To celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary, Nader – along with architects from Snøhetta, 5468796 architecture and other firms – spoke about what he believe’s the country’s role in architecture will be in the next 150 years.

“From our perspective today south of the border, we can imagine Canada playing an important role in offering a platform for social equity and environmental issues through the agency of design, all of which your leadership has shown in some measure – something that is being denied to us in the USA under our current administration. If the current spheres of power are fleeting moments in the context of the next 150 years, they are also a reminder that their impact can only be seen if treated as long-term commitments as part of a larger social contract.”

Read more HERE.

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The newly released Patkau Architects: Material Operations demonstrates how the firm utilizes traditional building material and unconventional construction methods to produce poetic forms with a unique identity. The book includes a preface from Nader:

“[Patkau’s] work has always maintained a deep commitment to the development of a ‘tectonic culture,’ using construction elements not only for the fabrication of buildings but indeed to transcend the ‘merely material’ and create artful and poetic assemblies that dematerialize the conventions with which common construction is oft associated.”

Buy the book HERE. Read Nader’s preface HERE.

“Engaging the grain of wood for the Skating Shelters is a way of understanding how its fibers may inform the possibility of spatial and formal pliancy. In contradistinction to classical modes of composition, where the figurative and compositional aspects of design are assumed, this suggests a bottom-up approach: discovering through tinkering. By extension, their requisite play with plywood acknowledges the dual directionality of plywood laminates, the overlay of which offers a structural composite that defies that very natural grain to work at a modular scale of industrial production. The 4′ x 8′ sheet here becomes a unit of production that helps not only to extend seamless surfaces but also to create the very joints that make its tectonic ethic an irreducible part of its inventive expression.”

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