Nader reviews Carla Ferrer, Thomas Hildebrand, and Celina Marinez-Cañavate’s new book for Architectural Record. The book explores forest management and the “illusion of infinite bounty”, the “present architectural arms race to build enlightened wood structures”, and the future of timber.

“Composed of three segments, its various writers bring perspectives ranging in disciplines to allow for a broader cultural reading than any conventional book on wood technologies. Acknowledging the already present and looming crisis of climate change as a central protagonist, the book also positions the balance of merits and liabilities in developing an attitude toward the production of wood, allowing the readers to better understand how a sustainable production of wood is a plan that cannot occur as a single decision but as something that requires ongoing efforts over years, administrations, nations, and cultures.”

Read on HERE.

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Miguel Guitart’s new book Approaching Architecture: Three Fields, One Discipline has been released for pre-order and includes a foreword by Nader Tehrani and contributions from 18 globally diverse teams of architects.

Purchase Approaching Architecture HERE.

More on Guitart’s work HERE.

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“The morphological particularities of the body offer a productive clue via their engagement with architecture, if only that the interface between the human and its environment may begin with the body as a system of parts: the torso, limbs, digits or head all establish a special relationship with the built environment. With the hand as maybe one of the most dexterous instruments of intelligence, it is also the most prone to architectural engagement, not only in the tactility of surfaces around us, but in the mechanical protocols of hardware, instruments, and vessels that mediate between the human and its environment: doorknobs, pulls, flatware, cups, and many industrial design artifacts are the first registration of such encounters.”

Jonathon Anderson and Lois Weinthal’s new book Digital Fabrication in Interior Design: Body, Object, Enclosure has been released! The book includes an essay entitled “The Figure in Translation” by Nader Tehrani.

Available for order HERE.

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“Among the many tendencies that characterize design thinking, one stands out from a material perspective: in identifying a single medium through which to work, the architect is able to force invention from within a genre, and in doing so, to radicalize its ability to transform, evolve, and innovate. There is a seductive allure to the idea that one might entirely conceive of a project in cross-laminated timber”

Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara’s new book Blank: Speculations on CLT has been released and includes an essay entitled “Blank Shots: Monolithic Desires and Laminar Inevitabilities” by Nader Tehrani.

Purchase Blank HERE.

More on Bonner and Kara’s mass timber research HERE.

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On the twentieth anniversary of Eladio Dieste’s passing, Nader writes on ‘confluence’ in Dieste’s work in AR Confluences. Eladio Dieste, an Uragayian ‘designer’ and a “great, yet lesser-known, 20th-century thinker who operated outside of the modernist canons” has had his work analyzed by many writers, all of which “note the way in which art and science are brought into confluence, revealing with great analytical precision how Dieste worked with the science of engineering to achieve geometric and structural feats that are deemed great works of ‘art.’”

“At the same time, it was the strategic way in which he brought the confluence of mathematics, geometric thinking, the protocols of construction, material innovation and historical knowledge into dialogue that made possible the types of inventions he unleashed [..] the laws of physics and optics come into an improbable alliance—not natural, nor harmonious or obvious—but a masterful aplomb of artifice to witness.”

Read the full essay HERE.

AR/Architecture Research is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published yearly by the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Architecture. AR Confluences is guest-edited by Robert McCarter.

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