Nader Tehrani

Recorded on April 4, 2025. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

Nader Tehrani founded the Boston-based architectural and urban design firm NADAAA in 2011 with Katherine Faulkner, later joined by Arthur Chang as principal. Their work advances design innovation, intense tectonic exploration, and dialog with the construction industry, often manifesting in large institutional and university buildings, as well as private residences. Tehrani’s early work was produced in partnership with Monica Ponce de Leon and Rodolphe el-Khoury in Office dA, which received the Architectural League Prize in 1997 and its Emerging Voices Award in 2003. Over the course of his practice, he has received 18 Progressive Architecture awards, four American Architecture awards, four Chicago Athenaeum awards, and many others for his contribution to architecture as an art. Tehrani is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold W Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also been named the 2022 National Design Awards Design Visionary by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Tehrani is the former dean of the Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and former head of the Department of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Recent and current NADAAA projects include MIT Site 4, a renovation of The Met’s galleries for Ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot Art, an addition to the University of Nebraska College of Architecture, and others.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:19
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit placing other values above it at least momentarily, my guest in this episode is Nader Tehrani. Welcome Nader.

Nader Tehrani  01:26
Thank you for having me.

Miljački  01:28
Nader Tehrani founded the architectural and urban design firm NADAAA in Boston in 2011 with Katherine Faulkner, later including Arthur Chang, who is now leading the office with Nader. Their work advances through design innovation, intense tectonic exploration and dialog with construction industry, manifesting in large institutional and often university buildings, as well as private residences. Tehrani’s early work was produced in partnership with Monica Ponce de Leon and Rodolphe el-Khoury in Office dA which had received the Architectural League prize, or the Young Architects award in 1997 and its Emerging Voices Award in 2003 over the course of his practice, he has received 18 Progressive Architecture awards, four American Architecture awards, four Chicago Athenaeum awards, and many others for his contribution to architecture as an art. Tehrani is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2020 Arnold W Brunner Memorial Prize. He has also been named the 2022 National Design Awards Design Visionary by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. His and his office’s works have been widely exhibited from MoMA to ICA Boston, and have been included in permanent collections at the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Nasher Sculpture center. Tehrani is the former dean of the Cooper Union Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, where he served from 2015 to 2022 and former head of the Department of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he served from 2010 to 2014. NADAAA has a number of important recent and current projects, including a couple of pieces here at MIT, a gateway and MIT Site Four, a renovation of The Met’s ancient near east and Cypriot galleries, addition to the University of Nebraska School of Architecture, Otis House complex renovation and others. And I hope we get to some of those in some detail. But as always, we will start with the work that is not on the boards, so to speak, at the office. So as you know Nader, I have been opening these conversations with a question about the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, or if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening and on what grounds?

