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On a chilly New York November afternoon up on the silver-painted roof of an apartment building in Soho, the brothers Rashid are vying for our attention. The scene resembles the performance of an experimental theater troupe. At stage right, under the looming water tower, is the media: an art director, a photographer, his assistant, a vintage camera on a tripod, and me. At stage left is architect Hani Rashid, dressed casually in black polar fleece, and his brother, product designer Karim Rashid, wearing a pristine white designer suit. Karim is telling us stories of his experiences being photographed for magazines. Hani is rolling his eyes. "Listen to this," he pleads the audience, "one after another." Karim mock-protests that this particular story is not about him, but about a photographer. Hani shrugs and relents.

Interviewing the high-flying brothers Rashid is a study in contrasts: Hani might be characterized as the hands-off theoretician, the experimentalist overseeing a lablike operation; Karim as the hands-on craftsman, the people's designer with the big, slick showroom. Rashid the thinker and Rashid the maker. Both have what appears to be a genetic knack for drawing notice. In the last two years, more than 100 magazine and newspaper articles have been written about Karim alone. With his sensual minimalist furniture and tableware, he has become design's honorary poster boy-seen in Esquire, GQ, and Time, and on CNN and morning news programs. To a lesser-but no less impressive-extent Asymptote, the firm founded by Hani and his wife, Lise Anne Couture, is being quietly cast as torchbearer of our architectural future. Situated at the nucleus of Columbia University's celebrated digital architecture (or "blob") movement, the firm has won the attention of the press for its groundbreaking forays into virtual and hybrid architecture, notably for the New York Stock Exchange and the Guggenheim Museum. Time named Rashid and Couture two of Canada's "leaders for the twenty-first century," and Business Week recently invited them to create a visualization of the twenty-first-century corporate environment. The brothers, it seems, are a phenomenon. Yet Karim is barely 40 and has operated his own company for just seven years, and Hani, 42, has not completed a single building. How did they get to be so big so fast?

This past October I arrived at Karim Rashid Inc.'s west-side Manhattan studio to meet the man we have helped fashion into a modern-day Raymond Loewy. Outside, conspicuously large glass doors allow passersby to admire Karim's trademark colorful plastic seats, a table shaped like a figure eight, and a bright pink ring-shaped couch. Inside, the walls and floors are white with lime green and frosted-glass partitions, behind which a dozen or so young designers sit at candy-colored iMacs and blue G4 monitors. Ambient techno music drifts from hidden speakers. Karim appears; he is charming, relaxed, and, he tells me, jet-lagged. Sliding his gangly 6-foot-4-inch frame into one of his fluorescent Pura chairs, he eagerly begins tackling questions on his favorite subject: himself.

I ask Karim if he is afraid that his meteoric rise to design fame is dependent on a strong consumer economy. He shakes his head. "If you're good, you're good. You're always going to be good," he says, smiling. "If I have a really good idea and I see somebody else has done it-which happens because things move really fast-well, I don't give it a second thought. I have tons of ideas. I have so many ideas." Some would disagree. One highly regarded industrial designer recently confided to me that he found Karim's forms "impressively awkward" and his methods of construction "naive." Animosity toward Karim is inflamed-as this designer admitted-by the "not him again" factor: we the media, seduced by his quotability and eminently photographable oeuvre, have given Karim a hefty share of the limited bandwidth available to designers. I ask him what he would say to those who call his designs derivative. "I'd say they're full of shit, and ask them to prove it," Karim says. "I see the opposite. I see my work being copied all the time." As an example he offers his famous $10 wastebasket named after a movie star: "Seven companies in the world copied Garbo."

