Farshid Moussavi - Research

Research

Alongside her professional practice, Moussavi has held a longstanding commitment to research across the academic and professional field of architecture. Since 2005, she has been Professor in Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Previously, Moussavi taught at the Architectural Association in London for eight years (1993–2000) and was subsequently appointed and Head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2002–2005). She has been a visiting professor of architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Hoger Architectuur Instituut Sint-Lucas in Gent, and in the USA, at UCLA, Columbia University and Princeton University. Moussavi’s research, which began while teaching at the Architectural Association in the early nineties, has aimed to identify the instruments that allow architectural design to embed built forms with intelligence and creative possibilities. Instead of importing external theoretical models, from other fields Moussavi has focused on those that are specifically architectural, exploring the potentials of the diagram, information technology, landscape, iconography, new construction technologies, blank envelopes and tessellation as tools that could be used to develop alternative theoretical models for the practice of architecture. Since 2004, Moussavi’s research has focused predominantly on how architecture involves the intellectual assembly of matter, providing each built form with inherent affects and sensations. Her work in aesthetics is influenced by a range of philosophers, notably Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Following from Gilles Deleuze’s work on affect, she proposes that built forms’ affects play a critical role in the daily experiences of individuals and the cultures which develop from them. Like active forces, they affect patterns of thinking and behaving. Moussavi argues that, in order for culture to evolve, architects need to produce novel affects. It is not what built forms represent but how they function affectively that makes architecture a critical cultural practice.

Moussavi has published two books, "The Function of Ornament" and "The Function of Form" in conjunction with her teaching at Harvard, both of which investigate the role affect in contemporary architecture.