Faris Al-Shathir Matches Designers With Architects ON a drippy Friday last September, a varied lot of fashion designers, downtown night-crawlers and uptown socialites gathered in a raw warehouse space on Walker Street, a forlorn street bordering Chinatown. Inside, the jewelry designer Irene Neuwirth had teamed up with the architect Marc Fornes to transform a former jewelry boutique into a phantasmagoric concept store, with terrarium displays and gold, coral-shaped sculptures that looked like something out of "Barbarella." Visitors marveled at the collaborative genius. But it was neither Ms. Neuwirth nor Mr. Fornes who would take the final bow, but rather a 30-year-old underemployed architect, Faris Al-Shathir, who moved easily through the crowd, air-kissing and backslapping as if he ran the place - which he did. For the last two years, Mr. Al-Shathir has popped up around New York, transforming oddly configured or forgotten spaces into architecturally stunning retail installations. He is a creative matchmaker, pairing young fashion designers with emerging architects through Boffo, the nonprofit group he founded with Gregory Sparks. During New York Fashion Week last fall, Mr. Al-Shathir paired the bad-boy designer Nicola Formichetti with Gage/Clemenceau, an avant-garde architectural firm on the Lower East Side. The result looked like the inside of a shattered kaleidoscope, with shards of mirror and purple lights as a backdrop for Mr. Formichetti's futuristic clothing. Before that, he took over an empty trailer under the High Line park, and had five teams of fashion designers and architects create a series of temporary stores. It was a welcome spurt of retail innovation, at a time when other storefronts were closing. "We're like professional squatters," Mr. Al-Shathir said the other week at Lovely Day, the cafe that is his neighborhood hangout in NoLIta. With his dark close-cropped hair and twinkling green-blue eyes, he looks more like a catalog model than a geeky architect flirting with fashion. "My eyes are my weapon," he said. I smile with my eyes. That's what my mom tells me. He ordered a Corona but barely touched it; he was teaching a 7:30 p.m. spinning class at David Barton Gym, which might explain his outfit: plain gray sweatshirt, tan cotton pants and black-and-white sneakers. "I teach spin class seven times a week," he said. It's partially to keep myself in shape - because I'm a gay man. And I like the structure it gives my life. There's a morning and an end. Mr. Al-Shathir grew up in Joplin, Mo., the youngest of three first-generation Iraqi-Americans. "It was a little bit like "Glee," " he said. There were a lot of high school stereotypes that existed: cool kids, dorks, band nerds, all that stuff. For the record, he was a "cool kid" who also did well in school. It was then that he showed his first knack for organizing parties. When his parents left town, he would hold keg parties for $5 a head. Everyone had to pay. From Joplin, he studied art at Rhodes College in Memphis, puttered around in interior design in San Francisco, before enrolling in the master of architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. There, he befriended a classmate, Mr. Sparks. After graduating in May 2008, he settled in New York. His first friend in the city was Klaus Biesenbach, then a curator for the Museum of Modern Art and now the director of MoMA PS1. "I met him from going out," he said. Just like being gay - kind of the gay mafia everyone talks about. A social fast track maybe, but jobs were tough to come by in 2008. He started teaching spinning classes, something he first did for extra cash in grad school. When he heard Mr. Sparks was working on a collaborative art project, Mr. Al-Shathir signed on. They called their project Boffo, after flipping through the dictionary and finding that the word was commonly used during the Great Depression to mean success. For its debut project in September 2009, Boffo took over a former Bible factory in Brooklyn Heights and invited 150 artists to create at will. "It was on no budget," Mr. Al-Shathir said. That was the beauty of it. It was super authentic. Boffo dipped into fashion the following year. Through Spilios Gianakopoulos, a well-connected architect he met through Mr. Biesenbach, Mr. Al-Shathir organized a series of pop-up boutiques at HL23, a luxury condominium along the High Line that had a vacant trailer that was used as a sales office. Pairings included Richard Chai/Snarkitecture, and Simon Spurr/Collective. By 2011, Boffo had a splashy board of advisers that included James LaForce, who owns a fashion public relations firm. Through another board member, Mr. Al-Shathir was offered the empty space on Walker Street. As the stakes are raised, so are the problems. Money is a constant nag. "It never ends," Mr. Al-Shathir said, his shoulders sagging. It has to be networking, finding the money, matching the right people together and finding the right people to talk about it. But Boffo is forging ahead in new directions. Sometime this month, it hopes to stage a solo show for Marco Ovando, a night life and art photographer, but the exhibition is mired in financing and legal issues. A new installation is tentatively planned for New York Fashion Week next month. Mr. Al-Shathir is working on the logistics. And this summer, Boffo is bringing in the fetish-wear designer David Mason Chlopecki to build a welcome gate near the ferry dock at Fire Island Pines. In the meantime, Mr. Al-Shathir has more pressing concerns. Sitting in the NoLIta restaurant, he alternated between the flashy party boy and the serious martinet. With the clock approaching 7:30 p.m., he grabbed his black backpack and headed to the gym. He had 25 students in his spinning class to lead.