Word: rashid
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...plan to transform the tiny city-state (part of the United Arab Emirates) into a Middle Eastern Singapore--that is, an ultra-efficient regional service center and tourist destination that benefits from the innovative yet unobtrusive hand of a benevolent leader. In Dubai that would be Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the ambitious Crown Prince whose dreams for Dubai leave those of most other gulf princes in the camel age. "They have been bold, and they have been strategic," acknowledges Sheik Mohammed, but he adds, "I have achieved only 10% of my visions." Dubai turned to tourism because...
...halt the escalating violence convulsing post-Saddam Iraq. Just as U.S. forces thought they were getting a handle on security, a series of coordinated, deadly attacks last week raised the Administration's Iraq troubles to an alarming new level. One day after rockets slammed into Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, the city was hit by four bombings within 45 minutes--three at police stations and one at the headquarters of the Red Cross. Thirty-four Iraqis and one American were killed, and more than 200 people were wounded. The insurgency looked bolder...
...York Stock Exchange, however, was so impressed with the virtual control center Asymptote created to communicate reams of data about the trading floor clearly and simultaneously that it commissioned the firm to build a version on its trading floor. That, to Rashid and Couture, is the sweetest moment: when virtual and real coexist. Because real by itself just doesn't do it for them. They're working on two unlikely projects: developing ceramic tiles that can change color and creating entrances to the New York City subway that look inviting. And consider Rashid's take on the outlandishly curvaceous, Frank...
...thing Asymptote has not developed is a recognizable style, although it's fluid in most of the current "isms." It toyed with deconstructivism in early designs, such as the steel cloud Rashid proposed as a gateway for Los Angeles in 1988. (The cloud registers the heaviness of the traffic and converts it into music.) The firm has also flirted with folded geometry, designing a store interior for Brazilian fashion designer Carlos Miele in New York City that's both chunky and smooth, as if carved out of ice that's melting and setting the clothes afloat...
This stylelessness is intentional on the firm's part, and Rashid, in particular, scorns architects who return constantly to the same design language. "Architecture is much more complex than a formal statement or a symbolic gesture," he says in Asymptote's book-cum-manifesto, Flux. "What we are most focused on is building inspired worlds, be they domestic, institutional, urban or digital." And in a world where boundaries are blurring, we might need all four at once...