OUALALOU + CHOI: Territories of Disobedience

Architects today play a marginal role in the production of built environments, often entering a project long after its critical limits have been defined. OUALALOU + CHOI seeks to reestablish the architect’s role as necessary and pertinent, to expand and redefine the profession’s perimeter of action.

The architectures presented during TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE are just that, a form of disobedience, a challenge to entrenched systems of construction. To question and pervert the established parameters of an architectural project is the practice’s modus operandi. This search for singularity is not an investigation into formal distinction; it is not a fetishism of the architectural object. It speaks to a desire to define a project’s conditions of existence, to be responsible for more than a project’s formal incarnation.

TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE touches on four themes inherently tied to the office’s design philosophy, and exhibited in its body of work: Cultural Resistance, Occupying Earth, Public Prerogatives, and Urban Transgressions.

With radically dissimilar projects, the office’s work is first and foremost an exploration of scale and territorial structures. Notable examples of this research include the Volubilis Museum, the FLIJ installation, the COP22 Village, the Moroccan Cultural Center in Paris, and the Leïla Mezian Foundation Museum.

Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou are Design Principals of OUALALOU + CHOI, an architectural practice based in Paris and Casablanca. TERRITORIES OF DISOBEDIENCE traces the first fifteen years of their work.

Speakers

Linna Choi, Design Principal, OUALALOU + CHOI
Linna Choi (Seoul, South Korea) is Founder and Design Principal at OUALALOU+CHOI. A graduate of both Yale University and the Harvard GSD, Choi is a licensed architect in the State of New York and has served as a visiting architectural critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Rice University Paris program, Harvard University’s Career Discovery Program, and the Graduate program at MIT. As Design Principal at OUALALOU+CHOI, she manages the Paris-based team currently working on projects both in Europe and Africa, projects that have been the subject of various exhibitions and publications throughout the world.

Tarik Oualalou, Design Principal, OUALALOU + CHOI
Tarik Oualalou (Rabat, Morocco) is Founder and Design Principal at OUALALOU+CHOI. Oualalou is a graduate of the Paris Malaquais School of Architecture and the Rhode Island School of Design, and holds degrees in Art and Architectural History from the Ecole du Louvre and in Engineering from the Ecole Nationale des Arts et Métiers de Paris. The recipient of numerous awards while at the helm of OUALALOU+CHOI, Oualalou has also led studios at Rice University, MIT, the American School at Fontainebleau, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture. With Choi, he directs the office’s ongoing works from both the Paris and Casablanca-based studios, overseeing projects such as the development of the new City of Mazagan, the Cultural Center of Morocco in Paris, the Maison de l’Afrique outside of Reims, and two mixed-used projects in Brussels.

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