NADAAA collaborated recently with two students from The Cooper Union to realize a new pavilion for the Shenzhen Biennale in the Nantou Urban Village of Shenzhen. The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at Cooper interviewed the students, Margaux Wheelock-Shew and Jeremy Son, on their experience of collaborating with a design office to complete a built project. Read the interview HERE.

The next big surprise: somebody over there decided it should be permanent, though it had originally been designed to be dismantled. So, the Chinese welded the joints and sank it into concrete. There is some irony to this because of all the designs the team came up with, the one they meant to be impermanent was the one with the scaffolding. “That thing is not going anywhere,” Margaux says. Tehrani added: “Moreover, it is an important recognition that such initiatives can be in service of a larger civic mission that contributes back to the community in which it is lodged.”

photo by Lea Bertucci, The Cooper Union

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