Farshid Moussavi
- Site : https://www.farshidmoussavi.com/
- Adresse : 130 fenchurch street ec3m 5dj London
FARSHID MOUSSAVI OBE RA
BSC ARCH, DIPL. ARCH, M ARCH II HARVARD, RIBA
Farshid Moussavi OBE RA is an internationally acclaimed architect and Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Moussavi’s approach is characterised by an openness to change and a commitment to the intellectual and cultural life of architecture. Alongside leading an award-winning architectural practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), she lectures regularly at arts institutions and schools of architecture worldwide and is a published author. Moussavi was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to architecture. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2015 and Professor of Architecture at the RA Schools in 2017.
At FMA, Moussavi’s completed projects include the acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA; La Folie Divine, a residential complex in Montpellier; a multi-tenure residential complex in the La Défense district of Paris, and flagship stores for Victoria Beckham in London and Hong Kong. Previously Moussavi was co-founder of the internationally renowned London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA) where she co-authored many award-winning international projects including the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal and the Spanish Pavilion at the Aichi International Expo, London’s Ravensbourne College of Media and Communication and the Leicester John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex.
Moussavi’s ideas and work are at the forefront of critical debate about architecture. In 2017 she was Architectural curator of the Royal Academy Summer Show where she proposed a highly original approach, showing the internal mechanisms and construction process that underpins architecture. Her work is deeply rooted in critical research which she carries out through FunctionLab, the research branch of FMA. FunctionLab explores cultural questions that find actualisation in the building commissions of the office, allowing for informed and innovative results. With the influential series of books that Moussavi published with Harvard, The Function of…, she has explored the theory and built history of ornament, form, and style.
Educated at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, University College London and Dundee University, Moussavi has taught and served as External Examiner in academic institutions worldwide. She was the Chair of the Master Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, and a member of its Steering Committee between 2005 and 2015. She continues to be a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery since 2009, and since 2018, a trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation London and New Architecture Writers (NAW) which focuses on black and minority ethnic emerging writers who are under-represented across design journalism and curation. Moussavi also serves on the Academic Court of The London School of Architecture.
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John Lewis department store and cineplex
Commissioned within a larger city centre regeneration scheme, the John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex challenge the conventional blank envelopes which typify these buildings and explore ways for them to connect to an urban context.
The department store skin has been designed as a ‘net curtain’ to permit interior arrangements to be changed without creating exterior clutter at the same time as providing shoppers with views of the exterior context and natural light. The pattern design is formed of four panels of varying density which meet seamlessly across the envelope, diffusing seams between glass panels and generating a sense of continuity in the pattern. Frit in mirror onto two layers of glass curtain wall, the mirrored pattern moreover reflects the context surrounding the store and in doing so, densifies as well as changes as the sun moves around the building. Viewed frontally from the retail floors, the pattern on the double façade aligns and allows customers views out, whilst at an oblique view from street level, the patterns on the two layers appear displaced from one another and create a moiré effect, reducing visibility into the store and maximising privacy for the store to arrange the departments as needed. The resulting envelope is translucent and reflective and allows the store interior and exterior to engage with its context in varying ways.
Unlike the department store, the Cineplex which adjoins it, needs to be a blank box. It is enveloped in an opaque mirror stainless steel rain screen, corrugated in profile to produce with pleats along the perimeter. The rainscreen is designed to be assembled with 10,300 small, and thin stainless steel panels, arranged in an overlapping manner. This generates an envelope that appears quilted and refracts imagery projected onto it. The pleats, shingles and mirror finish together provide shadow, texture and colour, while the play of light on the surface creates continuously shifting imagery. The conventional blank Cineplex envelope is therefore transformed into a ‘theatrical curtain’ that engages its context.
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