The Jardins de la Lironde tower will comprise eleven irregularly shaped levels, arranged in a seemingly random order to create balconies on different sides of the building.

A total of 36 apartments will be contained within the upper storeys of the building, while a restaurant will occupy the ground floor.

Lot 2, Jardins de la Lironde, is the first of 12 new buildings planned for the Port Marianne district. The brief for every structure is to create a "modern folly" that references the eighteenth-century chateaux built by wealthy merchants around Montpellier.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture will continue to work on the next stages of the project and construction is set to begin in 2014.

Above: typologies diagram

Iranian-born architect Farshid Moussavi launched her studio in 2011, after 16 years as co-director of Foreign Office Architects. Since then she has also won a competition to design housing outside Paris and completed the mirror-clad Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Other recent projects in Montpellier include a government building designed by Zaha Hadid and a school for hotel management by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas. See more architecture in Montpellier.

Above: unit layout one

Above: unit layout two

Above: unit layout three

Above: unit layout four

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The four-storey building, which opened this weekend, features faceted walls clad in mirrored black stainless steel and replaces the museum's former address in the loft of an old playhouse complex.

Visitors to the museum arrive inside a full-height atrium, where the structure of the walls is left exposed and the surfaces have been painted bright blue.

White staircases lead up to galleries on each of the floors, including a large top floor exhibition space where the ceiling is coloured with the same blue paint as the walls to offer an alternative to the standard 'white-cube' gallery.

Located at the intersection of two major avenues, the museum faces onto a new public square by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and has entrances on four of its elevations for flexibility between different exhibitions and events.

As the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is a non-collecting museum, it places extra emphasis on public programmes and events, which will take place inside a double-height multi-purpose space on the building's ground floor.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture completed the project in collaboration with architects Westlake Reed Leskosky, who are based in Cleveland.

The museum first unveiled the designs for the building back in 2010, which you can see in our earlier story.

Farshid Moussavi launched her studio just over a year ago - find out more here.

Photography is by Dean Kaufman.

Here's some more information from the architect's website:

MOCA is a 34,000 sq. ft. non-collecting museum in the emerging Uptown district of Cleveland's University Circle neighbourhood. Located on the corner of a triangular site at the junction of two major roads, the building will act as a beacon for this area of the city.

The new MOCA is arranged as a multi-storey building in order to produce a compact envelope and optimal environmental performance, and to liberate space for a museum plaza. The building in this location is exposed on all sides and has multiple entrances which will bring the museum added flexibility. Its prismatic form is clad in mirror black stainless steel panels which are arranged along a diagonal grid to follow the diagonal load bearing structure of the external envelope. These reflective panels will respond to weather changes and movement around the museum, providing visitors with constantly changing perceptions.

Upon entering the building, visitors will find the structure left exposed on the interior face of the envelope and treated with a fire-resistant, intense blue paint. The museum’s public and “back of house” activities will be interspersed along the section of the building and accessed physically and visually by a grand stair which ascends the museum’s vertical atrium. Each floor is designed to host a variety of configurations for maximum flexibility, with the blue inner surface which envelopes the different spaces providing a consistency across the various museum events. In the main gallery on the top floor, the blue surface will rise to form a deep blue ceiling, evoking the sky or a sense of boundlessness in contrast to the traditional idea of the gallery as a white, sealed, cube.

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London studio Farshid Moussavi Architecture has won a competition to design a housing complex for the western outskirts of Paris.

The building will accompany a proposed stadium arena and hotel on the Jardins de l’Arche development site, which will link the area of la Défense with les Terrasses de Nanterre.

Shops are to fill the ground floor of the building, while ten storeys of residences above will include three floors of student accommodation.

Each upper storey will be slightly rotated to create terraced balconies.

Farshid Moussavi was co-founder of Foreign Office Architects and launched her independent studio back in June as reported on Dezeen Wire. See earlier projects by Foreign Office Architects here.

Here's some information about the proposals from Farshid Moussavi Architecture:

Farshid Moussavi Architecture has won the competition to design a new residential complex in the La Défense financial district to the west of Paris. The 11,430 m2 building is to house 7,500m2 of residential units, 2,930m2 of student accommodation and 1,000m2 of retail space.