It's not hard to see how Karim can be so cocksure. Sales of the curvaceous, translucent polypropylene Garbo have topped two million for its North American manufacturer, Umbra. A steady stream of corporations in the chic business-including Issey Miyake, Prada, Estée Lauder, and Yves Saint Laurent-are now calling on him to package their cosmetics or design their next products. There seems to be no limit to the number and range of projects he will take on. Karim has designed a manhole cover for Con Edison, a CD alarm-clock radio for Sony, a retail store for Totem, and a restaurant for Masaharu Morimoto, the famed Iron Chef. He is working on a disposable lighter for the U.K. firm Ronson to rival the French Bic, designing a hotel in Los Angeles, and developing a range of furniture for Herman Miller. In the Washington Post two summers ago, the co-owner of Umbra likened Karim's reputation to that of Philippe Starck. The firm accordingly stamps "Designed by Karim Rashid" on the underside of his creations. Taking the same cue, the Italian furniture manufacturer Magis has agreed to call one of his chairs--designed as an homage to Charles and Ray Eames--"Kareames."

Hani and Lise Anne, by contrast, have not named their firm after themselves but after a mathematical term describing a line that approaches a given curve without meeting it. Asymptote is headquartered across town on the fifth floor of the curlicued steel and terra-cotta 1904 Singer Building in Soho. Unlike Karim's trim studio, this has the cluttered feel of a classroom. There is no lobby, just a reception desk in a large space packed with desks, drawings, models, and gray computer monitors into which a handful of architects peer intensely. Hani greets me a little cautiously in a meeting room overlooking Broadway. From the outset, he has been less enthusiastic about this article than his media-friendly brother, concerned that comparisons might be facetious. The unspoken possibility, of course, is that readers might consider him less successful than Karim. "One of the drawbacks is assessing design through commercial success," he said to me a week earlier, "and I've been adamant about staying in theoretical pursuits."

That is not to imply that Hani is not also blessed with the promotional gene. In 1995 Asymptote had a 160-page book of its work published by Rizzoli. Given that it was full of unbuilt projects and gallery installations, this was quite a bold move. Subtitled "Architecture at the Interval," the eponymous volume stated: "Today we find ourselves immersed in a spatiality in which indeterminate cultural identities merge with individual autonomy; borders become blurred and desires, transient." Rashid and Couture concluded with the closest thing to a clear manifesto in the book: "Architecture for such fluid, dimensionless territories can only be an utterance, without language; a new architecture that is anticipatory, imperfect, and precisely misaligned."

By immersing his work in the language of the architectural avant-garde, Hani has pulled off a feat comparable to that of his brother: establishing a reputation that to some seems incommensurate with actual achievement-i.e., buildings. Reviewing the installation by Hani and his Columbia stu-dents at the Venice Biennale last year-a ribbonlike structure of curved metal and glowing animations derived from digitally tracking the movements of a gymnast-Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times described the visuals as "sexy but vapid." He added that Rashid is a "talented fellow," but that the project lacked a sense of "real, historical time."

It becomes clear in our conversation, however, that Hani is adept at raising intriguing questions and has built an impressive portfolio of exquisite structural forms, albeit digital ones. His thesis project at Cranbrook Academy of Art was on sixteenth-century memory theater, a prototype of the Victorian museum, which later became a reference point in Asymptote's rapidly expanding Guggenheim Virtual Museum project. In beta form, the online museum is a mazelike arrangement of morphing translucent and solid spiraling ribbons that, according to Hani, will be able to visibly express that a visitor has entered a room before-mirroring the less tangible way "your memory of a room changes." An earlier project, which won a prize from the mayor of Los Angeles, proposed building a "steel cloud" gateway above the Hollywood Freeway that would incorporate aquariums, cinemas, and a digital sound machine that composes and performs music according to the frequency of the cars traveling in and out of the city below. It is described, in inimitable Asymptote fashion, as "architecture for the postinformation age, devoid of perspective, depth, frames, or enclosure; it is a prop for a place where hallucination and fiction temper vivid reality." Had it only been built, we might finally have been able to witness what happens when postinformation-age architecture gets real.

