The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Farshid Moussavi has been honored with a coveted Order of the British Empire (OBE) award during the annual Queen’s Birthday Honours. Moussavi received an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire award in recognition of her contributions to the field of architecture.
“I am truly honoured to receive an OBE from the Queen for Services to Architecture,” Moussavi wrote in a celebratory Instagram post. “I am delighted that architecture is recognised and celebrated as a service to the nation.” Follow Moussavi on Instagram at @farshidmoussavi.
Moussavi was honored alongside former RIBA president Jane Duncan, who received an OBE for her services to diversity in the architecture profession.
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, recognizing contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable organizations, and public service. It was established in 1917 by King George V, and is organized into five classes across both civil and military divisions.
Moussavi is Professor in Practice in Architecture at the GSD and principal of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). In 2015, she was elected a Royal Academician. She trained at the GSD, the Bartlett School of Architecture University College London, and Dundee University. She was previously co-founder and co-principal of the London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA), recognized as one of the world’s most creative design firms, integrating architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture in a wide range of projects internationally. Prior to this, 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.
Moussavi has also served on design and architecture advisory groups for key institutions including the British Council, the Mayor of London’s ‘Design for London’ initiative, the London Development Agency, RIBA’s Gold and Presidential Medals and the Stirling Prize for Architecture. In 2004, she was Chair of Master Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, following which she served as a member of the Award’s Steering Committee until 2015. Moussavi is a member of the Board of Trustees of both the Whitechapel Gallery and the Architecture Foundation in London. Moussavi is also a columnist for the Architectural Review magazine and has published published The Function of Ornament in 2006, The Function of Form in 2009, and her third book titled The Function of Style in 2015, based on her research and teaching at Harvard.
At FMA, Moussavi has completed her first USA commission, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, its installation at the 13th Architecture Biennale in Venice (2012), the flagship store for Victoria Beckham in London, and as well is currently working on a wide range of prestigious projects including a residential complex in the La Défense district of Paris (under construction), a residential complex in Montpellier (under construction), a department store in Paris, and an office complex in the City of London.