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Foreign Office Architects, Buildings, Image, Studio, Designs, Photos, Projects
FOA - Foreign Office Architects : Information + Images
Farshid Moussavi + Alejandro Zaera Polo, London, England, UK
Alejandro Zaera Polo
born in Madrid, Spain - 1963
Farshid Moussavi
born in Shiraz, Iran - 1965
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 - Exhibition
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 International Forum of Cultures,
Spain
2004

photo © adrian welch
Auditoria Park Spain
: Parc dels Auditoris
Birmingham Library, central England, UK
2008-
Shortlist of 7 practices
Birmingham
Library Competition
Hadspen Parabola - Competition Winner, Somerset, England, UK
2007-

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-

image : Glowfrog Studios
Ravensbourne College
Trinity EC3 tower, London, UK
2007-

image from Beetham
Foreign Office Architecture
: for Beetham, revised due to new protected view
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. 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 FOA’s
Barcelona Forum 2004 proposals 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.

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.

Yokohama Ferry Terminal image from Foreign Office
Architects via RIAS in 2004
FOA : main page
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London Architect Office
Architecture Studios
London
Architects
Spanish Buildings

World Architecture : e-architect
- key buildings across the globe
Buildings / photos for the Foreign Office Architects page welcome: info@e-architect.co.uk
Foreign Office Architects Building : page -
adrian welch / isabelle lomholt
Website: www.f-o-a.net |
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