CITYSPACE: ARCHITECTURE: ASYMPTOTE: CONSTRUCTING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Boxes? No! Blobs? No! Boring? Never! From Manhattan to the Middle East, visionary developers are lining up to get a piece of Canadian architects Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashidaving

LISA ROCHON Saturday, February 16, 2008

There was a point when the drawings and renderings by Asymptote, a New York firm led by two Canadians, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, were enough.

When building their designs might have sullied the reach of their imagination, and forfeited that which they had struggled to achieve: the beautiful edge.

It might have been that we never wanted them to become builders.

But don't get too nostalgic for their dreams of iconoclastic architecture dedicated to paper. Since founding their studio 20 years ago in the west end of Toronto, the architects have always wanted to build. And now, after leading the digital-design movement at Columbia University, and working flat out on about 100 design competitions, Rashid and Couture are suddenly being called upon to put up major towers in Abu Dhabi, Malaysia and South Korea.

It is sultry, magnetic work, brewed in theoretical labs and, until recently, impossible to construct.

The kids with the edge have grown up. Who could have imagined that the makers of a competition-winning vision of a porous, democratic piece of infrastructure for Los Angeles called Steel Cloud (1989) and a virtual trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange (1998) would ever be roped into designing an eight-storey condominimum for New York's latest "it" neighbourhood. Or that they would enjoy having it sited right next to arch, minimal, glass towers by Richard Meier, who had lured buyers such as Martha Stewart and Nicole Kidman into his highly branded space?

And, thus, the world turns. An asymptote is a mathematical term describing a curved line that approaches, though never meets, another curved line. The premise is interesting when applied to the current grab for Asymptote by high-profile developers around the world: Each needs the other, though distance is required to maintain the integrity of the architecture.

The studio's work has been dedicated to spatial experiments - new ways of imagining architecture that absorbs its environment as much as it does people - over the last two decades. But how to produce architecture for the big boys while safeguarding it from becoming a fantastic new marketing tool?

It takes a little luck. And a growing fascination with the power of architecture to transfix and transform. "The quality has very much to do with the ambition of the client," says Couture, from the pair's studio in Soho. "The era of the tone-deaf developer is changing. A lot of developers are realizing their value in terms of good architecture. That's not a bad thing - it might not be coming from altruistic motives, but it makes a better city."

For their New York project, Asymptote was hired by the same developers who assigned Meier to design those condo towers. Couture and Rashid were asked to convert an existing parking garage that was so wonky, it had to be stripped down to its steel frame. In direct contrast to Meier's acres of sheer vertical glass, Asymptote's building features a glass cladding that bucks and cavorts by angles of eight per cent off the sheer wall, so that the sky is reflected as much as the life on the street. Wedged between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, there is plenty to see.

The Scholl glass from Germany allows for crisp reflections: It presents like a cube with faceted walls of photographs. Inside, the space becomes a sensuous, icy wrap of white lacquered walls and silver leather sofas, a look that recalls the studio's earlier virtual experiments as well as recently completed interiors for the Brazilian fashionista Carlos Miele and for Alessi's flagship store in Soho.

In this work, it's possible to see the influence and irreverence of German expressionists such as Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut. The exterior introduces a seemingly kinetic wall of shifting transparency that kicks out to Manhattan while the interior retreats into an aesthetic of space-age capsule.

Scheduled to open later this year, 166 Perry Street will contain 24 residences, 22 lofts and two penthouses with private terraces and lap pools. The average cost of the units is about $3-million. It will be the first stand-alone building by Asymptote since their Hydra Pier pavilion (2002), with an angled roof covered in a film of water, opened in Harlemmermeer in the Netherlands as part of a horticultural fair.

In the next three years, there will be some seriously tall towers by Asymptote in cities that are wide enough to embrace new frontiers in architecture.

"The great thing about working in Abu Dhabi," Rashid tells me, after landing back in New York from the dessert, "is that out there, they don't really know what they want. By virtue of that, it's even more interesting than Dubai. It's way beyond Toronto, where they know the market and [real-estate agents, marketers and developers] drive it that way. In Abu Dhabi, it is open dessert, and the big boom is only beginning now. The client is listening to my passion."

First to open next year is a luxury hotel complex that will span the racetrack where the UAE's new Formula One Grand Prix competition will take place. The 500-room hotel and executive-hotel annex on Yas Island will be clad with a "solar-skin" screening device held together by a cable-tensioned grid. In drawings, the design resembles a rapacious anemone risen up from the sea.

Another project in Abu Dhabi is a residential tower some 40 storeys high. Rashid was present last week during the start of a massive pour of its concrete foundations. The building is already being proclaimed on billboards along the highway leading from the airport as the Asymptote Tower, and is destined to dominate a vast new development on landfill that includes buildings by power architects Rafael Vinoly and Foster + Partners.

In renderings, the tower appears to be architecture on steroids, pumped up with aggressive curves, a perforated skin of glass stretched beyond its structural walls. To some, it might suggest the tearing off of a veil. The extreme fluidity requires an entirely digitalized design process in which panels can be separately designed to allow for extreme, stretched geometries.

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