CITYSPACE: ARCHITECTURE: ASYMPTOTE: CONSTRUCTING THE IMPOSSIBLE

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More of that curvaceous, all-embracing thrust is applied for two mixed-use towers front-lining a massive new civic complex, the Penang Global City Centre, north of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The towers, though tall, use traditional brise soleil canopies, and state-of-the-art filtered glass. Stunning and startling, the towers are also at the centre of controversy, given that the master plan shows 34 other high-rise towers will be going up around Asymptote's curvy showcase. Welcome to the politics of architecture and the density grabs of developers working according to their bottom line.

But don't shoehorn the work of Asymptote into blobism, one of the more unfortunate architecture isms produced during the 1990s to help fill a vacuum of meaningful design. True, Rashid's and Couture's work tends to favour the organic, but for their flagship towers in Busan, South Korea, the architects have produced three kicked-out, tripartite slab towers - a riff on Mies van der Rohe's iconic Lake Shore Drive Apartments and Sears Tower in Chicago, no curves involved.

In fact, Rashid grew up in Etobicoke, now part of west-end Toronto, in Palace Pier - a sad knock-off of Mies's Lake Shore Apartments - along with his younger, now-famous designer brother, Karim Rashid, and their parents: Joyce, a British-born schoolteacher; and Mahmoud, an artist and set designer who was born in Egypt. The boys were born in Cairo, but decided to leave for ultimately rocky times in London and Montreal - see: the difficult life of an immigrant - before settling in Toronto.

Rashid studied architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, and did his masters of architecture in the mid-1980s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he met a fine teacher and early mentor, Daniel Libeskind. Later, Rashid practised in Toronto at the large corporate firm Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden Partnership before breaking out on his own. Libeskind turned up for a while to share a studio space with his former student at the unlikely corner of Dundas and Roncesvalles.

But before long, Rashid and Couture - a graduate of Yale, she was mentored early on by Frank Gehry - had settled in New York. "We certainly took a chance heading into some unknown and uncertain terrain," said Rashid, reflecting on the last 20 years, in an e-mail sent from Italy this week. "We knew then that we wanted to develop a new type of practice, to avoid some of the traps we saw of becoming too corporate, too traditional, too predictable or, worse, boutique.

"It was clear, I suppose, looking back, that we wanted to seek out possibilities that allowed for innovation, drama and exuberance - and a deep desire on Lise Anne's and my part to produce forward-thinking, big-idea architecture, and not pay attention to the critics back then who seemed to want us to quiet down and propagate some sort of Ma and Pa 'local' practice."

But to design for dot-comers and oil-rich developers: Isn't that the ultimate compromise? If the intent of an architect is to hide away in a theoretical lab and create paper architecture, yes. But architecture is a public art, and the ultimate test comes when it gets built, and then experienced, not in a virtual world but by people living their lives in real time..