Tehrani  03:57
Well, to begin with, despite your gracious introduction, getting any work at all is already a big deal for a small office like ours, so we’re not often in a position of denying work. And that explains a little bit the election to have a wide array of work, from urban design all the way down to furniture, but it also, some of it is intentional, obviously, but some of it is happenstance. Things get thrown at you, and different challenges come to you, and one’s intuition is to say, what kind of role could I play in taking this on and how transformative could it be? But obviously, there have been circumstances where we’ve had to bow out of certain opportunities. One was probably around 5, 10, years ago, at a time when we had already started doing a variety of schools and an education specialist from Florida, I believe, reached out to us who had been doing schools around the world, and said that there’s this great opportunity in the Middle East, and you might be just the right person to partner with. And we’ve done a lot of partnering and collaboration over the past 20 plus years. And so we don’t shy away from getting engaged, from new kinds of partnership. We developed a proposal and a narrative that goes along with it, and we were flown to the Middle East. The rest I can’t remember that well. I just remember being in the most beautiful hotel and then just waiting and then waiting, and then waiting, and then nothing happened. And so after a day, they said, Oh, the proposal will happen tomorrow. So we waited another day, and then we waited again and waited. And by the end of that day, they said it’ll happen tomorrow. When we woke up, they said there’s been a change of plans, and we’re going to fly you to another city. And we were flown to a second city. Limousines picked us up, and we were taken to a campus of some sort, to private rooms, and we did, we were not told who we’re going to meet, and we made a presentation, eventually, to a person who I’m told was important, but I don’t know who that is, and they said they loved it through translation. And we said, okay, great. So, what are the next steps? They said, We love everything. But they showed us a kind of booklet of images of Japanese comic strips that they love very much, kind of Neo Gothic images. And they said, “We love the plan, we’d like you to revise the iconography to match these images,” and realizing that we’re not experts at that kind of work, I said to them, Sure, no worries, no problem. But as we were flying back, I just told our partner firm that I’m happy to hand over the work back to them and for them to take it on. And, you know, and we can discuss the reasons. It’s probably mostly intuition. It has nothing to do with the Neo Gothic, which I would love to do in a different way. But, I think for them, the imagery was of such paramount importance that any of the projects that we take on as integrated architectural thinking could not be undertaken there, not being able to speak to the team with whom you’re supposed to collaborate on the other end was going to be frustrating, and I imagine that that’s going to be a problem. And then realizing that culturally, we may be the wrong person to get into such a thing, even if it’s of great money, meant that it may end up becoming more stressed than it’s worth. So, I handed the job away to the other consulting firm, and we waved it goodbye. It’s not the only time we’ve said no, but there’s things like this that happen and you realize you’re just probably the wrong person.

Miljački  08:56
Are there things that you would say are signs that you responded to or would respond to?

Tehrani  09:05
You can, sort of, you develop an intuition of these things. Look, I go back to the beginning. My intuition is, if something is difficult, I’ll say, no problem. Let’s see. Let’s understand it and let’s take it on. But when you have great partners in clients, that means that they’re usually great communicators. They usually know a lot about their culture and their program and their ambitions. They may not have the spatial, formal or material skills that go along with it, but that’s why they’re in dialog with you. But when you’re handed off to a representative, an abstract project manager, or somebody who is the transmitter of messages back and forth between a chairman or a committee, it’s already a bad sign, because when you… a client is not, let’s say, the end point of a process, they are a central part of the design team, notwithstanding the fact that they may not touch a pencil or a mouse along the way, they are a critical part of it. And so, the best projects that we’ve had and continue to have, the clients are amazing in their capacity to understand the design, be engaged in it, ask smart questions and also educate you.

Miljački  10:38
So, is this question about things you might want and might not want to do, something that you would say you have had a different position on at different times in your career?

Tehrani  10:48
You mean being selective about what you do?

Miljački  10:51
Yeah, sort of, like your relationship to simply saying yes or no or sort of questioning a commission. Is this something that you could always have the same relationship to, or is it evolving?

Tehrani  11:07
Obviously, it’s evolving. But there’s a cultural dimension to that question, which I can’t deny. No matter my education in this country, I’m still an immigrant, and so I felt that all along, and not being embedded in a community, not having direct access to patronage of this or that kind. I don’t naturally, we don’t naturally get work. Work comes to us by way of a huge network of architects, usually mostly architects, by the way, that are supporters, people that I’m indebted to forever. But the reality is that we have been painstakingly looking for work from the beginning, and still do to this day. So that’s my primary intuition, the selectiveness DNA emerges as a function of the pleasure that comes out in doing a body of work, whether that is a chair, or an interior or an urban design plan. I think there’s a lot of pleasure, I mean, you forget that we’re in this for other reasons also. So, we do take on a range of things that we think we will learn from and also contribute in some way.

