Architect Farshid Moussavi is behind a tranquil and timeless new building where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community can come together. But how has she created something that looks so delicate out of stone?

On a hot autumn day in southern Texas, monarch butterflies flit around the gardens of Houston’s new Ismaili Centre. Fragile and gaudy, they are on their way south to overwinter in Mexico, travelling up to 3,000 miles in a typical migration cycle, an epic feat of insectile endurance.

Their combination of delicacy and stamina is an apt metaphor for the Ismaili Centre, a building that has taken seven years to realise and is designed to last for a century or more. It’s a place where Houston’s 40,000-strong Ismaili Muslim community, one of the largest in the US, can practise their faith but it’s also a venue for shared activities.

Design Museum, London
The Fantastic Mr Fox’s snappy outfits, an intricate model of the Grand Budapest Hotel and dozens of stop-motion puppets are all among the 700 objects in this sugarcoated quirkfest

Terrible things happen in Wes Anderson films. In his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, a man is casually split in half in an aircraft crash. In The Royal Tenenbaums, the patriarchal protagonist feigns a terminal illness in order to weasel his way back into his estranged and dysfunctional family. In The Grand Budapest Hotel the “heroic” concierge Monsieur Gustave is essentially a killer and the fictional Republic of Zubrowka is in the tightening grip of a fascist regime.

All this is played for knowing comedic effect (the splatted bisection resembles a Tom and Jerry cartoon; Zubrowka is a brand of Polish bison grass vodka), while lavishly sugarcoated in a set dressing of eccentric curios, outlandish costumes and saturated colour. Anderson aficionados will be familiar with the drill, a bit like finding a gnat in a cupcake, delivered in a series of perfectly composed vignettes.