Farshid Moussavi wins competition in la Defense in Paris

Farshid Moussavi Architecture has won the competition to design a new residential complex in the la Defense financial district to the west of paris. The 11,430 m2 building is to house 7.500 m2 of residential units, 2.930 m2 of student accommodation and 1,000m2 of retail space. Her winning scheme features a slender volume to provide dual-aspect residential units with views down the path of the historic La Grande Axe.

Picture © Farshid Moussavi Architecture. FMA

Her team has now started detailed design work. The project is due to start on site in a year’s time.

The building’s 11 storeys are each rotated by two degrees from the one below to produce oblique balconies and loggias and a stratified look.The practice beat two French firms, LAN and Brenac & Gonzalez to land the prize, part of a large urban renewal project linking La Défense and les Terrasses de Nanterre in the west of Paris. Moussavi said: “We are delighted to be working in this part of Paris and to be part of the development along the historic axis.”

The wider scheme, for client Les Nouveaux Constructeurs working with public planning authority, l’Epadesa, also includes the new sports arena designed by Atelier Christian de Portzamparc and a hotel designed by a team including Spanish architect Rafael de La-Hoz.

It is the first major project for the fledgling practice which was formed this summer after Moussavi split with her Foreign Office Architects co-founder Alejandro Zaera-Polo. It will also be Moussavi’s first built project in France.

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More information

FARSHID MOUSSAVI

Farshid Moussavi, born in Iran in 1965. 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 Foreign Office Architects (FOA) in 1995 where she worked until its demerger in May 2011. She is Professor in Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, USA. She published "The Function of Ornament" in 2006, based on her research and teaching at Harvard, and the second volume, "The Function of Forms", in 2009.

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.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FAM)