Alejandro Zaera-Polo


Alejandro Zaera Polo is a Spanish-born American contemporary architect and founder of London and New York based Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture. He is the former dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University for two years and a prolific theorist, widely published in different professional media.

Career

Alejandro Zaera-Polo was born in Madrid, Spain on 17 October 1963. He trained at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, and after graduating he left Spain in 1989. Zaera-Polo went on to do a Master in Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. It was at Harvard University he met architect, Farshid Moussavi.
He worked at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam between 1991 and 1993. In 1993, he co-founded Foreign Office Architects with his ex-wife Farshid Moussavi. The "Foreign" in the company's name referred to the principal's' heritage, with Zaera–Polo hailing from Spain and Moussavi from Iran. The company produced architectural projects in Japan, the United States, the Netherlands and Spain.
In June 2011, after the dissolution of FOA, he established Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture renamed Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture.
Alejandro Zaera Polo’s practice has produced critically acclaimed and award-winning projects for the public and private sector on an international scale. He favors a pragmatic approach, embracing technical rigor in a search towards a complex and organic architecture which unfolds through a broad variety of locations and typologies.
He has also been an advisor to the Quality Commission for Architecture in Barcelona and a contributor to the Urban Age Think Tank of the London School of Economics. He has published extensively as a critic in professional magazines worldwide. El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Harvard Design Magazine, Log and other magazines have published his writings.
He was the inaugural director of the Seoul Architecture Biennale in 2017.

Academia

Alejandro Zaera-Polo has maintained in parallel an academic career. He was the Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, the Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and the inaugural beneficiary of the Norman Foster Visiting Professorship at Yale University. Prior to that, he was a Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture and has been a Visiting Critic at University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University in New York, the School of Architecture in Madrid and the Yokohama School of Architecture.
While serving as Dean at Princeton University, Princeton architecture was featured at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014. Zaera-Polo abruptly left his role as Dean, after he was accused by the Princeton University President of "plagiarizing parts of a text he produced for the “Elements of Architecture” exhibition curated by Rem Koolhaas at the 2014 Venice Biennale". Architect Rem Koolhaas emailed the Biennale’s director to deny any wrongdoing by Zaera-Polo. Zaera-Polo also denied the accusations and as a result, Zaera-Polo filed a lawsuit against the school in 2016.

Selected projects

Foreign Office Architects (FOA)

This is a list of select awards and honors given to Zaera-Polo.
In Tite Kubo's manga series Bleach, the character Szayelaporro Grantz is named after Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

Publications

Books