Farshid Moussavi is Professor in Practice in the Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She trained at the GSD, University College London, the Bartlett School of Architecture, and Dundee University. Prior to establishing Foreign Office Architects (with Alejandro Zaera Polo) in London in 1992, she worked with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam. Recognized as an outstanding and committed teacher, bringing a strong intellectual rigor to the discourse on architecture, she has been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia, Princeton, and at several architecture schools in Europe; she was also the Kenzo Tange Visiting Design Critic at the GSD in spring 2005. She taught for eight years at the Architectural Association in London and was the head of the Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she taught from 2002 until 2005.

Her London-based firm, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), is recognized as one of the most creative design firms in the world, deftly integrating architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture in their projects. They have produced numerous critically-acclaimed and award-winning international projects, most notably the Yokohama Ferry Terminal in Japan, an imaginative combination of industrial infrastructure and social function completed in 2002. Other built projects include a large new park with outdoor auditoriums in Barcelona, the Bluemoon Hotel in Groningen, The Netherlands, a police headquarters in La Villajoyosa, Spain, and the Spanish Pavilion in the 2005 Aichi International Expo in Japan a theater building in Torrevieja, a technology center in Logrono, and social housing in Madrid, a publisher’s headquarters in Paju, Korea as well a department store and Cineplex and pedestrian bridges in Leicester. FOA projects under construction include, the Institute for Legal Medicine, Zona Franca Offices in Barcelona and a College of Art and Design in London. The practice is also working on other major commissions including, in London, the Redevelopment of Euston Station, and a large-scale office development in the City of London , as well as commissions for retail spaces in Southampton and Sheffield, a new Maggies Centre in Newcastle, a hospice for the cancer charity and residential projects in the UK as well as Malaysia as well as a Museum of Contemporary Art in the USA.

Awards to the firm include: the Enric Miralles Prize for Architecture (2003); the Kanagawa Prize for Architecture in Japan (2003); three RIBA Worldwide Awards (2004, 2005 and 2006); the Special Award in Topography at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale (2004), the 2005 Charles Jencks Award for Architecture and, most recently RIBA European Award for Carabanchel Social Housing in Madrid Spain (2008), ELLE Award for Architecture (2008), European Business Award for the Environment for Meydan Retail Complex and Multiplex project, Umraniye, Istanbul, Turkey (2008). FOA also represented Britain at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002, The work of the firm has been widely exhibited and has been published in numerous monographs and catalogues. Moussavi published The Function of Ornament in 2006, based on her research and teaching at Harvard.