Karim does more producing than theorizing, and in truth the giant production runs and low retail costs of his products are not always conducive to the creation of objects of polished perfection. At one point during a tour of his studio, he shows me an early prototype of the $50 Oh chair he designed for Umbra. I remember that I once cut my finger on the crude molding around the oval-shaped holes in the chair's back. The prototype, however, is deliciously malleable-it began as an exploration of soft plastic, Karim says, as he bends the seat down on both sides so that it almost flips inside out. Sadly, the material wasn't durable enough to satisfy Umbra's engineers, and the final Oh came with a tougher, much less yielding polymer. Other designers might have fastidiously tweaked the shape, or ditched the project. But this designer is a pragmatist. "Compromise is how you work with people," he says.

Karim is a manufacturer's designer, and he makes no bones about differentiating himself from his Europhile design peers who complain that U.S. manufacturers don't get it. "I'm so tired of hearing that everyone has to run to Milan to be a furniture designer," he says. Oh chairs are selling like hotcakes, and the Buffalo- and Toronto-based Umbra is laughing all the way to the next project. Other firms to have been Karimed include Issey Miyake, which-thanks to Karim's widely publicized two-in-one perfume bottle-has experienced a boom in U.S. sales, and the New Mexico foundry Nambé, which back in 1994 commissioned Karim to design a set of curvaceous aluminum-alloy tableware. The project began, he says, with his investigation of the capabilities of aerospace computer numeric controlled machines. The manufacturer now has 12 of these machines churning out Karim-designed objects. Design is not so much about self-expression, Karim says, as it is about "being conversant in the languages of engineering, marketing, and management."

People who have encountered the Rashid brothers, in person or in countless articles, often come away with the impression that their polished presentation skills, charm, and arrogance are the product of a princely Persian upbringing. One look at the brothers' residences-Hani's spacious apartment in Soho and Karim's prime Chelsea location-and you might imagine the boys playing in the crèche at Harrods with the Al-Fayed brothers. I began to wonder if this might be driving some of the criticism leveled at them, and asked the brothers if I might talk to their parents. The real story, it turns out, is much more interesting.

Joyce (née England) Rashid, a retired English schoolteacher, and Mahmoud Rashid, a retired Egyptian art professor and set designer, met in Paris in the 1950s, where Joyce was vacationing and Mahmoud was living on an art scholarship from the Egyptian government. They married in Greece and moved to Egypt, where Joyce became the first British woman to enter the country after the British bombed the Suez Canal. Hani, born in 1958, and Karim, in 1960, established what the elder brother calls an "immutable bond" during an unsettled childhood, when the family moved from country to country in search of a suitable home. Their father, as the protégé of the Egyptian government, was posted around the Mediterranean: to a temporary job in Italy, where he learned to design sets for television; and to Algeria, where he built a national TV design department in the years immediately following independence from France. From Algeria the family, wary of the government restrictions and threat of war in Egypt, embarked on a Sound of Music-style escape from the watchful Egyptian authorities. They took a boat to France rather than the designated ship back to Egypt. Arriving in London in the mid-1960s, Mahmoud found that his impressive credentials as an artist and set designer in North Africa were unimpressive to the xenophobic Brits. After a year of working as a security guard, he agreed to his wife's suggestion that the family try Canada. "I was quite shocked by the racism in the U.K. at the time," Joyce says. "Even getting into schools in London was difficult." Montreal was almost as slow to offer her husband a position, however, so the family moved one last time to Toronto, where the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) offered Mahmoud a job as an assistant designer. His sons, aged five and seven, were finally in a beneficent setting. A daughter, Soraya, was born three years later.

In seeking acceptance in their new surroundings, the Rashid brothers learned to strive for recognition, while being encouraged by their mother to be "very confident" and by their father to compete. "Their similarities come from that they have always been in some kind of competition," Mahmoud reflects. "If Hani gained success, Karim would try to do it better. It was a good jealousy." He regularly took them to the CBC television studio, where they would play in the prop and costume departments, and encouraged drawing competitions, which Karim would invariably win. Karim describes the act of drawing as his "solitudinal epiphany," adding: "I preferred this time alone to spending time with friends."

