Tanderrum Pedestrian Bridge has won a 2018 Architecture MasterPrize for Urban Design! The Tanderrum Bridge was a collaboration with Melbourne-based John Wardle Architects. More about Tanderrum Bridge HERE. See all the 2018 MasterPrize winning projects HERE.
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William Cooper Mack, Of Anisotropic Matrices – Thesis, 2005-06
The William Cooper Mack Thesis Fellowship Lecture: Digital Materiality in Architecture is being presented at The Cooper Union tonight with lecturers Meejin Yoon and Fabio Gramzio. Nader and Michael Young will moderate. The lecture will be held in The Great Hall in the Foundation Building at 7 East 7th Street. While you’re there, make sure to stop by the current exhibition, Archive and Artifact: The Virtual and the Physical, currently on display in the Arthur A. Houghton Gallery!
The event is free and open to the public. RSVP HERE.
“The work of Fabio Gramazio and Meejin Yoon both draw on digital and computational intelligence through their research and built body of work,” notes Dean Nader Tehrani. “Gramazio’s work, under the banner of Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH has effectively defined the many ways in which formal, spatial, and material practices have been transformed by digital protocols, using their laboratory as a test bed for novel and unprecedented fabrication explorations, working with both traditional materials and invented composites. Meejin Yoon’s work, in contrast, was launched at MIT under the banner of MY studio, and subsequently in collaboration with Höweler Yoon studios, with a research focused on interactive technologies, imaging all the ways in which physical spaces can be augmented through sensory technologies that make for intelligent and responsive environments. Now after more than a decade of research, the two bodies of work converge as digital technologies come into conversation with other disciplines, among them physics, biology, and other sciences. In a dynamic and active field, as architects who share an intense commitment to practice and research, both also share an imagination about how our pedagogies will be impacted by technologies that stand to alter our understanding of both representational and generative thinking.”
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Nader is taking part in a panel at the UNFINISHED book launch at CUNY’s Spitzer School of Architecture Monday at 6pm. UNFINISHED explores projects from the Spanish Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, more info on UNFINISHED can be found HERE.
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photo by Shenjie Li
The Tectonic Grain is a textual and visual array which draws from this experience of designing space for design. The exhibit’s unique layout acts as both model and statement. A lecture given by Nader of the same name on October 24th opened the exhibit and serves as a supplement to the exhibit. To read the corresponding essay, click HERE. To learn more about The Tectonic Grain and the Stubbins Gallery at the Georgia Tech College of Design click HERE.
exhibition connection detail; photo by Shenjie Li
NADAAA approaches architecture with an understanding of a shared ability between academia and its own buildings to teach and challenge the conventions of built space. NADAAA’s work includes three schools of architecture and design: The Hinman Building at Georgia Tech, the University of Melbourne School of Design, and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto. Consequently, NADAAA integrates within its practice an extensive understanding of design schools and the structural and circulatory factors that impact learning about design.
photo by Shenjie Li
In the Atlanta and Melbourne projects, research on suspension became a transformative pedagogical tool. At Georgia Tech, we used the gantry crane above to delicately suspend an entire studio space – “the crib” – in order to maintain the flexibility of the ground level. In the Melbourne School of Design, where there is no budgetary allocation for dedicated studio space, 22 meter LVL beams spanned the atrium and formed the structure for a totemic suspended structure that served as the only dedicated series of studio spaces. The structure is massive and volumetric at its top, extending down to the studio walls in a kind of bas-relief, and eventually thinning out to plywood veneers at its base, where the surface of the cladding serves to create a coffered acoustic ceiling that hovers above the great hall.
Melbourne hanging studio elevation; photo by Nader Tehrani
For the Daniels Building in Toronto, while the idea of suspension was not a motivating force, the integrative mandates and lessons of Atlanta and Melbourne projects became instrumental in the transformation of the design. When the concrete shell roof structure was challenged, the project was virtually brought to its knees in a moment of truth, as it were, effectively on the verge of compromising the building’s most salient feature. The question, for us, was whether this roof was a materially driven idea, or rather just about the integration of structural illumination, environmental, and hydrological performance, as the latter became to dominate our thinking, we redesigned the structure more economically in steel, while keeping its essential figure and performance intact. Composed of a layered system of parts, the steel I-beams with corrugated steel deck, covered with light gauge structs, gypsum board sheets with radiant panels, and a coating of paint. Thus, the paint shows no grain, as such, the most characteristic feature of the building resides in the morphological grain of the roof itself.
Toronto roof section; photo by Nader Tehrani
Credits
Curation and design: Nader Tehrani, Lisa LaCharité & Hannah Wang
NADAAA Installation: Hannah Wang & Luisel Zayas
Georgia Tech School of Architecture students: Shenjie Li & Rachel Cloyd
Photographs: Nader Tehrani & Shenjie Li
photo by Shenjie Li
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A new monograph of Machado & Silvetti’s work begins with an introduction by Nader, who studied under Jorge and Rodolfo at the GSD. Below are excerpts from Nader’s introduction, his full introduction can be read HERE. The print monograph can be purchased online HERE from Oro Editions.
