Alejandro Zaera

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Alejandro Zaera-Polo (born Madrid, 1963) is an accomplished contemporary architect and co-founder of London-based Foreign Office Architects. His work has consistently merged the practice of architecture with theoretical practice, providing a strong intellectual rigour to the discourse on architecture through a sharp capacity to identify social and political trends and creatively extrapolate them.

He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, graduating with Honors, and went on to do a Master in Architecture (MARCH II) at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, USA, where he graduated with Distinction. He collaborated with Rem Koolhaas at OMA in Rotterdam between 1991 and 1993, prior to establishing Foreign Office Architects together with Farshid Moussavi in 1993.

He had an unusually early involvement as a theorist, writing for El Croquis from as early as 1987, where he identified and theorised the work of the current generation of established architects. His early theoretical work inaugurates a materialist critique of architecture departing from deconstruction and critical theory, the predominant theoretical discourses in the 1980’s. It is also deeply influenced by the readings of Deleuze and Guattari and Complexity theory, connecting him to the discourse practiced in America by authors such as Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter and Greg Lynn, and by the reading of neomarxist authors, such as Manuel Castells, David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, which left a strong political bias to his approach to architectural theory.

After these early adventures, he succeeded in transferring his early theoretical interests into a viable architectural practice, as a founding partner of Foreign Office Architects (FOA). The experience of architectural practice shifted his critique towards a more pragmatic perspective and addressed to the discussion of the practice of architecture and the analysis of the conditions of production that affect it: the impact of globalisation, informational technologies and organisational structures, the discussion of iconography and representation in the cultural and political role of architecture and a political critique of the contemporary building industry are some of the subjects that his most recent theoretical work addresses. With a characteristic sniper-like style, Zaera-Polo’s recent theoretical work has been published through articles in different media, constantly changing position and location to address contemporary subjects in a poignant and polemical manner.

His own ongoing Scientific Autobiography charts, as a trans-continental, psycho-geographical drift, a gravitation through some of the most stimulating architectural milieus over the last quarter of a century. Recounting a varied and vivid sequence of cultural exposures, Zaera-Polo applies knowledge and experimentalism as he evolves his personal reading of architectural theory and practice - not as dialectically opposed entities, but as a complex continuum.

Beyond the theoretical work in El Croquis, his texts have been published in many professional publications such as Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Log, Volume and Harvard Design Magazine, and in books including The Endless City (ed. Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, published by Phaidon, 2008), Some of his writings can also be found within FOA’s monographs to date.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has also had an extensive involvement in education at an international level since 1993. He currently occupies the Berlage Chair at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands, and was Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2000-2005, resetting the institution’s academic compass through pedagogy and public events towards the creation of new instruments of architecture and urban design conceived through practice in globalised conditions. In tandem with holding the Delft Chair he is a member of the Institute’s current Research Board (with Ben van Berkel, Winy Maas, Robert E. Somol and Elia Zenghelis). He has been Visiting Professor at Columbia GSAPP, Princeton SOA, UCLA School of Architecture, and he led a Diploma Unit for eight years at the Architectural Association in London with Farshid Moussavi.

He has also been an advisor to several urban design and development committees, such as the Municipal Quality Commission for Architecture of the City of Barcelona and the Advisory Committee for Urban Development of the City of Madrid. He is also a member of The Urban Age, the worldwide, multidisciplinary investigation into the future of cities via a sequence of international conferences, staged from 2005-10 by the think tank of the same name, which is based at the London School of Economics.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s London-based firm, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), is recognized as one of the most creative design firms in the world, deftly integrating architecture, urban design and landscape architecture in their projects. Under his theoretical stewardship, FOA has produced critically acclaimed and award winning projects for the public and private sector on an international scale. In their approach to architecture, FOA are new pragmatists, bringing to bear great technical rigor in their focus on organic growth and the evolution of design ‘species’ hybridizing uses relating to both local and global conditions. The work unfolds rigorously through a broad variety of locations and typologies. In 2002 they realised the groundbreaking project which put the practice on the map, the Yokohama Port Terminal in Japan, an imaginative hybrid of non-Cartesian industrial infrastructure and versatile social functionality completed in 2002.