Miljački  12:39
I might have, I have a perfect follow up, and then maybe later more. But you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s organized on the firm’s website in terms of both client typologies and program interchangeably. So, research, commercial, academic libraries, public realm, housing, furniture. Somewhere else you said that NADAAA’s portfolio is built on process rather than typology, and I was hoping that we could talk about how you at NADAAA think about commissions slash typologies. Do you cultivate specific lines of inquiry within your body of work and how? Or maybe another way to say that, do you use the topics you’re already researching to discern between possible commissions in some way, do you seek out work, or do clients seek out you?

Tehrani  13:29
Let’s start with the end. First, we seek out a lot of work, and usually we don’t get those. And when we don’t expect any works, and somebody calls it means that they were selecting us already in some way. So, I found our endless search for work pretty, pretty much unsuccessful.

Miljački  13:54
You don’t think it’s crucial in the possibility of the other direction, also that it supports in some way, those who call you up?

Tehrani  14:06
Those who call us, call us because of reputation, because of hearsay or because of direct knowledge. And I do think process has something to do with that, because we don’t do that much work, and when you’re doing three or four, four projects at the same time, it means that I am, we are directly involved in that work. There isn’t some abstract team in some back room working on it. We it’s a small firm, so and we often team up. So, if we need support, we get it through others whose bench is deeper than our own, but we show up to those meetings. We listen. Listening is something that’s often overlooked, and part of our role is to translate, because the bigger the commission is, the larger, the more amount of stakeholder groups there are, or community groups that you meet and the more of those meetings there are, the more divergent the opinions of what a project may end up becoming. And so, part of our role is to establish either a rhyme or reason, a logic or a consensus of what are the common denominators in what appears to be heterogeneous thoughts, but actually coalesces in some way or another. So, I think the process matters. Our internal process, of course, is distinct from our external ones, because there are, like any other office, there are certain protocols and areas of interest that are unique to our own. And I can speak to those also.

Miljački  15:50
I’m just trying to sort of imagine organizing the work according to some description of the process. That’s just, I wonder what that would be?

Tehrani  16:00
In the early days, in an era where architecture was about form or was about type, we stumbled into materiality as a discovery or as a yearning of what the Swiss were doing at that time, this is 30 years ago plus, and realizing that the courses that we were taking in school were in the kind of building technologies realm, but really not part of the intellectual debate. So, you were either a techie or you were a designer, but the technology aspects never came into design. All of those first projects were about taking on the means and methods of construction as part of a critical debate, and learning that, from a legal perspective, the architect has no right to the means and methods and only has rights to design intent. We were only scandalized further to realize the political weight of what we may be taking on, that we are making huge claims through the drawings that we’re doing, and somebody from a construction field is unilaterally rejecting that design based on their access to quantity surveying and material knowledge, and has the political way to veto what we’re doing right in front of the client. And so we took on a range of projects in those early years. I don’t know if you were here in Boston when we built Mantra, because we built it ourselves.   

Miljački  17:59
I’ve been to it many times. As a neighbor of it. 

Tehrani  18:01
Oh, you had? Okay. So the hookah den, I’ve told this story many times…The hookah then was, I don’t know, budgeted, I mean the restaurant was budgeted at $230,000, but the hookah den itself came out at $200,000 and we just didn’t, we didn’t deal with money those days. So, we said, how could it be that, you know, 90% of this project is going into this little pavilion, and we decided to cut the wood and stack it. We did it, actually Hansy Luz Better, who’s the head of the BSA right now was a young architect working for our firm, and she’s the one who laid out all of those bricks of wood with plum bobs from the ceiling. A plan at full scale was printed out, we realized we could do about six or seven layers per day with a tolerance of less than a quarter of an inch, which is virtually impeccable, right? That we could do about all of the layers in 30 days for about $1,000 a day. So that’s $30,000 materials and profit included, and you still have another $200,000 for the rest of the thing. So that was a kind of awakening for us. 

