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Hani Rashid - Cersaie 2004

Architecture, art and design all are confrontations and dialogues with nature and the its dynamic and chaotic forces. The ceramic tile is at its essence a reconciliation between the manmade artifact and the perfection of the materiality of nature. The ongoing struggle to create, design, envision is always one with the hopes of yielding infallible beauty, which at its limits is obviously nature itself. Today the struggle is as it always has been to find precision, elegance, beauty and above all perfection, and in this way the manmade artifice is nothing but an attempt to traverse the ambiguous space between the real ( natural ) and the virtual ( architecture ).

Hani Rashid is an architect involved in the fields of architectural design and theory, digital interactive environments and spatial experimentation.
In 1989 he co-founded with Lise Anne Couture Asymptote, an architectural practice in New York city.
Since 1989 he has been a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture where he has been engaged in research regarding new design technologies and their application to architecture, co-developing the Schools Advanced Digital Design program in 1995.

Hani Rashid has also been a Visiting Professor and lecturer at numerous universities including the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, the University of Lund, Sweden, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.
His practice, Asymptote, has produced an extensive body of work including the Guggenheim Virtual Museum, the Virtual Trading Floor and Advanced Operations center for the New York Stock Exchange a new office system for Knoll International as well as the award winning HydraPier constructed in the Netherlands in 2002.

Hani Rashid's work has been featured in numerous publications including Time Magazine, Esquire, Domus, Frame, Architectural Record, ArtByte, Interview, and Wired.
He has received several awards and in 2000 represented the United States at the American pavilion of the Architecture Biennale in Venice and in 2002 exhibited Flux 3.0 at Documenta XI in Kassel.
Hani Rashid received a Master's Degree in Architecture from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1986.