Sinuous and striking, Asymptote Architecture’s newest building designs feel as though they could move - perhaps as though they are moving. In years past, when Asymptote was working primarily in the realm of virtual architecture, this phenomenon would hardly be surprising. In fact, they made their name designing the New York Stock Exchange’s web environment and trading floor, and the Guggenheim Virtual Museum (which never opened for financial reasons) - ‘buildings’ in which movement was integral to the concept. But these new projects - the Penang Global City Centre in Malaysia, the World Business Centre Busan in South Korea, and a luxury residential tower in the United Arab Emirates - are different. These projects will be built, constructed from real materials in the real world.

Even without virtual reality, there is something futuristic in their aesthetic: the buildings, when they are built, will cleave to their origins as computer renderings. Their impact will lie in the unexpected but smooth twists and turns that would have been unthinkable only decades ago. They can be built only via the virtual, and they announce this hybridisation of reality and virtuality in their silhouette and their details.

With more than a decade’s background in virtual architecture, unbuilt designs, experimental work and theory, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, the husband and wife team behind Asymptote, approach the reality of built architecture via virtuality and theory. But what they emphasise is continuity, the close interrelationships that allow each aspect of their practice to feed back into the others.

Their current projects are notable in this context, for they seem to mark a definitive move to the built. Their buildings in Penang, Busan and the UAE are large commercial projects, destined to become landmark structures in
cities that are themselves poised to become the cutting-edge. Such buildings might be seen as the culmination of a trajectory that began with the HydraPier pavilion in 2002 and that has, since then, seen them design a luxury apartment block in New York City, where they are based, as well as the interiors of flagship stores for Carlos Miele and Alessi.

Already renowned for its exciting avant-garde work, Asymptote now face the challenge of translating this into bricks and mortar.

Specifier: Hani, you’ve argued in the past that, like advertising, “architecture also needs a hook.” What’s your hook?

Hani Rashid: Our “hook” or “core offering,” to borrow a term from branding, is basically centered on the notion that since Asymptote’s roots are in experimentation and technological innovation, we bring that pedigree to building design and urban planning with full force. Asymptote's ongoing investment and passion for advanced and innovative approaches to architectural solutions and thinking is essentially well developed and of great interest to our ongoing and prospective clients, as well as a strong undercurrent in all our speculative and competition work these days. Essentially, what started as an experimental and polemical practice in art and architecture has evolved, or matured, into a progressive and leading edge architectural practice involved in implementing projects of varying scales and scope.

S: After more than a decade of largely virtual and un-built work, Asymptote Architecture has recently starting producing built architecture. What precipitated this transition? Why turn to building things now?

HR: Building things, as you put it, is something in which we have always been engaged. It is true that our early work from 1989-1995 was largely speculative, although it is interesting that in those years we engaged in, and in
fact won, a number of large-scale building commissions: the Steel Cloud in Los Angeles (1989); the close win in Moscow for the State Theater; the Groningen Courthouse, which we won in partnership with Wiel Arets in The Netherlands; and a number of other nearly built works filled our portfolio as is evident in our first monograph Architecture at the Interval published in 1995 by Rizzoli. The speculative, experimental and art-based work we carried through in that period, including the Optigraph and Hyperfine Splitting studies, as well as installations at artists’ space and other gallery exhibitions, were indeed carried out with the same exuberance and excitement as the building design work and—probably as your question intonates—had a major influence on our later digital work from 1995 to 2001. In that period we did get a great deal of attention for the visual environments we created at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City and the Guggenheim Virtual Museum as well as installations at the Venice Architecture Bienniale of 2000 and Documenta XI. And these projects, although natural outgrowths of the earlier “analog” art-based works coupled with our expertise as architects, contributed, I believe, to a fuller
and more substantial definition of architecture, something we now are developing into actual buildings and planning projects as well as design and art-based works.

S: How have you found the messy world of construction? What kinds of opportunities and difficulties does it pose in comparison to your early work?

HR: I think as we had always seen each project from the early models (which aspired to be built) to the virtual environments as constructions of one sort or another, we have come well prepared to delve into the so-called “messy world” of construction as you put it. All of our works that preceded this phase were dress rehearsals of a sort I suppose; the logistics, nuances, complexities, unknowns and so on were always there in all of our endeavors, and now in the “actual” building work it is essentially more of the same, perhaps with greater focus on economics and more time constraints. However, most of what we are experiencing now we have experienced before, as if we as a studio were carrying out a constant “wind tunnel testing” the way one would a high-performance vehicle before taking it on the open racing circuit. In some ways, I am pleasantly surprised at how acclimatised and "experienced” Asymptote is at tackling large-scale works these days.

