Hasta La Ideas

This six-sided building covered in mirrors is the new home for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland in Ohio by London-based architect Farshid Moussavi (+ slideshow).

The four-storey building, which opened this weekend, features faceted walls clad in mirrored black stainless steel and replaces the museum’s former address in the loft of an old playhouse complex.

Visitors to the museum arrive inside a full-height atrium, where the structure of the walls is left exposed and the surfaces have been painted bright blue.

White staircases lead up to galleries on each of the floors, including a large top floor exhibition space where the ceiling is coloured with the same blue paint as the walls to offer an alternative to the standard ‘white-cube’ gallery.

Located at the intersection of two major avenues, the museum faces onto a new public square by landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and has entrances on four of its elevations for flexibility between different exhibitions and events.

As the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is a non-collecting museum, it places extra emphasis on public programmes and events, which will take place inside a double-height multi-purpose space on the building’s ground floor.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture completed the project in collaboration with architects Westlake Reed Leskosky, who are based in Cleveland.

The museum first unveiled the designs for the building back in 2010, which you can see in our earlier story.

Farshid Moussavi launched her studio just over a year ago – find out more here.

Photography is by Dean Kaufman.

Here’s some more information from the architect’s website:

MOCA is a 34,000 sq. ft. non-collecting museum in the emerging Uptown district of Cleveland’s University Circle neighbourhood. Located on the corner of a triangular site at the junction of two major roads, the building will act as a beacon for this area of the city.

The new MOCA is arranged as a multi-storey building in order to produce a compact envelope and optimal environmental performance, and to liberate space for a museum plaza. The building in this location is exposed on all sides and has multiple entrances which will bring the museum added flexibility. Its prismatic form is clad in mirror black stainless steel panels which are arranged along a diagonal grid to follow the diagonal load bearing structure of the external envelope. These reflective panels will respond to weather changes and movement around the museum, providing visitors with constantly changing perceptions.

Upon entering the building, visitors will find the structure left exposed on the interior face of the envelope and treated with a fire-resistant, intense blue paint. The museum’s public and “back of house” activities will be interspersed along the section of the building and accessed physically and visually by a grand stair which ascends the museum’s vertical atrium. Each floor is designed to host a variety of configurations for maximum flexibility, with the blue inner surface which envelopes the different spaces providing a consistency across the various museum events. In the main gallery on the top floor, the blue surface will rise to form a deep blue ceiling, evoking the sky or a sense of boundlessness in contrast to the traditional idea of the gallery as a white, sealed, cube.

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by Farshid Moussavi appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen Wire: former Foreign Office Architects co-founder Farshid Moussavi has announced the opening of her new studio, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA).

FMA are working on proposals for a Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA and a Quran Museum in Tehran, Iran.

Moussavi has also formed research studio FuntionLab, dedicated to investigating the theoretical aspects of FMA projects.

Foreign Office Architects closed in 2009 – see our earlier story.

The information below is from FMA:

Farshid Moussavi Architecture Opens For Business

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.

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