The two leaders of the ironically named Foreign Office Architects were putting on a brave face when I met them (and their tiny daughter, Mina, bearing cake) in their Pimlico home last weekend. They had just had the final interview in the long drawn-out contest to build the BBC’s £22m London music centre. An announcement was due. The phone hadn’t rung. That, in the sudden-death-or-glory world of the architectural competition, was that. They knew the signs, they said gloomily: they hadn’t won. Still, chin up, eh? As I left, I lamely suggested the phone would ring the moment I walked out.

It didn’t. The BBC kept them hanging on until Monday lunchtime. The newsflash was already humming down the wires by the time the phone rang in Pimlico. Up popped the announcement: “Foreign Office Architects win competition.” It wasn’t death, it was glory. They’re off. Again.

This couple — Alejandro Zaera Polo, from Spain, and Farshid Moussavi, originally from Iran — are still youngsters in architectural terms. Both are in their late thirties, and the general rule of this business is that you get only scraps until you’re 40. But they already have one celebrated competition win under their belt: the newly constructed Yokohama International Ferry Terminal in Japan, for ferries and cruise liners. They beat an international field to that project in 1994, only two years after setting up in business. An exercise in complex landscape-as-architecture, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, it opened in 2002, the year FOA was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in architecture. The architects filled the entire pavilion with evocative images of just that one project. Now there is a wider-ranging exhibition, Breeding Architecture, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, opening this week, which looks back over 10 years of work. The BBC commission is the cherry on the cake. Not bad going.

Beyond that, FOA has a track record many of its rivals would kill for. The architects came high up in last year’s competition to rebuild the World Trade Center, as part of the United Architects bid of younger names, and were shortlisted with Daniel Libeskind (the eventual winner) and Lord Foster. They are architectural denizens of the world. So what about the batting-for-Britain thing? Wasn’t that just a touch paradoxical? No, says Polo seriously, it was an honour, one that reflected well on the multicultural nature of Britain. But it might seem odd to some when you consider the intellectual position Foreign Office Architects adopts. Polo and Moussavi are foreigners in the French sense of étranger, meaning “outsider”, “stranger”. They choose to tackle each job from first principles, as if they had landed from Mars and were handed the job of building something. “We say that if you can force yourself to stand outside the context, the culture, the politics, and so on, you are bound to have a wider perspective, you are bound to be more free,” says Moussavi, as she and Polo manage the task of talking high architecture while placating Mina with videos and glasses of milk.

The whole idea is to bring no baggage with them, whether of nationality or of style. The design for the BBC’s Music Centre is accordingly nothing like the Yokohama complex. This seems logical enough: a marine terminal is not a concert hall. Many architects have a one-style-fits-all approach. Not here. The Music Centre will be a building standing proud, its looping structure curling upwards like a snake out of a basket. It will house the two main BBC orchestras, plus chorus and Moussavi, giving them, for the first time, a public home with a 600-seat auditorium, as part of the BBC’s ambitious new campus at White City.

FOA has beaten Zaha Hadid (their closest rival for the BBC commission), the Dutch architects MVRDV, Future Systems (the designers behind the polka-dot Birmingham Selfridges) and the highly re- garded Ushida Findlay Architects. It seems Polo and Moussavi’s professionalism paid off — FOA spent a great deal of time with the BBC’s musicians, hungry for feedback from real user-clients, they say, after the necessarily arm’s-length design of the Yokohama terminal.

Polo and Moussavi admit they are addicted to the intensity of competitions. They have just finished a slew of them — the BBC, a second Pompidou Centre in Metz, a seafront development in Hastings, and an extension to the Whitechapel Gallery in London. “It was like giving birth to many, many babies over the summer,” says Moussavi, laughing at the absurdity of her words. “Whether they’ll survive is another matter.” Right on cue, her daughter toddles up. “Mina! You’ve eaten the purple icing on your cake and left the rest. Bad girl!

” I’m doing all right out of this (I’m getting bits of Mina’s cake), but the domestic picture — workaholic architects, with offices in Japan and London, projects in Spain, the Netherlands and Korea and a demanding child — suggests they need more commissions back home. And London is home. They met at Harvard and worked together at Rem Koolhaas’s office in Rotterdam, but London is where they’ve settled — it is architecture’s international headquarters.

“We’ve been lucky,” says Polo. “We’ve had the chance to work in many different places. Usually that leads to some global brand. Our beginning was about trying to escape from branding, to develop this more alien approach, always starting from scratch.” But now they realise there are recognisable FOA ways of doing things. “We call them FOA’s ark,” says Polo. “What kind of animals have we been collecting over these 10 years? All architects have animals they nurture.”

Foreign Office Architects: Breeding Architecture, ICA, London SW1, from Saturday

www.f-o-a.net
As enigmatic as they are