About once a week, Polis has been straying off the NYC campus, and I guess that’s just going to continue to be the case; not everything fantastic happens here.
The news that caught my eye today is that a hot young architecture firm has been chosen by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland (MOCA) to design the museum’s new building. Foreign Office Architects of London was founded in 1993 by a husband and wife team, Alejandro Zaera Polo and Farshid Moussavi, who met at Harvard (he’s Spanish and she is Iranian). The team gained international recognition with the Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan (pictured above). They were short-listed for the Ground Zero master plan competition. But the firm has not built anything in the United States yet, and this will be the team’s first museum. It’s a fantastic selection on the part of MOCA. From an article on the Design Museum’s website about the duo:
If Gehry’s older generation deconstructed the modernist box, FOA’s generation is more interested in reconstructing, from the landscape upwards. Zaera Polo and Moussavi are not interested in flashy gestures designed to sell cities as Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum has done for the Spanish city of Bilbao. …
“Each building is like a species grown for a specific ecosystem, an antidote to homogenising globalisation,” notes Zaera Polo. In other words, FOA does not stamp one style wherever, whatever. They take root.
Totally digging this sensibility. Can’t wait to see what they come up with for my hometown, Cleveland.
[...] Foreigners in Cleveland « Polis [...]
You go girl! Thanks for keeping part of your mind back home!