NADAAA’s “Disciplined Negotiations with the Architectural Type” opened on Friday at the Keller Gallery at MIT. It will be on display through early April. For more information click here.
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NADAAA’s “Disciplined Negotiations with the Architectural Type” Exhibit is on display at the Keller Gallery at MIT through early April. The exhibit compares two seemingly disparate projects, Ordos 20+10 and the New Hampshire Retreat, to reveal their common preoccupation with the figural clarity of architectural typology. These two projects negotiate the constraints and conventions of type by introducing the bespoke, the aberrant, and the unique in addressing the specificities of each architectural challenge in inventive ways.
The opening event will be tomorrow at 6:30pm in conjunction with Happy Hour.
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Dortoir Familial (winner of 60th Annual PA award, AIANY and BSA Unbuilt Awards) is on display at the Wolk Gallery as part of the MIT faculty research and design collection entitled Building Discourse. On view until April 17th.
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A final opportunity to view Urban Timber, in what is the final week of the exhibition at the BSA Space. Curated and organized by Yugon Kim, the exhibit was the result of a competition, resulting in dozens of submissions. Targeting innovative ways of building with wood, the agenda of the competition was to assemble four design teams to develop their proposal with the guidance of architectural mentors —Alan Organschi, Alex Anmahian, Andrew Waugh, and me, Nader Tehrani– towards full scale mock-ups that demonstrate through making. With the four projects, also an expansive overview of the uses of wood in history, new means and methods developed in recent times and the range of products that are the result of the wood industry. Not to be missed!
I helped mentor Christina Nguyen and Sean Gaffney, two brilliant young designers who took on the structural challenge of fabricating laminated plywood slabs –post-tensioned– that could take on variable geometries to construct a landscape: a new ground. Also participant to their project, C W Keller Associates, who have done amazing work with us in the past, with Steven Holl and Mark Goulthorpe.
http://www.architects.org/bsaspace/exhibitions/urban-timber-seed-city
Duck-Work: Sean Gaffney, Christina Nguyen
Coopered Column: Timothy Olson
Four Corners: Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forest, Ultramoderne
M2X3: Christopher Taurasi, Lexi White, Jeffrey Lee
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Construction of NoMa art installation has begun. Stay tuned for the final photos!
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Hana Kassem, Design Director at KPF and myself have put together a great roundtable discussion on the programming of public art. The speakers are fantastic and a lively discussion is inevitable. Open to all, free admission and refreshments served.
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Unable to find suitable stands for our architectural models, we commissioned ourselves to build a custom set of steel tables.
Each table has a simple frame of 1″ square tube. The steel is cut to length with double-bevels (yay for our new lubricated band saw), jigged square, and tacked together.
Resolving the corners of the implied box is the key detail of the design. The cleanly-executed welds are left unground and exposed.
The frames are topped with a raw 3/16″ plate and fitted with leveling/locking casters.
Our models, in the NADAAA gallery space.
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For the Manhattan office of engineering firm Simpson, Gumpertz and Heger we harnessed the material and processes frequently analyzed by SGH staff to produce minimal furniture for their copy-room and reception area. The pieces were built by NADAAA in our Boston fabrication space.
Plate steel is plasma-cut off-site. Extruded stock is cut and prepared in-house.
The CNC-cut plates are used to jig the steel frames of the shelving units, which are fully-welded, then tacked to the plate.
Blocking and clamps are used for fit-up, ensuring all elements are square and parallel.
The randomized fin pattern of the reception desk is achieved with spacers of different widths. These spacers ensure that all fins are perfectly parallel. The fins are subtly tacked to the back of the frames so that the connection is not visible.
The 3/8″ thick base plates of the reception desk are leveled and the vertical elements are plumbed, clamped, and welded.
The reception desk is built in three monolithic elements, each carefully designed with respect to the clearances necessary for installation.
Parke failed to measure the truck… good thing he’s lucky.
The robust copy-room tables and shelves resolve functional requirements with an absolute minimum of details: Vertical planes float past slender vertical members.
