The brothers Karim and Hani Rashid have made themselves into totems of modern design and futurist architecture. Karim, 39, is the designer as famous for public relations as he is for recognizable furnishings, functional, fab and fun. Hani, 42, is the quiet architect (partnered with wife Lise Ann Couture as AsymptoteArchitecture), known for virtual realms and digital theory. Business versus art, marketing versus material. Opposites. The brothers Rashid have had questions concerning diversity lobbed at them for 15 years.

"There’s a feeling that because I produce objects and Asymptote [produces] architecture, that they are theoretical and I am the pragmatist," says Karim from his Manhattan offices. "I think we’re both well balanced in these not-so-extreme issues."

For an object to transcend style, it must have a certain context, a strong tenet and meaning. It also must meet all the other criteria, such as ergonomic, social, behavioral, technological, market and material issues. Both brothers have made careers of this, even if Hani’s outlook is conceptualized.

"Karim approaches the world from the point of view of aesthetic pleasure and perfection," says Hani from Asymptote’s New York offices. "I, on the other hand, tend to question and offer critical and problematic works that force us out of complacency about environment."

So their first collaboration — the Institute of Contemporary Art-commissioned "stratascape Asymptote" — is a coup not only for this city’s most progressive gallery, but for brothers so famously iconographic.

With his highly publicized, best-selling Oh-Chair and Garbo Can, Karim became Op-to-Pop’s reigning superstar, designing colorful, oft-copied furniture, bottles and bolts for Issey Miyake, Armani and Sony that manage signature sexy minimalism while remaining practical.

The juxtaposition of his sensually organomic but tactile designs within the banal Cartesian spaces we think of day to day should remind us of a curvaceous woman set against tight white bedding. Karim’s designs are equilateral with business itself; he holds interactions with business and art with the same embrace that businesses with cultural impact do design.

"When a client proposes a project, I believe they’re asking for new direction, someone to help reshape their culture," says Karim, who believes so much that design is an instrument for change that he proposes bodies of work rather than single objects. "Design is a social, political and cultural act. I am a cultural shaper, a thinker, a theorist and a pragmatist." This balance affords him opportunities to be critical and perceptive to culture’s shifts and conditions.

The less-practical (but equally prolific) Hani made his bones in theory more than in tactiles. With Lise Anne, Asymptote specializes in digital hybrid and virtual worlds; computer-generated environments, experimental installations, building design and urban planning. Though most famous for imagined reduxes of New York Stock Exchange and the Guggenheim Museum, Asymptote has made architecture in general a more malleable world to be in, blurring clearly delineated cubicles of life’s straight lines with virtual realities. "We think of things as architectural when they are indisputably spatial, mathematical and scaled to human perception and occupancy," says Hani.

Asymptote’s concept for new model architecture is that it reads and writes space, tackling first the rethinking of issues and solutions, flushing out all cliche, then re-entering the client’s mind anew with a fresh virtual look at another reality.

"As soon as we’ve implemented our virtual-reality works, they indeed exert influence on the ‘real’ situations that they tend to coexist with," says Hani of Asymptote’s revolutionary, bloblike, soft sculptural computer designs. "The real space no longer can be seen without the reference and elucidation found in its visual counterpart."

It’s this supple brainswash that allowed Asymptote to tackle virtual office space for Knoll, named A3, that broke from usual linear cubicles to form something configurable, malleable and versatile. Hani discovered new ways in which people cohabit a space, whether communicating or seeking privacy, by recognizing new protocols and behaviors, many of which were tempered by virtual relations — even down to what exists between clothing worn and digital interfaces used.

"The A3 reflects the readings we made concerning not only the way we communicate and inhabit, but also the desires and wants we have when we are able to freely maneuver our way through data, art, relationships and so on."

Karim designed Stephen Starr’s new restaurant Morimoto, and Hani designed furniture for Knoll, but until recently the friendly brothers kept out of each other’s realms and businesses. That’s changed with "stratascape Asymptote." Rashid/Couture/Rashid’s installation asks: How can the temporal and the domestic meet? How can we engage the virtual, the metaphysical and the physical as a singular interactive experience? How can the smug world of architecture collaborate with designers when architecture is at the height of the applied and major arts that so often look down at modern design? And what does it all have to do with its interactive chess set/grid design?

Filled with Karim’s charcoal-grey reclining chairs, beds and tables and Asymptote-made, irregularly shaped suspended tubes of molded Plexiglas onto which projectors show bubbled images, "stratascape Asymptote" appears as if all shape is constantly changing with the swirl and colors of differing patterns.

The gamelike notion of "stratascape Asymptote" figures beautifully into the Rashid brothers’ story.

"I suppose that those approaches will make for a fascinating reconciliation at the ICA," says Hani of this first collaboration. "We live in a world that is tempered and determined by aspects of temporariness and domesticity meeting the virtual and the mediated. It is highly appropriate to be using the gallery setting as a test bed for studying new spatial configurations, solutions and ideas. That is something Lise Anne and I have been doing since 1986. It seemed a good place to merge with my brother and his interests in manufacturing design and interiority."

Karim sees the commonality of the trio’s work, sharing interests in the ephemeral, the transparent and, most phenomenally, the phenomenological. "The experiential notions of use and space, of new technologies, new processes, of interaction, of interface, of occupancy, and a forever dynamic, shifting, changing world — these are common issues where human engagement is heightened, creating new boundaries, new landscapes."

"Hani Rashid + Lise Anne Couture and Karim Rashid: stratascape Asymptote," Dec. 8-Feb. 10, Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St., 215-898-5911, www.icaphila.org.

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