“Interpreting architecture is a sufficiently complex task, but reading into a work that has so deeply biased one’s own education, practice, and pedagogy is altogether another challenge. Such is the Oedipal anxiety I confront in returning to the work of Machado and Silvetti. Thus, rather than claim neutrality here, I want to acknowledge a motivated project, even if I bring to it a different cultural backdrop, generational perspective, and personal viewpoint. Suffice it to say that while this book contains a vast retrospective of their designs, it by no means completes their story. If much remains for them to build on, there is even more that others, like myself, will be contributing to their project through our own speculations.”
above: Djerba House by Silvetti and the Country House by Machado
“Among the myriad writings on typology of this period, the significance of Machado and Silvetti’s contributions lay in the idea that architecture is a cultural practice, and therefore immersed in systems of representation and engagement with a larger public. As such, while they adopted types as a convention for establishing continuity, they did not idealize them. Types, for them, did not have the authority of propriety, but instead were cultural matter as mutable as they were meaningful in their ability to transmit change. In this regard, Machado and Silvetti’s work also explicitly challenged the avant-garde notion of the ‘new’, which is invariably and repeatedly absorbed, consumed, and normalized in the digestions of the cultural process.”
above: Asian Art Study Center at the Ringling Museum of Art
“The transformation of Machado and Silvetti as a firm into a builidng practice produced a meaningful shift from their academic work. With a small set of commisssion in the 1980s and early 1990s behind them, winning tje Getty Villa competition and embarking on the design of its expansion in 1994 enlarged the office tenfold. It also required the partners to translate their conceptual and theoretical priorities for a broader cohort. Their baggage of professional experiences would catapult them into new possibilities for materializing complex assemblies, in some instances; but it would also be a sober reminder of how the industry predetermines the vast set of questions and specifications that go into building processes. Balancing out the relationship between the customized and the generic, the theoretical premises of the figural and the configurative helped Machado and Silvetti to set certain priorities within each project.”
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Spectrum, MIT’s publication for friends and supporters, recently provided an update on the future Kendall Square. Here, MIT President Rafael Reif explained that the boundaries between campus, community, education and entrepreneurship will blur. “Once the cranes leave town, we’ll be left with a Kendall Square full of possibility for the Institute, the region, the nation, and the world… If you haven’t been to Kendall Square recently, I hope you’ll stop by for a visit. You’ll be amazed by the progress we’re making.” Read the full article in Spectrum HERE. More info on NADAAA and Perkins+Will’s collaboration on the MIT Site 4 project at Kendall Square can be found HERE.
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Nader will join speakers: Andrea Bardin, Neeraj Bhatia, Orit Halpern, Shannon Mattern, Emanuele Quinz, Gilles Retsin, Dubravka Sekulic, Kathy Velikov; and moderators: Thomas Balaban, Samuel Bernier-Lavigne, Sinisha Brdar, Salmaan Craig, Fabrizio Gallanti, and Irena Latek to discuss Architecture in Light of the Notions of Form and Information. The Seminar begins tomorrow at 9am in the amphithéâtre 3110 at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. More information can be found HERE.
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NADAAA was recognized for their collaboration with the Van Alen Institute and The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, for a re-imagining of the related systems of incarceration, justice and community. Using design to bind scattered mechanisms of social healing, NADAAA is deeply proud of Justice In Design, and its model of a more responsive and considered justice system. To learn more about this work click HERE, and to read about the award click HERE.
NADAAA’s Daniels Building was also mentioned as an honoree in the category Spaces, Places and Cities. To learn more click HERE.
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Architecture students from the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union recently traveled to Puerto Rico to practice an in-depth approach to solution-based design. In collaboration with professors and students from the University of Puerto Rico, students from Cooper and UPR challenged themselves through an intensive programmatic tour of the island, emphasizing a need for housing. A shortage of housing is chronic to the island, and was further exacerbated by the damage caused by hurricanes Irma and Maria. “The advent of the hurricane offered an opportunity to engage in a social project that could make both immediate and long-term contributions to the island, but also to the discipline.” -Nader Tehrani
Students studied housing from diverse perspectives, ranging from a lack of promised pharmaceutical jobs preventing economic advancement in San Juan, to homemade techniques of preventing soil erosion thorough buried layers of fabric. Back in New York, students used their research to re-imagine the relationship between systemic factors in housing and propose location-specific designs.
To learn more about architecture students at Cooper and their work in Puerto Rico click HERE.
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Structure, the new review of structural design and engineering published by Detail, describes the system of tubular steel that envelopes the Tanderrum Bridge’s spanning walkways and folded railing.
“Depending on the viewpoint, this tubular veil may look heaver or lighter, which creates a fascinating interplay of light and shadow and achieves a perfect blend of structural engineering and landscape”-Roland Pawlitschko
To learn more about the Tanderrum Bridge click HERE.
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