Moussavi: working in the third world is ‘easy option’

Architects working in developing countries have been left dismayed after Farshid Moussavi launched an attack on volunteer work.

Speaking at the V&A last week, the former Foreign Office Architects partner said that she was “dubious” about volunteers who see working in these places as an “easy option”.

Moussavi, who teaches at Harvard and runs her own practice in London, said: “It’s quite telling that Harvard students, when they want to be activists, have to go to these areas of the world. It’s tougher to be an activist in America.

She said a lot of her own students wanted to join organisations working overseas but that “most of them are not the really good students. It also can become an excuse and an easy option.”

One architect in the audience told BD there was a “stunned” reaction to her comments: “She implied that people who work for these charities are the less talented people she meets. That seems unfair.”

Jack Pringle, former RIBA president and chair of built environment charity Article 25, which works in Afghanistan and Haiti said of Moussavi: “She is an extremely good architect and opinion-former and it’s a great pity that she’s expounding these views.”

He defended Article 25’s work as “action orientated” but admitted “there are a number of groups around who do a lot of talking and not a lot of doing”.

Tom Corsellis, executive director of Geneva-based NGO Shelter Centre, which he co-founded while studying architecture at Cambridge, accused Moussavi of sensationalism when the subject needed hard work and understanding. “The aid business needs architects but not gap year architects,” he said.

Speaking to BD, Moussavi said that for architects “based in the west who want to go and work in Africa, it’s easier than working in your homeland where the complexity is greater”.

Another former RIBA president Sunand Prasad said: “There is just as much variability in the quality of work being done on aid projects than fancy city centre projects. It depends on what you bring to it.”

Moussavi was speaking as part of a panel that also included Alice Rawsthorn, design critic at the International Herald Tribune,and Farrokh Derakhshani of the Aga Khan Architecture Award.

She made her comments during a Q&A session, after presenting a project by an African architect who trained in Germany before returning to Gando in Benin, Africa to build a school.