IT TAKES GENIUS or madness to snuffle out the sublime in the Lea Valley. To you and me, it’s your mouldy old post-industrial junk shop of viaducts, scrapyards and mangy warehouses, cobbled together with rampant buddleia.

To the Spaniard Alejandro Zaera-Polo and the Iranian Farshid Moussavi, however, it’s paradise. “Have you been?” gasps Zaera-Polo. “It’s amazing, amazing. And the sewers! The sewers! This is where the guts of the city come to the surface. Ah, you can really feel something there.”

The pair, husband and wife directors at Foreign Office Architects, are busy cooking up the future of the Lea Valley as one quarter of the architectural supergroup that is designing London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics.

No one sees the world quite like Foreign Office. To them even the Lea Valley is some exciting man-machine, eco-techno organism from which to conjure up astonishing shapes. Their designs lift flaps of skin from the ground, and mutate them in contorted twists, like plastic surgery for the earth’s surface. Buildings become landscape and landscape buildings, man and nature in an indivisible embrace.

Their first big project, Yokohama international port terminal in Japan, which opened last year, stretches the city into the sea, its beach of boardwalks weaving like braids through wooden “dunes”, ducking and diving as you promenade to your ship. It looked unique, guaranteeing the pair star billing in style mags across the world, and yanking them in their late thirties — an architecturally tender age — into the premier league. They are, they say, “still in a state of shock”.

That didn’t stop them last year from taking on old-timers such as Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster when they were shortlisted for the redevelopment of Ground Zero in New York. Zaero-Polo and Moussavi were the most cerebral and so least likely to win.

Undeterred, they took on Zaha Hadid and Future Systems for the BBC’s new music centre in White City, West London. Last Friday, they won the competition with a design — like a slumped sheet of damp wallpaper, freshly peeled from a wall — which promises to be Britain’s most radical building when it opens in 2006.

Meanwhile, inside their small, cultish hothouse in Southwest London, peopled with intense boffins like them, all sorts of freakish shapes are bubbling up in computers, to be grafted on to the world.

Right now they’re blitzing Spain; an origami police station opens this month in the Costa Blanca; next year, Torrevieja sprouts a theatre like a chunk of rock ripped from the ground by an earthquake, and Barcelona opens a seaside park for its International Forum of Cultures which whips up concrete and trees from the land like icing.

Such fluid shapes could pigeonhole them like the blobs and angles of their new-found rivals. Wrong. They hate the “starchitect” system, and remain detached from their sudden fame. “We reject the icon!” announces Zaera-Polo, in mock earnestness. “We love Gehry,” Moussavi butts in, “but our generation can’t operate in the same way.”

Once exported round the world, the mass-produced quirkiness of Gehry and Libeskind, designed to distinguish places, ends up making everywhere seem the same, all jostling “look at me!” icons — as ridiculous as the one-style-fits-all international style of Mies, Gropius and Corbusier.

“We are all, to a certain extent, foreign these days. It’s a modern condition,” says Moussavi (which explains the company name). “Our biggest problem is identity,” says Zaera-Polo. “With globalisation, it is difficult to identify exactly who we are and where we fit in space.”

So how do you counter globalisation’s tendency to blur everywhere into the same freeways and malls? Something that references a place, landscape and history without getting cheesily postmodern.