Farshid Moussavi

On leave for Fall 2024

Farshid Moussavi is Professor in Practice in the Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design and principal of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). Moussavi’s approach is characterised by an openness to change and a commitment to the intellectual and cultural life of architecture. Alongside leading an award-winning architectural practice, she lectures regularly at arts institutions and schools of architecture worldwide and is a published author. Moussavi was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to architecture. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2015 and Professor of Architecture at the RA Schools in 2017.

Moussavi trained at Harvard GSD, the Bartlett School of Architecture University College London and Dundee University. Recognized as an outstanding and committed teacher, 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.

At FMA, Moussavi’s completed projects include the acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA; La Folie Divine, a residential complex in Montpellier; a multi-tenure residential complex in the La Défense district of Paris, flagship stores for Victoria Beckham in London and Hong Kong, and the Toys Department for Harrods in London. Her current projects include the Ismaili Center Houston and a primary school in Paris. Previously Moussavi was co-founder of the internationally renowned London-based Foreign Office Architects (FOA) where she co-authored many award-winning international projects including the Yokohama International Cruise Terminal and the Spanish Pavilion at the Aichi International Expo, London’s Ravensbourne College of Media and Communication and the Leicester John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex. Prior to setting up FOA, Moussavi worked with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Genoa and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam.

A prolific writer and public speaker, Moussavi is a leading figure in contemporary architectural dialogue. Author of four books, her most recent Architecture and Micropolitics, Four Buildings 2011-2022, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (Park Books, 2022) sets out her vision for architecture as a form practice that is responsive rather than deterministic. Moussavi has pursued teaching in parallel to practice for more than 30 years, seeing it as the opportunity for developing new thinking on subjects including the design of social housing and approaches to adaptive reuse.

Moussavi has served on key design and architectural advisory panels and international design juries including for the British Council, the Mayor of London’s “Design for London” advisory group, the London Development Agency, the RIBA Gold and Presidential Medals and the Stirling Prize for Architecture.

Moussavi is deeply committed to art and culture. She has previously served as a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the London Architecture Foundation, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Currently, she is a trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation London and New Architecture Writers (NAW) which focuses on black and minority ethnic emerging writers who are under-represented across design journalism and curation.

In Moussavi’s latest book, Architecture & Micropolitics, she seeks to dispel two widely held misconceptions: first, that architects are no longer central to the making of buildings and, second, that design is a linear process which begins with a fully formed architectural vision. Moussavi argues that the temporality of architecture provides day-to-day practice with the potential to generate change. She proposes that we abandon determinism and embrace chance events and the subjective factors that influence practice in order to ground buildings in the micropolitics of everyday life.