Internationally acclaimed architect Farshid Moussavi announced today (3 June 2011) the opening of her new practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA). Moussavi has founded her new firm as an international practice based in London. FMA is currently working on a number of prestigious commissions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA and a Quran Museum in Tehran, Iran.

Moussavi was previously co-founder and co-principal of the award-winning Foreign Office Architects (FOA). At FOA, Moussavi co-authored the design for the award-winning Yokohama International Ferry Terminal in Japan (which was subject to an international competition in 1995) and was part of the United Architects team who were finalists in the Ground Zero competition as well as the team that designed London 2012 Olympics masterplan. Other international projects completed include the John Lewis complex in Leicester, England, the Carabanchel social housing in Madrid, Spain and the Meydan retail complex in Istanbul, Turkey.

Farshid Moussavi is a prominent academic and writer. She is Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, USA and has published two books, ‘The Function of Ornament’ and ‘The Function of Form’, based on her research and teaching there. Moussavi has also been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia and Princeton, and head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As well as serving on numerous international design juries, she is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and Architecture Foundation in London, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Born in Iran in 1965, Farshid Moussavi studied architecture at Dundee University, University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) before co-founding FOA in 1995 where she worked until its demerger in May 2011.

Farshid Moussavi said: “Establishing Farshid Moussavi Architecture has been a significant step and I want to thank my staff and clients for their support. We have some exciting projects to work on and we’re very optimistic for the future of this new Firm.”

The work of Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) in architecture, urbanism and landscape design is to be supported by a newly formed research arm, FunctionLab, dedicated to the investigation of the relationships between architecture and other materials that determine the complexity of the built environment.