Breeding Architecture

London, as everyone from the Mayor to in-flight magazines keeps telling us, is about diversity. It is the city of umpteen different languages, of transcontinental dining experiences in every high street, and of temples and mosques rising in suburban streets. It is a global city, with the world's busiest airport and innumerable foreign banks in the City.

This makes Foreign Office Architects the quintessential London architects. Its two principals, Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, are from Iran and Spain, met at Harvard and made their name with a building in Japan. Their mildly confusing name (and this black-clad couple are emphatically not to be confused with the suited civil servants of the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices) refers to the global nature of their office. 'Usually, to be a foreigner means you don't understand very much,' they say, 'but there's also a naivety and a kind of freshness'.

FOA are the most successful architects of their thirtysomething generation in the world. Their greatest claim to fame is the Yokohama International Port Terminal - an imposing quarter-mile pier of undulating steel and timber, which opened last year to coincide with the football World Cup. They won this commission in a competition, beating an international field of 600 architectural practices, when they were in their twenties.

London has been slow to recognise the talent quietly ensconced in a Victorian stuccoed terrace in Pimlico, and their only built work here is a Belgo restaurant (now closed) in Ladbroke Grove. This is about to change: this week they were announced as the winners of a competition to design the BBC's new music centre in White City. They are also part of the team to create the masterplan for London's Olympic bid. Their role in this team is to provide the creative edge the proposals might otherwise lack.