Building Cultural Commons
Farshid Moussavi is an architect, founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture and professor in the practice of architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was previously cofounder of Foreign Office Architects. Educated at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, University College London, and Dundee University, Moussavi has a long-standing involvement with academic institutions worldwide.
Using the urban and ecological scale of the Ismaili Center as a starting point, Moussavi will address her process for generating new forms of urbanism. She will discuss what makes her projects urban and how that urbanism plays out. Drawing on her experience as an educator and prolific architect, Moussavi will discuss the “practicality” of architecture, of being in the world (as opposed to existing as an abstraction). She will share the cultural translation that the Ismaili Center deploys and how those multicultural references might relate—if at all—to urbanism and the “practicality” of architecture.