Architecture: Boxes? No! Blobs? No! Boring? Never!

There was a point when the drawings and renderings by Asymptote, a New York firm led by two Canadians, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture, were enough.

When building their designs might have sullied the reach of their imagination, and forfeited that which they had struggled to achieve: the beautiful edge.

It might have been that we never wanted them to become builders.

But don't get too nostalgic for their dreams of iconoclastic architecture dedicated to paper. Since founding their studio 20 years ago in the west end of Toronto, the architects have always wanted to build. And now, after leading the digital-design movement at Columbia University, and working flat out on about 100 design competitions, Rashid and Couture are suddenly being called upon to put up major towers in Abu Dhabi, Malaysia and South Korea.

It is sultry, magnetic work, brewed in theoretical labs and, until recently, impossible to construct.

The kids with the edge have grown up. Who could have imagined that the makers of a competition-winning vision of a porous, democratic piece of infrastructure for Los Angeles called Steel Cloud (1989) and a virtual trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange (1998) would ever be roped into designing an eight-storey condominimum for New York's latest “it” neighbourhood. Or that they would enjoy having it sited right next to arch, minimal, glass towers by Richard Meier, who had lured buyers such as Martha Stewart and Nicole Kidman into his highly branded space?