Farshid Moussavi

In this lecture, Farshid Moussavi will argue that architecturally speaking, politics is about people’s attachment to buildings- how buildings alter what people see, hear and do in and around them. This is not a question that is settled in advance through representation, but has to be evaluated in its irreducible singularity each time. Alongside leading an award-winning architectural practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), 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’s ideas and work are at the forefront of critical debate about architecture. In 2017 she was Architectural curator of the Royal Academy Summer Show where she proposed a highly original approach, showing the internal mechanisms and the construction process that underpins architecture. Her work is deeply rooted in critical research which she carries out through FunctionLab, the research branch of FMA. FunctionLab explores cultural questions that find actualisation in the building commissions of the office, allowing for informed and innovative results. With the influential series of books that Moussavi published with Harvard, The Function of…, she has explored the theory and built history of ornament, form, and style