Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Alejandro Zaera Polo
Born 17 October 1963
Madrid, Spain
Nationality Spanish
Occupation Architect
Practice AZPML
Foreign Office Architects
Buildings Osanbashi Yokohama International Passenger Terminal

Alejandro Zaera Polo is a contemporary architect and founder of London and New York-based Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML). He is the former dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University and a prolific theorist, widely published in different professional media.

Career

Alejandro Zaera-Polo was born in Madrid in 1963. 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 where he graduated with Distinction. He worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam between 1991 and 1993, prior to co-founding Foreign Office Architects in 1993 together with Farshid Moussavi. As a principal of FOA Alejandro Zaera-Polo co-authored the award-winning Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan, after winning an international design competition in 1995. He also was part of the United Architects team, one of the finalists in the Ground Zero competition. He designed and supervised the completion of a wide range of international projects such as the Barcelona Forum Park and Auditoria, the Torrevieja Theater, the Rioja Technology Transfer Centre in Logrono, Spain, the Carabanchel Housing in Madrid, The Palace Residential Towers in Busan, Leicester High Cross and the recently completed Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. He also designed and delivered the Spanish Pavilion in the Aichi International Exhibition 2004 and the Madrid Pavilion in Expo Shanghai 2010, and represented Britain in the Venice Architecture Biennale 2002.

Alejandro Zaera Polo’s practice has produced critically acclaimed and award winning projects for the public and private sector on an international scale. He favors a pragmatic approach, embracing technical rigor in a search towards a complex and organic architecture which unfolds through a broad variety of locations and typologies.

In June 2011, after the dissolution of FOA, his first company, he established Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture (AZPA) renamed Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML) in August 2013, where he is working on the Redevelopment of the Birmingham New Street Station, the 2014 ISAF Sailing World Championship Facilities in Santander, the Cerezales Foundation in Leon, the Locarno Palazzo del Cinema in Switzerland, the Hospital Universitari Arnau de Vilanova en Lleida and the BioPol Science Centre in Barcelona.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has maintained in parallel an intense academic career. He is the former dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University [1] and has recently been Visiting Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture and the inaugural beneficiary of the Norman Foster Visiting Professorship at Yale University.

Prior to this, he served as the Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam for four years, and the holder of the Berlage Chair at Delft University for 6 years. He was a Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and has been a Visiting Critic at the University of California in LA, Columbia University in New York, Princeton University, the School of Architecture in Madrid and the Yokohama School of Architecture.

He has also been an advisor to the Quality Commission for Architecture in Barcelona and to the Urban Age Think Tank of the London School of Economics. He has published extensively as a critic in professional magazines worldwide. El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Harvard Design Magazine feature his work and he has contributed to numerous publications.

Selected projects

Foreign Office Architects (FOA)

Bamboo Building (Madrid, 2007).

Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML)

Birmingham New Street Station (Birmingham, 2007–2015).

Research and theory

Alejandro Zaera-Polo 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 1980s. 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, information 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 Scientific Autobiography charts, as a transcontinental, 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 and Living in the Endless City (ed. Richard Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, published by Phaidon, 2008 and 2011). Many of his writings constitute FOA’s published texts.

Academic activities

Zaera-Polo has also had an extensive involvement in education at an international level since 1993. In June 2012 he became the dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University . In 2009, he was awarded the Norman R. Foster Visiting Professorship at the Yale University School of Architecture. In 2008 he was Visiting Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture, and hosted the Berlage Chair at the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands. He was Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2002–2005, 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. He has been a Visiting Critic at Columbia GSAPP, Princeton SOA, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, and he led a Diploma Unit for eight years at the Architectural Association in London. He has now become a visiting professor at Ravensbourne London.

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. 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.

Selected awards

Publications

Books

Other texts

References

  1. ↑ "Zaera-Polo steps down as dean of Princeton's School of Architecture".

External links

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