It forms part of La Parvis Jardin de l’Arché, a large urban renewal project linking la Défense and les Terrasses de Nanterre, which also includes the new Arena Stadium as well as a hotel. The project is for client Les Nouveaux Constructeurs working with public planning authority, l’Epadesa.

The FMA design proposes a slender volume to provide dual aspect residential units. Each floor of this volume is rotated by two degrees from the one below to produce oblique balconies and loggias. These oblique exterior spaces of the apartments will enjoy uninterrupted views down the path of the historic La Grande Axe.

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by Farshid Moussavi Architecture appeared first on Dezeen.

FMA are working on proposals for a Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA and a Quran Museum in Tehran, Iran.

Moussavi has also formed research studio FuntionLab, dedicated to investigating the theoretical aspects of FMA projects.

Foreign Office Architects closed in 2009 - see our earlier story.

The information below is from FMA:

Farshid Moussavi Architecture Opens For Business

Internationally acclaimed architect Farshid Moussavi announced today (3 June 2011) the opening of her new practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). Moussavi has founded her new firm as an international practice based in London. FMA is currently working on a number of prestigious commissions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA and a Quran Museum in Tehran, Iran.

Moussavi was previously co-founder and co-principal of the award-winning Foreign Office Architects (FOA). At FOA, Moussavi co-authored the design for the award-winning Yokohama International Ferry Terminal in Japan (which was subject to an international competition in 1995) and was part of the United Architects team who were finalists in the Ground Zero competition as well as the team that designed London 2012 Olympics masterplan. Other international projects completed include the John Lewis complex in Leicester, England, the Carabanchel social housing in Madrid, Spain and the Meydan retail complex in Istanbul, Turkey.

Farshid Moussavi is a prominent academic and writer. She is Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, USA and has published two books, ‘The Function of Ornament’ and ‘The Function of Form’, based on her research and teaching there. Moussavi has also been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia and Princeton, and head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As well as serving on numerous international design juries, she is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and Architecture Foundation in London, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Born in Iran in 1965, Farshid Moussavi studied architecture at Dundee University, University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) before co-founding FOA in 1995 where she worked until its demerger in May 2011.

Farshid Moussavi said: “Establishing Farshid Moussavi Architecture has been a significant step and I want to thank my staff and clients for their support. We have some exciting projects to work on and we’re very optimistic for the future of this new Firm.”

The work of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) in architecture, urbanism and landscape design is to be supported by a newly formed research arm, FunctionLab, dedicated to the investigation of the relationships between architecture and other materials that determine the complexity of the built environment.

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Farshid Moussavi launches studio appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and publishers Actar have got together to offer readers the chance to win one of five copies of The Function of Form by Farshid Moussavi, academic and co-founder of Foreign Office Architects.

The book explores what Moussavi sees as the traditionally opposed relationship between function and form, using both speculative research and studies of built or proposed designs.

The 384 page book follows Moussavi's first book, The Function of Ornament, and explores how material systems can be tessellated to create a variety of forms.

This competition is now closed.

Five winners will be selected at random and notified by email. Winners’ names will be published in a future edition of our Dezeenmail newsletter and at the bottom of this page. Dezeen competitions are international and entries are accepted from readers in any country.

Subscribe to our newsletter, get our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for details of future competitions.

Here are some further details from Actar:

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Function of Form

‘Form follows function.’ There has never been a more seductive dictum in the history of architecture. In The Function of Form, internationally acclaimed architect, Farshid Moussavi, provides a provocative critique of the historically opposing relationship between function and form to reveal the contradiction at the heart of modernism. We need to move away from the definition of function as utility, she argues, to align it with how function is defined in mathematics, biology or music.

Form, on the other hand, should be considered not only in the way buildings are produced, but also how they perform sensorially. Function and form, considered together in architecture, stand in opposition to the dualism which defined our approach to the built environment throughout the twentieth century.