The reception desk operates as an “inflated” I-beam, with blackened-steel plates connected by a web of irregularly spaced fins.
The patterning of the fins creates shifting perceptions of transparency and opacity from different vantages.
Welds are placed in such a way that the end product reads as a pure assemblage of orthogonal planes.
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The architectural explorations of NADAAA are launched with a bias towards material behavior—tapping into a material’s predisposition, whether it is malleability, translucency, structural rigidity or another property. These properties, in turn, offer geometric opportunities, freeing up the architectural figure from the constraints of the orthogonal box, while also enabling a more reciprocal relationship between form and program, figure and organization, or function and envelope.
Our in-house fabrication capabilities allow us to interrogate our conceptual inclinations toward material in immediate and physical ways. Our interest in flexible, shingled cladding systems has spurred several trajectories of material exploration, shared below. These preliminary exercises inform our design process, catalyzing the dialogue between ideas, materials, tools, and making.
This work is currently exhibited at the SCIN Gallery in London.
Flexible composite panel: Cherry veneer bonded to a rubber substrate
Flexible composite panel: Silicone rubber, cast in a digitally fabricated mold, reinforced with steel wire mesh.
Flexible composite panel: Translucent urethane rubber, directionally-reinforced with stainless steel wire.
The flexible composite panel pairs the malleability of silicone rubber with the strength of stainless steel. The panel’s translucency reveals the architecture of its directional-reinforcement.
1:4 scale rainscreen mock-up. The flexible shingle displayed in this system is a wood veneer laminated to a recycled rubber substrate with marine epoxy. The veneer is sealed with satin exterior-grade polyurethane. Dims: 45″ x 30″ x 15″
Full-scale flexible shingle made of translucent silicone rubber, directionally-reinforced with stainless steel rods. The panel is hung from a steel frame with integral lighting. Dims: 45″ x 30″ x 5″
Geometry emerges as negotiation between material and fabrication processes, while also proving to be a figurative device that is larger than the sum of constructive parts. As such, as the research develops from the scale of the installation to the scope of buildings, the complexity of wall and assembly systems assume broader responsibilities, synthesizing environmental aspects of the building with programmatic goals while also addressing the civic presence of the building within its context.
Our concept proposal for Thunder Stadium features flexible-shingled cladding similar to the prototypes shared here. The project employs this versatile envelope toward the reconciliation of various forces: materials, tectonic systems, programmatic pressure as well as the urban presence of the stadium within the historic core of St. Paul.
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The carefully articulated textures of Aesop East Hampton leverage novel detailing to deliver a visually and tactilely engaging retail space. A band of digitally-fabricated pegboard shelving panels emerges from the large window at the fore of the space, providing a flexible means of displaying product and embedding hidden Morse code messages. A large soapstone basin with vintage garden taps sits on a steel base in the center of the room while the point-of-sale island anchors the rear of the space. The feature elements of the project were fabricated in-house at our Boston office and installed onsite by the NADAAA team.
The completed retail space.
Custom computer codes generate the varied peg-board pattern and hidden morse-code messages.
The CNC-cutting process for each wall panel is digitally simulated before fabrication.
Finished panels are staged in the shop, awaiting transport to the project site.
A specialized jig is used to cut the shelving pegs for the wall panel system.
Welding the steel base for the soapstone sink.
A timber mock-up representing the soapstone sink is used to evaluate faucet design.
The faucet hardware for the sink is soldered on site.
The custom soapstone sink is centrally located in the retail space.
The point-of-sale counter is fabricated in the shop, then disassembled for transport to the site.
The point-of-sale island secrets the necessary retail electronics and tools behind a variation of the perforated scheme used on the walls of the store.
The wall panels mounted to the wall with z-clips on furring strips.
The wall panel system emerges from the window to wrap around the retail space.
Corner detailing.
The pegboard pattern maps continuously over panel seams. Shelving can be easily reconfigured to accommodate evolving product lines.
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