Design: Building Momentum

And how, exactly, does a building mutate? The closest the duo has come to answering that is with HydraPier, an exhibition pavilion that Asymptote built (yes, actually built) last year at Harlemmermeer, in the Netherlands. The two-winged structure sits on an artificial lake created on land reclaimed from the sea. Embracing this quirky history, the roof of each wing is covered in a film of water so that as the wings dip toward each other visitors pass through a water alley formed by the runoff from the roof running down glass walls. That is, they walk through water--on dry land that was once underwater--to an artificial lake. The little pavilion doesn't change (unless you count the play of light through the liquid on the glass), but it acknowledges change.

One 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.