No Walls

From high-fashion flagships to world-class institutions, the visionary work of British architect Farshid Moussavi shatters convention.

- Jesse Dorris

There is an apartment building in Montpellier, France, that bears a slight resemblance to a teetering stack of vanilla cream cookies. Its wavy facade of corrugated aluminum is mirrored in exterior curtains, and curvilinear hardwood-floored balconies add to the playful mix of natural and manmade, hard and soft. Just 750 miles north, an iconic department store in London has torn down its boys-against-girls toy department and installed a kaleidoscopic, genderneutral retail playground. While rather different in appearance, both spring from the mind of architect and academic Farshid Moussavi, who’s spent the past few decades asking what’s next for design. At the moment, she’s uncertain, but happily so. “There is a looseness between form and function,” she says. “Very often architects are under the false impression that their job is to produce the perfect outcome. It doesn’t happen that way. Great buildings remain relevant because they have this robust openness.”

Moussavi’s airy aesthetic means that one project may not look like the next, but whether it’s a garden-topped mall in Istanbul or an outdoor auditorium in Barcelona that elegantly slopes toward the Mediterranean Sea, it almost always looks like the future. This flexibility has allowed her to scale to the top of a profession still ridiculously resistant to letting women take charge. Her influential “The Function of” books on form, ornament, and style are industry standards, and her studio classes and lectures as a professor in practice of architecture at Harvard, her alma mater, have been immensely popular. “She is a role model for young architects around the world, both women and men,” says Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and founder of her own eponymous firm. “Farshid’s talent and tenacity have made her a barrier breaker.”