HIGH DESIGN 05/27/08

Words :: Andree Iffrig // Images :: Francisco Andeyro & Alejandro García, Ramon Pratt, Sérgio Padura, Jordi Todó

The opening slide of Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s presentation is nondescript: a black background with white lettering spelling out the topic—high-rises—and today’s date. There is no logo to showcase a brand, and none of the “wow” factor you might expect from a global architectural practice that competes with such celebrity architects as Daniel Liebeskind and Cesar Pelli. The slides that follow—a collection of winning designs that are shaping how we live in 21st-century cities—leave no doubt as to the stature of Zaera-Polo’s firm in the high-flying world of architecture.
Zaera-Polo is a founding partner with Foreign Office Architects (FOA), an international architecture and urban design practice. Leapfrogging from London to Calgary for a presentation at the sustainable design series hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the University of Calgary, he has opted to present a recent portfolio of FOA’s work in high-rise design. Zaera-Polo was born in Spain and is a graduate of the architecture school at Harvard, class of ’91. After graduation, he moved to the Netherlands with his partner and wife, Farshid Moussavi, to work with Dutch superstar Rem Koolhaas. In 1995, the pair founded FOA in London, winning the Yokohama International Port Terminal design competition that same year.
That first slide of Zaera-Polo’s presentation may have been understated, but it was a statement nonetheless about FOA’s approach. The design world may be obsessed with signature style, but FOA isn’t going to play that game. In a Zen equivalent to “profits happen when you do everything else right,” FOA’s partners and staff work collaboratively to realize their striking designs. The form comes out of a rigorous process of research and testing, with a focus on responding to local context, using particular building prototypes or typologies as the foundation for exploration.
With characteristic restraint, Zaera-Polo explains in an interview that the sense of human touch found in FOA’s projects is not the designers’ first priority. As an example, he describes the choice of wooden slats for the flooring of the Yokohama International Ferry Terminal, completed in 2002. Travellers are drawn through the terminal along public walkways faced with Brazilian hardwood. This flooring, along with the sinuous railings of stainless steel, provides a sense of human scale in a terminal with an area of 48,000m2. “The choice of the wood came out of a marine reference, probably the wooden deck of a ship or the deck of a waterfront,” says Zaera-Polo. “It was one of the few materials that we could use to link the building’s interior and exterior walkways. We wanted a material that would be able to filter the water through into the drainage system of the building, without actually exposing the system. Of course, you could have stone slabs, but that would be too heavy for the structural cantilevers.” After much discussion, the firm selected wood as the most efficient material for the flooring. Zaera-Polo is pragmatic about the decision. “That humanity or human scale you see in the building doesn’t intentionally come out of thinking, ‘We are going to have a warm material.’ It was the outcome of a technical procedure, like most important discoveries in the built environment. I have a very strong belief that architecture is a technique, like engineering. Buildings are not made to be seen. If you try to make it look good, probably it will look mediocre. I think the looks come out of something deeper, which is solving certain technical problems.”
A first generation of global architects, practitioners like Frank Gehry and Liebeskind, are associated with a signature style. The idea that buildings are not made to be seen would be heresy in their circles. Zaera-Polo explains, “Past generations of architects since the Middle Ages have travelled, but it’s only recently that practices have become global. What this first generation of star architects did was to brand themselves, to insist that certain features were always a part of their projects, so that people could identify the brand. It is an effective branding strategy. Our generation is a little bit different because we are responding to a more informed clientele, one that is becoming wary about being given the same thing everybody else is getting.”

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