The parental characterization of the Rashid boys' differences, though varying somewhat from Karim's self-portrait as the artistic loner, is borne out in their career choices. "Hani was the quieter, more introverted one," Joyce says, "and Karim was the opposite-very outgoing and easy to talk to. Hani was more complicated." The brothers enrolled at Carleton University in Ottawa, even rooming together for a year-but Hani chose architecture, the complicated profession, and Karim chose industrial design, the practical one. The older brother went on to Cranbrook Academy of Art's graduate architecture program and in 1989 opened Asymptote with his fellow Carleton alumnus Lise Anne, who has a masters from Yale. The younger brother pursued a more hands-on graduate education in design, traveling to Europe to work and study, landing a job at the Rodolfo Bonetto Studio, in Milan, then at KAN Industrial Designers, in Toronto. By 1993 Karim had followed his brother to New York City.

So far Hani and Karim have always measured their success against each other but never encroached on the other's design territories. "We don't overlap. It's why we are extremely good friends," Hani says. With the increasingly blurred boundaries between design disciplines, however, this is beginning to change. Hani is designing a range of furniture for Knoll; Karim is designing a hotel in Los Angeles. Both Rashids are testing the boundaries of their respective professions-Karim from objects to spaces, and Hani from spaces to hyperspaces. Later this year Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art will stage the first-ever joint project between Karim and Asymptote, a temporary installation exploring the idea of domestic space as a virtual and physical interactive environment.

Back up on the shimmering Soho roof, the mid-photo shoot sibling banter has returned to the subject of Karim's celebrity status. It has surfaced that he is to appear on the cover of another design magazine this month. "Is that a problem?" Karim asks the assembled throng. We nod. Hani, seizing his moment, elbows his brother out of the picture, gesturing at the photographer to take a shot of him standing alone. He grins broadly. It's endearing to witness the older brother keeping the younger one's ego in check and spoofing the sibling rivalry that has helped drive their careers. I am reminded that this extraordinarily successful pair represents a minority group in North America and that each is a role model to many young designers. As such, their public presence is surely a healthy thing.

However, the question still lingers: Can they possibly live up to their reputations? The most valid criticism leveled at the Rashids seems to stem from the fact that the design community expects more of its public representatives. As their work currently stands, Hani and Karim are still conducting formalist explorations-the social consequences of their output seem largely unconsidered. In Hani's case, this is a situation symptomatic of the whole "blob" movement, with its Darwinian investigation of types. "It's a formally driven and inherently conservative movement because it says the way things exist now is alright-we're going to make blobs," says Thomas Fisher, dean of architecture at the University of Minnesota. "But Hani is only part of a much bigger debate about the nature of this future we are constructing." Fisher's colleague Janet Abrams extends the criticism to product design and to Karim, who recently spoke at the university. "There is a need for architects and designers to be more conscious of what world they are designing when they make forms to wear, carry, or occupy," she says. Abrams concedes, however, that the current model, where designers are being called upon to single-handedly shape the virtual and physical environment of the future, is problematic. "It's a burden to ask architects to be political theorists," she says.

The photo shoot is dragging on, and the brothers decide to take five. As they descend the steps from the roof into the blissfully warm apartment below, they chat intensely. The subject seems to be the installation in Philadelphia and what they could do if adequate sponsorship were made available. It occurs to me that with a collaborative situation, Hani and Karim might find in each other a missing ingredient. Karim would benefit from the more thoughtful approach taken by his brother, and Hani would benefit from his brother's real-world pragmatism. The two careers of the brothers Rashid could converge in one climactic event. Whatever happens, we-the media-will be all over it.

Peter Hall is the co-author of Pause: 59 Minutes of Motion Graphics and Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist.