Asymptote: Flux

Asymptote, an award-winning New York City — based architectural firm, expands the boundaries of traditional architectural practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to computer-generated environments. Recognized internationally as both leading-edge architects and virtual-reality artists as well as sought-after critics and teachers, Asymptote partners Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid have emphasized research into cultural trends and technological influences as the core of their practice. The firm has completed or is overseeing projects around the world, with commissions as diverse as a trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange; a multimedia research park in Kyoto, Japan; a modular furniture system for the Knoll furniture company; a music theater in Graz, Austria; and a new center for art and technology for the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, New York. Designed and written by the partners, Asymptote is the first book to fully document their “real world” (as opposed to virtual) projects.In mathematical terms, the word “asymptote” is defined as a line that a given curve gets closer and closer to, but never touches, as it gets further from the origin towards infinity. In architectural terms, Asymptote is the Manhattan-based architectural design and research practice established by Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid in 1989.

Rashid and Couture’s work is intriguing because it draws inspiration from a wide range of sources not traditionally associated with architecture — among them the design of airline interiors, sporting equipment, and organic systems like seashells and honeycombs; and various means of communicating and disseminating information. Their projects areconcerned as much with light, speed, and traversing virtual boundaries as with “real-world” geometries and building systems. Hani Rashid is one of the founding instructors in the “paperless studio” curriculum at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, a program of study that emphasizes designing directly via computers and communications networks and encourages students to pursue investigations into the evolving possibilities of digital design and “placeless” environments.

Echoing Asymptote’s approach, this book presents a seamless trajectory of projects organized in a non-linear fashion and illustrated with installation photographs, collaged photographs, and computer-generated diagrams and environments, all in color. Photographs of an installation might be followed by a spread of Asymptote’s “scapes” — computer diagrams morphed into a variety of potential body forms or structures — followed in turn by images of a virtual environment. The projects follow one another in a panoramic, filmstrip fashion and are interspersed with descriptive text and the speculative writing that Asymptote is known for. The book is intended to be explored at random, without strict beginning or end.