Since then, the work of the practice has branched into a very broad range of typologies and geographical locations and client types, rigorously developed to suit the particular conditions and programatic requirements. FOA has already completed numerous projects: in the UK, a John Lewis department store and Cineplex at the Shires West Development, Leicester (2000-8). In Spain, where FOA has a local branch, completed projects include the La Rioja Technology Transfer Center, Logrono (2003-7), a social housing in Carabanchel, Madrid (2004-7), a 50,000m2 coastal park with outdoor auditoria in Barcelona (2000-4), a police headquarters in La Villajoyosa (2000-3) and the Municipal Theatre in Torrevieja (2000-6). Completed projects in other European locations include the Bluemoon Hotel in Groningen, the Netherlands (1999-2000), the Umraniye Retail Complex and Multiplex, in Istanbul, Turkey (2007), and a Villa in Pedralbes, Barcelona (2008). Projects completed in Asia include the Spanish Pavilion at the 2005 Aichi International Expo in Japan (2004-5) and a headquarters building for Dulnyouk Publishers, Paju, South Korea (2000-5). In Spain, projects under way include the Institute of Legal Medicine in Madrid (2006-), the D-38 Office Complex in Barcelona (2004-), the Hotel Masaveu in Gijón (2006-), and a Residential Tower in Durango (2004). In the UK, projects under way include the Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, in the Greenwich Peninsula (2005-), Trinity EC3, an office complex in the City of London (2003-), the mixed use extension of the West Quay retail centre in Southampton (2002-), Sevenstone Quarter, a mixed-use complex in Sheffield (2007-), Hadspen Gardens, Somerset (2005-), the redevelopment of Euston Station in London, and a Maggie’s Centre for cancer patients in Newcastle (2007-). Other European projects include the Mahler 4 office building in Amsterdam (2000-), and the future Aerospace Campus in Toulouse, France (2006-). In the USA, FOA is developing the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, (2006-). In Asia, FOA is currently building two 180m high housing towers at the World Business Centre in Busan, South Korea (2006-), and the KL Sentral Plot D Residential Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2006-)

FOA has won several prestigious competitions and commissions, including the BBC Music Box for the firm’s White City complex in 2003, which was widely exhibited but the client has yet to commit to build it. The practice played a central creative role in the Masterplanning team for the London 2012 Olympics Park, site-wide infrastructure and accompanying long-term regeneration of the Lower Lea Valley (2002-2007) and was selected as part of the United Architects team to submit a design for the World Trade Center in New York in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11.

Awards to the firm include the Enric Miralles Prize for Architecture (2003); the Kanagawa Prize for Architecture in Japan (2003); three RIBA Worldwide Awards (2004, 2005 and 2006); the Special Award for Topography at the 9th Venice Architecture Biennale (2004); the 2005 Charles Jencks Award for Architecture and, most recently FOA was honoured with the title of Architect of the Year Award by Architectural Digest Magazine in Madrid. FOA is one of very few practices to have represented Britain with a solo exhibition at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. The work of the firm has been widely exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. and at the Max Protetch Gallery. The practice has been published in numerous monographs and catalogues globally.

FOA Monographs:

• foa’s ark evolving container for the proliferating singularities, Korean Architecture and Culture Magazine, December 2004 • Phylogenesis: foa’s ark, Foreign Office, A monograph by Actar, Barcelona, Spain, 2003 • Complexity and consistency, A monograph, issue 115/116, El Croquis, Madrid, Spain, 2003 • The Yokohama Project, a monograph, Actar, Barcelona, Spain, 2002 • FOA Recent Projects, Text by Jeffrey Kipnis, Ciro Najle & Alejandro Zaera Polo, published as 2G no.16, Barcelona, Spain, 2001

Recent texts by Alejandro Zaera-Polo include:

‘A Scientific Autobiography, 1982-2004: Madrid, Harvard, OMA, the AA, Yokohama, the Globe’, in The New Architectural Pragmatism, (ed. William S. Saunders, with essays by Stan Allen, K. Michael Hays, Kenneth Frampton, Roemer van Toorn et al), a Harvard Design Magazine Reader, 5, 2007, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007

‘30 St Mary’s Axe: Form isn’t Facile’, Log, #4, Winter 2005

‘The Hokusai Wave’, Volume, #3, September 2005

Interview with Peter Macapia, Log, #3, Fall 2004

External links:

• FOA’s official website: [1]

• Archinect: discussion on Iconography, or the problem of representation, following the publication of Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s text ‘The Hokusai Wave’ in Volume #3, September 2005 [2]

• Berlage Institute: [3]

• El Croquis [4]

• El Pais: interviews with and features about Alejandro Zaera-Polo, 2002-2006 [http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:5LwFL2X8RpMJ:www.elpais.com/todo- sobre/persona/Zaera/Alejandro/3830/+Alejandro+Zaera+Polo+El+Pais&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=uk]

• The Endless City (eds.Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic), Phaidon, 2007 [5]

• Harvard Design Magazine Reader, 5: The New Architectural Pragmatism [6]

• The Urban Age [7]

• Volume: interview with Alejandro Zaera-Polo by Jeffrey Inaba, Ambition issue, #3, March 2007 [8]