S: Where does your interest in virtual architecture resurface in your current built work? Is it largely in the design stage, with computer modeling and design technologies, or do you see the virtual as pervading the finished product more generally?

HR: Our interest in virtual work is alive today in our current work on both fronts I believe: that of building design methodologies we are engaged in as well as the influences over our spatial thinking and conceptualizing processes. Our current project in the United Arab Emirates for example, an ambitious 50-story tower on the Arabian Sea, was begun using parametric modeling and virtualization in order to better understand both the visual effects and atmospheric presence of the project in this remarkable location. It was also an attempt to understand how to generate a building of elegance and somehow play against the sand and sea as well as the historic overtones of the land and its mythical and intriguing cultural history. Those early studies transformed into a more practical, and no less important, interest in modeling the entire building virtually and utilizing parametric controls over the building to monitor everything from design elements to building components to economic variables. The building is a powerful mix for us between virtualization as a visualizing and conceptual tool and digital technologies and their capabilities as a means of achieving better results on all fronts from structural to environmental.

S: You say that the cultural heritage in Malaysia, and specifically Penang, influenced your design for the Penang Global City Centre. How is that element of the local culture expressed in your design?

HR: Penang is a fascinating place, a Malaysian city not as well known as Kuala Lumpur obviously, but no less vital and in some ways, due to its island status and the presence of George Town, a British colonial city center, perhaps even more colourful and culturally curious. The mix of Chinese and Islamic cultures in Malaysia is powerful and resonant, and in Penang that is coupled with a surreal, Asian resort-like atmosphere, a bustling metropolis and a deep sense of pride of place, all contributing to the creation of a unique setting in which to propose and build ambitious urbanism and building design. Our project is set into the Penang Hills, a spectacular mountain range that acts as a backdrop to the city. The design elements, tectonics, decorative aspects (albeit abstract and without specific meaning or symbolism) of the PGCC, as well as the formal composition and programming, were all influenced and propelled by our understanding and reading of these variables and influences that make up this city’s urbanism, cultural significance and pertinence. For example, the towers allude to Asian mythical symbols as well as Islamic minarets, the plinth is designed as a “stage” enacting the “performance” of having these buildings on it, which is a situation and composition influenced by the ancient art of sculpture and Chinese theater. The patterning and fenestration motifs drawn from fractal mathematical models touch on, although do not quote specifically, the use of arabesque and Islamic patterning, and the use of stone alabaster and ceramic as building materials is drawn from local building techniques and formal principals and so on. In other words, the PGCC project as envisioned by Asymptote is a harmonic assemblage of distinct historic and cultural references set against contemporary dynamics of fluidity, transformation and flux.

S: More generally, you seem to emphasize the locality of many of your built projects, often describing them as symbols, landmarks or icons of their city or region. How do your buildings—which seem highly abstract in many ways—retain that specificity of the local? How do you ensure that abstraction doesn’t simply produce a kind of homogenous uniformity?

HR: Abstraction in architecture is perhaps one of the most compelling and perplexing dynamics operating beneath the surface. From Gustave Eiffel’s Eiffel Tower to Utzon’s Sydney Opera House to Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, abstraction is perhaps the most important dynamic at work, and I would argue passionately that these projects do not in any way lend themselves to homogenous uniformity of any sort. In fact, it is precisely the distance from lucid and powerful abstraction to symbolism, a priori historicism, pastiche and, I would even argue “design,” where that problem of uniformity emerges. One only needs to look at developments such as Canary Wharf or Battery Park City or more recent projects being proposed for the World Trade Center site in New York City to see that the diametric opposite to the pursuit of new forms, language and innovation can take us into a highly banal and homogeneous outcome for architecture and, more importantly, urbanism.

The question of specificity of the local is, I believe, more critical and pertinent in well thought out, intelligent and forward-thinking architecture. And to achieve that there is a certain element of risk where one needs to detach themselves from the expected and the anticipated in formal terms and seek out, even though one might be seen as renegade and difficult, unorthodox solutions that carry with them the potential for meaning, pertinence and criticality as they fuse themselves into cultural locales and situations. In other words, it’s the latency for meaning that is more important than the immediacy of understanding.

S: Way back in 2000, Herbert Muschamp accused you of “working the hocus-pocus angle.” Do you think the turn to built architecture goes some way towards mitigating these kinds of criticisms? Or would you prefer to embrace this sense of the “hocus-pocus” in your work?

HR: Muschamp's remarks were, to my mind, generated by a person in the dark with respect to what lay before us in the 21st century. His use of that phrase spoke volumes about a paranoia and fear of what lay ahead, and in most of his criticism there is a nagging need for return to first principals and a backward approach to design and innovation. In fact, I always took those remarks as incentive to pursue the “magic” of architecture further and not shy away from the prospect of transforming architecture and going forward, from the staid, somewhat myopic condition of a “building centric” art form into a place of vital and exciting transformational possibilities. Ironically as we head deeper into digital procedures both from a design and fabrication point of view, the excitement and advancement of the discipline is almost completely reliant on an appetite and investment in the very procedures that we entertained in our projects that were exhibited at the American Pavilion of the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, the work that Muschamp was reacting to and commenting on.

S: Although your work has been linked to various contemporary architectural movements, genres or styles, you seem to reject this notion of a single, coherent style across your entire body of work. What is it about style that you find so disinteresting?

HR: Style has historically been a death sentence for innovation and progress in architecture. I recall the work I was involved in with Daniel Libeskind as a student in the mid-1980s becoming commodified and “sold” as the Deconstructivist movement thanks to the desire of Philip Johnson to effectively “quiet” the tendency that, at that time, was somehow (and dubiously) evident in projects ranging from early OMA to Gehry. It is, to my mind, a process of completion when a style is reached and, within each style, the end of true innovation and groundbreaking work. I am too excited about discovering new terrains to be quieted by the imposed interest of society and critics to close up an argument and start the process of repetition, i.e. pursuit of a style.

S: Architecture is traditionally thought of as a primarily spatial form, but what is fascinating about virtual architecture is that it seems to introduce a very explicit temporal dimension. Buildings in a virtual world can move, change shape, be different every time you come back to them. It’s a very exciting possibility. Do you see your built work as drawing on time and movement in the same way? Is this relationship between space and time still an important concern for you?

HR: When we embarked on virtual projects, what separated us from technologists and such was the fact that, as architects, our premise was that architecture has always been invested in virtualization and simulation-one only needs to think of Piarnesi, Boule, Ledoux, St. Elia, Finsterlin, Bruno Taut and so on to substantiate that idea. And visionary thinking in our field has traditionally gone hand in hand with the virtual in one respect or another. It is important to know that we never saw our work on the Guggenheim Virtual Museum, or the NYSE for that matter, as that far from the theory-based work about liquid and mutational space, transformation and flux, that had fueled our work prior to these virtual environments. And that theory-based work still exists as undercurrents to our projects today.

It was Walter Gropius who, in his treatise on architecture written in the early 20th century, claimed that architecture is under constant assault of time and movement. For him the natural act of the sun exemplified such time-space understanding, and his texts on objects under such influence are profound and of equal importance in the virtual world. What is interesting is that through the lens of animation-based sketching, morphing, texture mapping and user control—and even looking forward to possible mnemonic controlled spatiality, hybrid and augmented reality, artificial intelligence and the like—we are in a continuum of discovery and experimentation, which I would rather see as a converging “asymptotic” trajectory that is ongoing and increasingly intense and revelatory.

S: Architecture and cyberspace have both been greeted as the agents of a dawning utopia. What are your feelings on using virtual and built architecture to realize utopian aspirations? Do you see these virtual realms, or their hybridization with the actual world, as representing the dawning of a new age?

HR: When I helped initiate the Advanced Digital Design Program at the Columbia University GSAPP in New York back in 1992 I remember one of my first student’s reaction to cyberspace when I quizzed him after a solid month of his being immersed in a virtual design project, and his reaction sums up perfectly our somewhat tenuous, but nevertheless critical, relation to cyberspace and the virtual. When I asked him how he felt after such a long immersion in such a relatively new domain (as an architect) he looked up at me with bloodshot eyes and said that all of a sudden reality had become extremely compelling. In other words, that virtualization and the cybersphere had pointed out to him, as it does to us now more and more, the differentiation and importance of the real. I very much believe that as we delve deeper and deeper into the virtual we will find ways to interrogate and position reality in more compelling ways. It is also why in this age of email and video chatting we tend to stack up more and more frequent flier miles! +

Top. The summit of Asymptote's fifty-storey luxury hotel and residential tower building in the United Arab Emirates. Building was begun in 2006 and is expected to be completed in 2009.

Second. UAE luxury residential tower, night view. The building uses unusual lines and a gentle twist to create a sense of animation - intimations of movement which are characteristic of Asymptote's built and virtual work.

Third. The PGCC's two towers will each stand sixty storeys tall. Their unusual, iconic shape draws inspiration from the local culture and will help define the PGCC and Penang itself as the gateway to Malaysia's Northern Corridor Economic Region.

Fourth. Asymptote were the unanimous winners of an international competition to design South Korea's World Business Centre Busan. The spectacular design comprises three separate, tapered towers rising out of a central base building.

Bottom. The towers bend inwards at the base, creating a series of slender voided spaces. The result is an impressive and dynamic structure and a highly original take on the conventional skyscraper.