Miljački  18:07
I have a question that exactly follows on that. But for me, I mean, I am interested in, what would be the organization of work if means and methods, perhaps, were or process were the way that you organized it? So it’s the kind of particular search that’s in those projects becomes the tool by which you organize them, as opposed to commercial, academic, public realm. That’s, for me, I’m trying to understand these words on the website as a kind of signaling, right?

Tehrani  19:59
The reality is that because of these little discoveries, we tended, and continue to do, to some degree today, to design from bottom up rather than top down. We’re not doing the site plan and delaying materiality till nine months later. We are developing a portfolio of what I call catalytic details, details that are not bespoke moments, but are systemic and are distributable throughout the design. And use them strategically in this project or the next project, because they become part of a family of a lexicon of pieces. And in some way, they find themselves in a strategic debate with both the contractor and the client, because you realize that not every detail is as affordable in this geography than it is another, because there are such things as steel cities versus concrete cities, or there’s places of wood versus masonry. So, you begin to not completely expose your cards, but play your cards against each other, so that you don’t fall in love with your design prematurely. You allow that process to be part of the intellectual development of a scheme, but also the guessing game as to where a scheme may end up going.

Miljački  21:31
So based on your Mantra story, but also having watched a number of lectures in rapid succession, one thing that stood out to me is that in a number of projects, some very old Boston ones, like <antra, but also the Daniels ceiling, for example, you decided to produce something on your own to prove that it is literally and financially possible. And so, this knowing how to build something means having agency to do it, you say, and to convince others to support it. So, when you tell this Daniels story, you talk about that as a kind of vignette in the politics of construction. And so maybe it would be useful to talk about the collaboration with builders or construction industry. Does it feel like a collaboration or some other sort of mechanism of convincing?

Tehrani  22:26
Both and, I mean, in the Daniels, I wouldn’t call that a great collaboration with the contractors, but it was a great collaboration with the Daniels faculty, who built almost all of the millwork inside the building. So in brief, there are projects where a mill worker or a metal worker will show us their repertoire of work, and then we will internalize that, and then do mock ups in the office that take it to the next level and then show it to them and they may react positively or negatively, but the moment you show them that the details that we’ve deployed are actually an extension of what they already do, you break it down for them, they say, of course, we can do this. It’s also about getting a level of craft to which many projects think they have no access, and you demonstrate that, in fact, there’s a simplicity to the way that you’re operating, but gives them a level of tactility that is usually not accessible to certain budgets.

Miljački  23:40
What would you say is the kind of knowledge, or skill set that you look for in someone who comes to work as part of NADAAA?

Tehrani  23:51
From a technical perspective, just because of the pressures that are always there, they have to have an impeccable understanding of geometry. Invariably, they have to understand drawing as a discipline, and usually in these days, that’s channeled through Rhino, though there are Revit and other software that we have to go through, but that means nothing, in comparison to what we really need, which is malleability, ambition, an embracing of uncertainty, and the ability to play that is much more valuable in the partner that you inherit, whether that’s somebody with 20 years of experience, or whether it’s an intern with no experience at all. And it has transformed us, critically. You know one of those people, Brandon Clifford, was a student that had just graduated from Georgia Tech when he came to spend maybe a year or two with us. Yeah, I think he stayed for about four years, but he was transformational in our collaboration, but we were looking for a little bit of the former skills that I mentioned, but a lot more for those things that you when you wake up in the morning, you know you’re going to a terrain that may change course during that day, and you want somebody to be right there with you.

Miljački  25:29
Thank you. So Fred Bernstein proposes in an AD article on your schools that you have uniquely influenced, or have unique influence on young architects by designing architecture schools more than any other architect, and there is now one more school than when Fred first wrote that article, so Georgia Tech, Melbourne University, Daniels school in Toronto and the Nebraska University School extension, and you have yourself written on the relationship between architecture schools and their pedagogical projects. And I’m interested in whether you feel implicated in these schools, pedagogical legacies, or how you think about that responsibility when designing?

