Asif Khan to Design New Museum of London After Beating Bjarke Ingels

London-based architect Asif Khan, born in 1979 to Pakistani-Tanzanian parents, has won the competition to design the new Museum of London at Smithfield Market, beating Danish starchitect Bjarke Ingels. Khan, a graduate of the Architectural Association, previously worked on the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion as an assistant to Ingels and built the Coca-Cola Beatbox Pavilion for the 2012 London Olympics, where visitors could play the structure like an instrument. For the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, his MegaFaces Pavilion used thousands of telescopic cylinders to reproduce visitors' faces on a monumental facade. Khan's practice merges technology, nature, and art, as seen in his Harvest furniture line made from invasive weeds and the Cloud pop-up canopy of soap bubbles and helium. He is the only architect to win the Cannes Lions Grand Prix for Innovation and was a finalist among 1,715 participants for the Guggenheim Helsinki competition. The new Museum of London, designed in partnership with Stanton Williams, will span 25,000 square meters and is slated to open in 2022. Khan describes it as 'a museum where everyone will feel they belong and where the future of London will take shape.' He is also working on a portable restaurant called Xiringuito and a pavilion for Expo 2017 Astana that fuses architecture with renewable energy.