HOWZAT

That’s where it gets tough, but Foreign Office have big brains. Their conversation leaps from Stockhausen to calculus like mine does from Britney to Beyoncé. The pair fell in love in Harvard University library, for heaven’s sake. On Christmas Day. “We knew we were meant for each other,” Zaera-Polo says with a smile.

Trying to find the words to explain what their localised globalised architecture might be to lay mortals is, confesses Zaera-Polo, “very difficult”. So they use a lot of metaphors. Ecology is their favourite. “Each building is like a species,” says Zaera-Polo, “grown for a specific ecosystem.”

They don’t stamp one style wherever, whatever. They take root with on-site offices staffed by local talent sniffing out the locality. Their exhibition Breeding Architecture, at the ICA in London next week, is a giant “genetic tree”, showing the evolution of their species, as the “seeds” of ideas take root in particular places. “We try to let the building grow by itself,” says Zaera-Polo.

The architect simply “edits” or “conducts” what emerges, no longer the heroic artist but a midwife delivering a latent form, buried in the landscape all along. How many metaphors have we got through so far? Here’s another. “It’s like a wine-maker,” says Zaera-Polo. “You have a grape. You know that if you go to Chile or the Napa Valley a particular grape will grow in ways that will produce different flavours.”

Clear? Well, the Olympics are the perfect illustration. Here we have the ultimate globalised brand which, every four years, descends on a lucky/unlucky place. Usually you get icons and monuments, or an Atlanta-style corporate circus passing through town.

Foreign Office’s Olympics, though, will be “an antidote to the usual sanitised, branded theme park-that-could-be-anywhere Olympics,” says Zaera-Polo, something that “distills the character, crystallises the ambience” of the Lea Valley. No jokes please. “It’ll be the first grunge Olympics, heh, heh, heh. We don’t want to clean it up, cover it in concrete, and put a few white elephants on a platform. We want to grow the Olympics from the bottom up.” And, adds Moussavi, “capture some of the gruff, East London street culture of 100 languages, the unexpected, the quirky, the weird” that make London’s hybridised buzz the envy of every metropolitan rival.

It’s a tough sell, particularly since the first images emerging next year will be more “shadowy impressions, loose, vague” than actual designs. Whatever happens, the team’s work will feed into the Lea Valley’s future, Olympics or not. But Zaera-Polo and Moussavi are confident that the International Olympic Committee is as interested in the Lea Valley’s long-term regeneration as they are.

Whether it’ll take a chance on this new look icon-less, grunge Olympics (especially without CrossRail) is another matter. I hope it does — just to see Foreign Office’s inexplicable world when it roots amid scrapyards.

But what will it actually be like? Essentially the problem they’ve set themselves is the same that has confronted us since Carlyle and Ruskin, when industrial revolution and empire started churning up the earth: how to find identity in a world of flux.

The solution is the same: “The sublime,” says Zaera-Polo, “a physically exciting form to project the things around us to a higher level.” No different from the Renaissance. Only our age isn’t fixed: our spheres aren’t ordered but chaotic; our universe isn’t closed but expanding; our human is no Renaissance man but a mongrel with slippery identities. Our landscape must follow suit.

Another metaphor, the classic. “We want our architecture to be like entering a piece of music,” says Zaera-Polo. “Music is about spatialising and distributing forms. It surrounds you.” But don’t expect Mozart: “We listen to techno.”

An architecture of digital loops, samples, a cloud of references swirling in electronica, just like techno? Genius? Or madness? Maybe both.

• Foreign Office Architects: Breeding Architecture runs from November 29 to February 29 at the ICA, The Mall, SW1 (020-7930 3647)