Nader Tehrani - The Tectonic Grain

With an office dedicated to academia, NADAAA –and its principal, Nader Tehrani-- have been dedicated to building bridges between practice and its aligned disciplines for over 20 years. Having taught at Northeastern University, RISD, Harvard, Georgia Tech, MIT, and now at The Cooper Union, Tehrani has had a chance to witness and participate in varied pedagogical cultures and intellectual streams. With the NADAAA team, Tehrani has completed three schools of architecture for Georgia Tech, The University of Melbourne and the University of Toronto. While this is somewhat of a coincidence, it has led to an in depth analysis of the current state of design schools, some of their radical curricular and structural differences, the manner in which technology has changed the spaces of each school and more broadly how spaces of education are evolving in different ways according to varied cultural and intellectual platforms. One of the significant changes that has taken place in recent years concerns the redefinition of the studio space, most commonly held to be the heart of the school of architecture. For this reason, the program of the School of Architecture is being completely re-thought, with spaces of research, fabrication and collaboration taking on a higher urgency than before.