Farshid Moussavi is principal of the London firm Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), founded in 2011. FMA’s recent projects include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, a project exemplifying her goal to create architecture that can “embed time” and then through its form and materials show how it changes. FMA also designed the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale installation Architecture and Its Affects. The firm’s current work includes an office complex in London; a department store in Paris; the competition-winning design for a residential complex, Jardins de la Lironde, in Montpellier; and La Defense, Lot 19, in Paris. Recently FMA was shortlisted to design the new headquarters of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne.

A professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Moussavi was head of the Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and has held teaching positions in Europe and the United States.  She has served on advisory panels and design juries for groups including the RIBA, the Mayor of London’s Design for London advisory group, and the London Development Agency. Moussavi also serves as a trustee for the Whitechapel Gallery and the London Architecture Foundation, as well as serving on the steering committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Moussavi was previously co-founder of Foreign Office Architects (FOA), who had their start as winners of the Yokohama International Ferry Terminal competition in 1995, and garnered numerous prizes including RIBA Awards, the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale Award, and the Charles Jencks Award for Architecture.

Her publications include the books The Function of Ornament and The Function of Form, based on her work at Harvard.  Moussavi currently is a columnist for the Architectural Review, addressing topics ranging from planning as “a lost art form,” to the value of transparency in architecture competitions as well as their inspirational capacity as “invitations to make conceptual leaps and to open new frames, speeds, and scales through which we perceive space and time.”