Lise-Anne Couture, from Canada, and Hani Rashid, from Egypt founded Asymptote in New York in 1989. The aim of this transdisciplinary organization, into which the two architects call on the know-how of computer experts, engineers and various kinds of scientists (entomologists, bio-physicists etc), is to be a forum of genuinely technological thinking about architecture. The need for some kind of interpolation between the physical space and the visual and technical world opened up by the new electronic media is a bedrock conviction for both Rashid and Couture. For the past ten years, in their virtual projects, urban and architectural alike, their multimedia installations, and the research and teaching programmes which they run (in particular at Columbia University and at the Guggenheim Museum), they have been exploring the reciprocal architectural implications of these two continents of the real. Asymptote is famous for having designed a virtual market hall for the New York Stock Exchange (3DTF), where the data and economic movements are visualized in 3D, and "spatialized" in real time.	(USA)
	Asymptote Couture (Lise-Anne) (1959), Rashid (Hani) (1958)