Architects play a marginal role in the production of built environments today, often entering a project long after its critical limits have already been defined. OUALALOU+CHOI seeks to render the architect’s role once more necessary and pertinent, to expand and redefine the architect’s perimeter of action.
The architecture presented in this lecture is a form of disobedience when faced with entrenched systems of construction; to question and pervert the stated parameters of a project is the office’s modus operandi. The search for singularity is not a search for formal distinction or a fetishism of the architectural object, but the desire to define a project’s conditions of existence and not simply its formal incarnation.
Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou are architects and partners of the office OUALALOU+CHOI, based in Paris and Casablanca. OUALALOU+CHOI has worked on a wide range of programs and scales encompassing museums, hotels and resorts, social housing, sports complexes, and master plans for both existing and new cities. The office curated the first Pavilion of Morocco for the 2014 Venice Biennale, designed the Moroccan pavilion for the 2015 World Exposition in Milan, and were the architects and master planners for the United Nations Climate Conference COP 22 in Marrakech.
The office has won numerous awards, including the Rice Design Alliance Spotlight Prize 2015 and Architecture of Expo 2015. OUALALOU+CHOI was a finalist for the BSI Swiss Architectural Award and the 2014 AFEX award, awarded for an outstanding project undertaken by a French architect outside France. In 2012, the office won the Young Arab Architects competition, WA Awards,and the EMAP Award for emerging architecture. OUALALOU+CHOI’s work has been exhibited in Paris, London, Venice, Copenhagen, and Casablanca. Recent publications include FLIJ(AAM Editions), Fundamental(ism)s(AAM Editions), and Territories of Disobedience(Actar Publishers).
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