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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The Victoria Beckham flagship store
The Victoria Beckham flagship store is located within a three-storey Georgian townhouse on Dover Street in London’s Mayfair. Modelled on the typology of a gallery, it has a simple frameless glass frontage without a window display, encouraging views of a dramatic, three-storey interior.
The design aims to provide the sense of transience, unpredictability and exploration that underpins fashion itself. A concrete door, cast as a negative of one of the windows of the Georgian façade above, slides open to give access to three floors within. Responding to the growth of online shopping, which allows fashion brands to provide customers with choice, the spatial experience of the Victoria Beckham store is designed to be less like a market – where the focus is on choice – and more like a gallery where the focus is on display.
Inside spatial devices such as a wide concrete stair, cutaway floor and cast-lattice coffered ceiling invite the customer to explore the space and, through their dynamic forms, correspond to the fast-changing pace of fashion. Large triangular cuts in the first and second floors provide views up through the entire volume, drawing the eye towards the oblique geometry of the coffered ceiling. Reflective stainless steel ceilings on the lower two floors create an optical doubling effect, making the store space seem twice as high and, by doubling the stair on itself, turning the staircase into a space of its own where the store can host different events, shows and displays.
The coffered ceiling, which has long been used in modern art galleries to hide services or deaden sound though its depth, is used on the top floor to conceal the mechanical and electrical system. Its complex form, cast in grey concrete, contains a system of tracks from which steel chains are hung to support garments. The chains, replacing the conventional system of clothes rails, are one of a number of active elements that turn conventional shop fitting into a series of sculptural pieces. Individual items of clothing are suspended from each vertically hanging chain to provide a soft lining to the wall that can be moved around the space or removed entirely to turn the store into an event space.
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