Asymptote Architecture is an American architecture practice, based in Long Island City, New York. Asymptote Architecture is known for multidisciplinary architectural designs that often incorporate digital technologies.
History
Husband and wife team Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture co-founded Asymptote Architecture in 1989. The firm began with building designs in the United States, and subsequently expanded to international projects. Critics have described Asymptote's architectural style as "futuristic"; the firm is known for fusing architecture with digital computer technology to create a hybrid style. Rashid and Couture believe that the spatial form of a building is what drives its architectural meaning. The firm suggests that its buildings reflect specific attributes of their surrounding environments. For example, the Yas Hotel Abu Dhabi has a fluid, curvilinear form, evoking the concept of speed, since Formula One auto races are held underneath the building. 166 Perry Street, a condominium in the West Village neighborhood of New York City, has a rippling glass façade that evokes a waterfall.
Projects
One of their most famous early designs was their 1988 winning entry for the Los Angeles Westcoast Gateway Competition; an international jury of designers chose their submission, "Steel Cloud," out of more than 150, but when the monument received a poor reception from locals, it was not built due to lack of funding. In 1992, Asymptote was invited by The New York Times to design a hypothetical building for Times Square.
NYSE Virtual Trading Floor
In 1997, the New York Stock Exchange commissioned Asymptote to design an environment to visualize the real-time numerical and statistical data related to stock trading with help from Securities Industry Automation Corporation. This represented the first large-capacity, virtual reality environment for the New YorkStock Exchange, concurrent with the construction of the Advanced Floor Operations Center on the trading floor of the Wall Street facility. In 1999, the project was completed, and as a result a command center was designed and created with state-of-the-art screens. This work was a very early example of a collaboration between the multiple disciplines of architecture, human-computer interaction, data visualization, and user experience design.
Yas Hotel
Yas Hotel is located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and was completed in 2009. The 500-room, 900,000-square-foot hotel is surrounded by a Formula One auto race course, the Yas Marina Circuit. Upon the building’s completion, the location hosted the UAE's first Grand Prix motor race in November 2009. The building is organic is shape and has two 12-story towers. It is said to have been designed to reflect aesthetics often associated with speed and the visual movements in car racing, as well as Islamic art traditions of patterning.