For Mies van der Rohe, buildings were a refuge from ‘the acute anxiety of the metropolitan experience,’ while Rem Koolhaas describes the building as a “machine to fabricate fantasy”. Deftly guiding readers through the historical and theoretical arguments around the production and performance of form in architecture, Moussavi, a Harvard professor and co-founder of the award-winning Foreign Office Architects, cites works by Palladio, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and OMA, as well as references to Islamic and Gothic architecture, and writings by theorists including Gottfried Semper and Gilles Deleuze, to illustrate the shortcomings of considering form and function independently in today’s increasingly molecular/hybrid reality. Moussavi’s argument extends beyond architecture to an examination of culture, production and form in all aspects of contemporary life, showing the effects of markets and technologies on case studies spanning science, spaghetti sauce, cars, jeans and Gyrotonics® exercise machines.

Following on from Moussavi’s critically acclaimed first book, The Function of Ornament, Actar and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) are pleased to announce the release of The Function of Form (FOF), developed in conjunction with seminars taught by Farshid Moussavi at the GSD, The Function of Form comprises a comprehensive set of material systems, and analyses ways in which they can be tessellated to produce novel forms. This book provides a thought provoking account of the challenges facing the 21st century built environment, and an enlivened awareness of the wider possibilities of architectural form.

Organization of the book

The book is divided into chapters with each chapter devoted to a specific idea for assembling a material system, combining a physical material with a structural concept or idea. To show the flexibility of these assemblies, each chapter explores the different ways in which this idea can assemble the physical material. In each case, the base generative unit- “base unit”- of each system is identified, outlining its structural capacities and constraints, and its affective traits. Each base unit is then tessellated in three primary directions – horizontal, vertical, and curved – to test its potential to produce different forms of enclosure including horizontal, shed-like forms; vertical, towerlike forms; or spherical, dome-like enclosures. In some cases the base unit is varied in other geometric ways to cater for other external concerns such as environmental concerns or specific spatial and sensorial desires.

Over seventy percent of cases documented in this book are speculative – the result of the research. The remaining pages analyze projects that are either built or have been proposed by architects and engineers throughout history and in different geographies. Together, they point to the inherent flexibility of material systems, revealing the range of built forms that can be generated by each system, with unique affects and sensations. They also demonstrate that built forms are determined not only by objective, technical issues but also by the specific subjective choices that architects make among a myriad of possibilities that each material system offers.

In each case, the right-hand page shows how the base unit is repeated and varied to assemble the specific form, revealing its degree of complexity. The left-hand page provides an image of the resulting form, together with a list of affect titles, in an attempt to suggest the different optical and acoustic (marked by this symbol ) affects produced as a result. Illustrating affects is a difficult task, as affects are in fact “intensities”. In order to initiate a discussion around the consideration of affective performance of forms within the process of design, the book considers that a combination of affect titles and an image of each space should provide readers with an indication of the affective differences between cases as actualized throughout the book.

Note on the author

Farshid Moussavi is an architect and co-founder of Foreign Office Architects. Renowned as one of the world’s most innovative architectural practices, FOA integrates architecture, urban design and landscape architecture in a wide range of international projects, including the Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan and the John Lewis Department Store and Cineplex in Leicester, England. FOA’s current architectural projects include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland in the United States.

A prominent academic and architectural theorist, Moussavi has been a Professor in Practice in the Department of Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2005. She directed the research for her influential first book, The Function of Ornament, and her new book, The Function of Form, at Harvard. Moussavi is continuing this work as director of Function-Lab, a research laboratory she has founded to explore the changing relationship of architecture and material culture.

Born in Iran, Moussavi studied at University College London and at Harvard, and is now based in London. Always involved in education in parallel to running her own practice, she has taught at the Architectural Association and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, as well as at Harvard. Moussavi is also a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and the Architecture Foundation in London, and a member of Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Book specifications

Author: Farshid Moussavi
Edited with: Daniel López-Pérez and Garrick Ambrose, Ben Fortunato, Ryan Ludwig, Ahmadreza Schricker
With contributions by: Richard Galbraith of Sandy Brown Associates on acoustics and Jason Guteratne of Halcrow Yolles on structures

17 x 22 cm
384 pages
Language Edition: English 978-84-96954-73-1
Plastic cover
Published by Actar and Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Buy this book and others at the Dezeenbooks store
(in association with amazon.co.uk)

Congratulations to the winners! Ron Assa in the USA, Milena Zindovic in Serbia, Daniel Parker in The UK, Tiago Pinto de Carvalho in Mexico and Mathilde Fossy in France.

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by Farshid Moussavi to be won appeared first on Dezeen.