled Architecture & Micropolitics (2022)—highlights four key projects pursued over the past decade of practice, and includes a brief text by French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who examines the subversive role of the user in FMA’s projects. Moussavi, for her part, draws her work into dialogue with the rhizomatic theories of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as the open-ended wanderings of experimental literature like that of Walter Benjamin. FMA projects channel the Arcades Project, for sure, but are also reminiscent of the player-led lore-making of an open-world videogame. 

A Building as an Open-ended and Multiauthored System

When considering a building as an open-ended, multiauthored system, multiple clichés from the history of architecture can be offloaded. First up: the building as a product of the so-called “master architect.” If architecture can be understood as an assemblage of “actants”—defined by Moussavi as the architect, building, and user—it can also be seen as something of a hive mind. For Moussavi, this distributed agency of the building is precisely the point. “Architectural practice is nonlinear,” Moussavi reflects. “The project evolves along the way—and constantly evolves. There is no way an architect has all the answers on day one, when a project takes six to ten years to come to fruition.”

While one can read certain values across FMA projects—flexibility, transparency, scalelessness, stacking, and reflectivity among them—these qualities shape-shift across each building. Hence there is no trademark “style” that is intrinsically FMA-coded; it’s less about a signature material output than a mood. For Moussavi, this affective capacity of the architecture is at the heart of a building’s micropolitics, which can be more intricately defined as the small-scale encounters or details of a building that trigger necessarily unpredictable reactions from its users, who in turn extend the life of the building by interpreting and utilizing it in their own ways.

In that spirit, it seems fitting to embark on a nonlinear tour through some of Moussavi’s architectural worlds, beginning with two French housing projects completed a year apart: Îlot 19 in La Défense (2016) and La Folie Divine in Toulouse (2017). Îlot 19 appears like a great slab of glass and dark metal; horizontal screen-laden loggias and open balconies run the length of the building, alternating across its 11 floors, which are composed of mixed private and student accommodation, retail units, and public space. Its four lobbies are shared among all its diverse residents; each apartment’s unique layout allows for continuous customization as the residents’ needs change. Meanwhile, the bright La Folie Divine—its curvaceous design defined by rippling corrugated aluminum—likewise blurs indoor and outdoor space across its nine floors. The building offers its residents panoramic, unobstructed views of its garden surrounds from generous balconies lined with billowing curtains. Both projects advocate for a kind of universal luxury, with modifiable floor plans that enable residents to develop their own worlds while nestled inside a larger built ecosystem. 

In addition to FMA, Moussavi maintains a robust pedagogical and research practice. This includes FunctionLab, the research arm of FMA, and a housing-themed studio at Harvard GSD since 2017. Prior to her new monograph, Moussavi published The Function of Ornament (2006), The Function of Form (2009), and The Function of Style (2014)—a trilogy of texts that analyze architectural affects and propose new means of conceptualizing the flows of material, ideology, and agency within built systems. FunctionLab unites Moussavi’s material and theoretical practice, enabling the built projects to feed into research and vice versa, ouroboros-like, tending to an ever-evolving ecosystem of ideas. 

Moussavi’s keen attention to the sense-making of sensory experience, matched by the architect’s commitment to framing architecture as an ongoing and collaborative act, distinguishes her approach and output from many contemporary practitioners. For Moussavi, it’s never been about imprinting the practice on the project, but each project shaping the practice according to its needs. “When the architect goes, the building remains,” reflects Moussavi. “The key is always keeping the system open.” 

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• Education
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• Academia
• Alice Bucknell
• Architecture
• Design Research
• Farshid Moussavi
• London
• Manu Valcarce