Farshid Moussavi is an architect, the founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture, and an architecture professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In this lecture, Moussavi will use the urban and ecological scale of the Ismaili Center in Houston (for which she was one of the lead architects) as a starting point to address her process for generating new forms of urbanism, as well as discussing what makes her projects urban and how that urbanism plays out. Furthermore, drawing on her experience as an educator and prolific architect, Moussavi will discuss the “practicality” of architecture as being in the world (as opposed to existing as an abstraction). She will share the cultural translation that the Ismaili Center deploys and how those multicultural references might relate—if at all—to urbanism and the “practicality” of architecture.

Find more lectures on architecture and design taking place across North America this Fall with our curated list.