Farshid Moussavi

Farshid Moussavi (born in 1965, Shiraz, Iran) is an Iranian-born British architect, educator, and author.

She is the founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) and a Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

The work of her London-based practice, FMA, is celebrated for projects that integrate an inventive approach to space and materials and a strong social awareness, whether they be a cultural centre such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland or a community centre such as the Ismaili Center Houston (currently under construction), a social housing project in Montpellier, or an elementary school in Saclay (under development), both in France.

Moussavi was born in 1965 in Shiraz, Iran and immigrated to London in 1979 to attend boarding school.

She trained in architecture at the Dundee School of Architecture, University of Dundee, the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and graduated with a Masters in Architecture (MArch II) from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

While at the Harvard, Moussavi met architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

Prior to foudning FMA, she was co-founder of the London-based Foreign Office Architects or FOA (1993-2011), recognised as one of the world's most creative design firms, integrating architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture in a wide range of projects internationally.

Moussavi first came to prominence with Foreign Office Architects (FOA), the practice she co-founded in 1993 with Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

Previously, Moussavi taught at the Architectural Association in London for eight years (1993–2000), and was subsequently appointed as Head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2002–2005).

She has been a visiting professor of architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Hoger Architectuur Instituut Sint-Lucas in Gent, and in the US, at UCLA, Columbia University and Princeton University.

Moussavi's research, which began while teaching at the Architectural Association in the early 90s, has focused on instruments that allow architects to embed built forms with design intelligence and creative possibilities – such as the diagram, information technology, new construction technologies, envelopes and tessellation – and how they can be used to develop alternative concepts for the practice of architecture.

At FOA, Moussavi co-authored the design for the award-winning Yokohama International Ferry Terminal in Japan (which was subject to an international design competition in 1995) and was part of the United Architects team who were finalists in the Ground Zero competition.

She also completed a wide range of international projects including the John Lewis complex in Leicester, England, the Meydan retail complex in Istanbul, Turkey, Carabanchel Social Housing in Madrid, and the South-East Coastal Park in Barcelona, Spain.

Since 2004, Moussavi's research has focused predominantly on the relationship between the construction and experience of a built form, and how the architect's agency is to navigate the many choices provided by the design process to give built forms the unique propensities which individuals experience as affect.

Her work in aesthetics is influenced by a range of philosophers, notably Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Rancière.

Following from Gilles Deleuze's work on affect, she proposes that built forms' affects play an active role in the daily experiences of individuals and the affections they develop.

Moussavi argues that, in order to move people's experience away from routine and to open up the possibility for new types of action, architects need to provide built forms with novel affects.

It is not what built forms represent but how they provide experiences that would otherwise not exist that makes their aesthetic experience relevant and gives their architecture a function or agency in culture.

Moussavi has published three books: The Function of Ornament, The Function of Form and The Function of Style in conjunction with her teaching at Harvard, all of which disclaim architecture's traditional binary oppositions – form vs.function, structure vs. form, ornament vs. function, style vs. function – proposing that architecture's creative potential lies, rather, in finding ways to relate them to one other.

Since 2005, she has been a Professor in Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

In June 2011 after splitting with Zaera-Polo, Moussavi re-established her own London-based practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA).

Her notable projects with FMA include the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Victoria Beckham's Flagship Store in London, a multi-storey and multi-tenure affordable residential block in the La Défense-Nanterre district of Paris, the Folie Divine residential tower in Montpellier, and the Harrods Toys Department in London.

The practice is currently working on a number of high-profile projects including The Ismaili Center Houston in the USA, an elementary school in the Saclay district of Paris, a mixed-use block in Montpellier, and a flagship store in Shanghai.

Alongside her professional practice, Moussavi has held a longstanding commitment to research across the academic and professional fields of architecture.

In her fourth and most recent book titled Architecture and Micropolitics, Four Buildings 2011-2022, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (2022), she argues that the temporality of architecture provides day-to-day practice with the potential to generate change and proposes that architects should embrace chance events and the subjective factors that influence practice in order to ground buildings in the micropolitics of everyday life.

This is a select list of Moussavi and Foreign Office Architects (FOA) awards.

Moussavi was elected a Royal Academician in 2015, and subsequently, Professor of Architecture at the RA Schools in 2017.

She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours for Services to Architecture.

In 2022 she was selected as one of the London Mayor's 42 Design Advocates to support his vision for 'Good Growth'.