Foreign Office Architects, FOA Studio, Buildings, Image, Designs, Photos, Projects

FOA - Foreign Office Architects : Information + Images

Farshid Moussavi + Alejandro Zaera Polo, London, England, UK

FOA - Foreign Office Architects Alejandro Zaera Polo born in Madrid, Spain - 1963 Farshid Moussavi born in Shiraz, Iran - 1965 A recent building by Farshid Moussavi, completed post F-O-A: Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio, USA Design: Farshid Moussavi photo : Dean Kaufman Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland Foreign Office Architects - Education Alejandro Zaera Polo 1981-88 ETS of Architecture, Madrid, Spain 1988-90 Harvard Design School, USA - Masters degree in Architecture Farshid Moussavi 1983-86 University of Dundee, Scotland, UK 1986-87 Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa, Italy 1987- Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK 1988-90 Harvard Design School, USA - Masters degree in Architecture 1991 Rem Koolhaas / Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, Netherlands Foreign Office Architects -Teaching 1993- Architectural Association, London, UK University of Princeton, USA UCLA, USA Columbia, USA 2002 - Zaera Polo : Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands 2002 - Moussavi : Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria Foreign Office Architects - Books Foreign Office Architects: Working, University of Michigan Press, 2005 Albert Ferre, The Yokohama Project: Foreign Office Architects, Actar, 2003 Agneta Eriksson, Foreign Office Architects, Eriksson + Ronnefalk Forlag, 2001 Foreign Office Architects - Exhibitions Breeding Architecture 2004 ICA - Institute of Contemporary Arts, London First UK exhibition Designing Modern Britain - Design Museum 2006 Design Museum, London 8th Venice Architecture Biennale - 2002 FOA exhibition : British Pavilion Yokohama Port Terminal Key Buildings by FOA Yokohama International Port Terminal, Tokyo, Japan 2002 photograph from Foreign Office Architects via RIAS in 2004 Yokohama Ferry Terminal : architecture competition winner Auditoria Park, Barcelona, Spain 2004 photo © Adrian Welch Auditoria Park Spain : Parc dels Auditoris Birmingham Library, central England, UK 2008- Shortlist of 7 architect practices Birmingham Library Competition Hadspen Parabola - Competition Winner, Somerset, England, UK 2007- image from Foreign Office Architects Hadspen Parabola Masterplan for 2012 Olympic Games, east London 2012 Selected in 2004 with Allies & Morrison, HOK Architects and EDAW London Olympic Games Architecture Ravensbourne College building, London 2006-11 photograph © Benedict Luxmoore Ravensbourne College Trinity EC3 tower, London, UK 2007- image from Beetham Foreign Office Architecture : for Beetham, revised due to new protected view. FOA : main page on Foreign Office Architects

Foreign Office Architects - Practice Information

Foreign Office Architects - Lecture at RIAS Convention 2004 by Farshid Moussavi:

Foreign Office Architects, London

Farshid studied in Dundee for her first three years at University and proposed to show us four infrastructure projects by Foreign Office Architects. She claimed to be ‘more interested in the plastic aspect of architecture’; ‘we try to compose new aggregates, a synthetic material…geometry in our projects has been a very important tool…constantly layering decisions...at a certain moment the project freezes…precise crystallisations of decisions’. First we were shown a simple flowing train station in Korea, then a competition in Venice that was not judged as the ‘courier didn’t deliver that day, lost to Norman Foster with a shed’. Next came Barcelona Forum 2004 proposals by Foreign Office Architects on the seafront. The architecture is generated by a complex tiling geometry that is ‘not matched by nature but generative of it’: lots of diagrams interspersed with photos and sketch images show a very logical and technologically-rooted practice. I’m reminded of Future Systems and, to a certain extent, my former employer Eva Jiricna. The earth ‘dunes’ are ‘grown out of very rational decisions, a geometrical exploration’, organic and rationalist in the same breath.

Major building by F O A Architects - Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Japan:

Yokohama Ferry Terminal photo from Foreign Office Architects via RIAS in 2004: Saturo Mashima

Finally, the finale. Yokohama. This is the kind of project many of us dream of. After the description of the initial 32 sections becoming 124, and the ability to keep control of such a large irregular geometry building, I felt drained and guess that many of the audience were between bafflement and amazement. Farshid wanted users to get close to the heavy structure: ‘at times it is more baroque like’ and in the terminal, more classical. She asked ‘how far you can take a package to make a system’. I enjoyed her simple pursuit of simplicity, the rough wood outside, the smooth inside, also the inventiveness of it all, ‘the floor became a kind of bench…bodily contact with the buildings is… very effective’. Some of the ideas and geometries seemed a little contrived, and expensive, but the radical newness forces us to evaluate the potential of building anew.

Major building by F-O-A Architects - Yokohama Ferry Terminal Building:

Yokohama Ferry Terminal image from Foreign Office Architects via RIAS in 2004

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photo © Adrian Welch



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