Tehrani  26:28
So, the question that we enter into all of these commissions with is something that, in part, is autobiographical, and something that we all feel. You probably remember very well, the intellectual project of Rice, and you must in some way, project that onto the ethos of the school, even though the school is probably very different today, but something of that resonates with the spaces in which they happen. Now I’m not suggesting a kind of social determinism whereby the architecture makes us do certain things a certain way, but I also don’t like the idea that we are in, we are completely neutral to our environment, because we’re not. So as we look at, let’s say, the case study of the GSD, the trays that we’ve all been inside, we can’t deny that, typologically, that terracing produces a theater-like condition, which is completely irrelevant to design, really, that makes you on a stage with hundreds looking at you, or vice versa, with you in the audience looking at other people on a stage. And this trope, this spatial trope, transforms the act of designing just by virtue of where the subject and the object the protagonists of that space are. I like to think of extreme buildings that do these things. SCI-arc does that in the length of the building and the way in which bicycles and skateboards animate relationships between studios and auditorium and crit spaces along the long wall, or famously, the role of the bar at the AA, which is just a couple of row houses and there are leaders like Boyarsky understanding that for lack of an institutional space, and the lack of quantity of space or dedicated studios, that the way to put this school on the map is to broadcast it. And so, the bar became the intellectual hub, but the publications and the exhibitions were, enabled that to be reverberated globally, and that was the era in which globalization, one could say, was taking hold. And he understood that, knowing that the AA was going from the good old boys club to an international school, with, at that time, the Japanese economy being really strong and becoming a central platform for their tuition, basically. But I like to think of all of our schools as somehow responding to a particular culture that they already have, and in turn, imagining that something that we’re doing is either critically transforming it or responding to a need that they never had. That they now can have. I mean, in the case of Melbourne School of Design, that was really critical, because their main competition was RMIT that had dedicated studio spaces, and MSD did not. And so, our main commission was to design the studio of the future there, and within the first month, we came to the realization that they didn’t have the money for a dedicated studio space. So, it was very different than Georgia Tech and Daniels. So what we did, this is in collaboration with John Wardle, is we ended up coming up with an incredibly simple scheme, an atrium space whose corridors expanded from five feet to about 10 and whose budget of the FF&E was smuggled into the railing system that would produce an infrastructure of tables, desks and seats that would become the collaborative conference tables, The drafting boards and the crit spaces forming a sectional idea about how you separate different disciplines on every floor, but force them to go up and down, to use these different infrastructures, allowing for a kind of interdisciplinarity, by virtue of mixing people on different floors, so that you can’t say that there isn’t a form of social engineering within the section of this scheme. But at the same time, we had to do it through a very precise manipulation of the budget, once we realized they just didn’t have the right budget for dedicated studio spaces. So, there’s about, I don’t know, 1000, 1500, seats in there, but they are hot desks.

Miljački  32:08
But let me ask you, maybe, something that’s a little less programmatically driven. You say in one of these lectures that architecture is not what you draw, but what you sense. And I found that switch of subjectivity, flipped from architect to user, very interesting and maybe specific to the school work, where, for example, in that Melbourne School, I think about the importance of the ceiling structure, maybe ceiling structure in general, but you also describe it as the problem of tectonics, gravity, sensation and the phenomena of suspension. And to me, that also sounds like an architecture school speaking to its students.

Tehrani  32:53
Oh for sure. To be clear, the way that Melbourne had conceptualized the competition, in my opinion, was far more sophisticated than any of the others we’ve worked on, because of the way that Tom Kvan, the former dean, had laid out the brief. And one of the points he made was that he wanted an exemplary pedagogical building. We asked him, Well, yes, what is a pedagogical building? I’m not sure if this was his response or my interpretation of that response, is that, in one way, he wanted us to develop spaces of teaching or learning that speak to the curriculum they have. But also, his aspiration was that by virtue of its objecthood, or its spaces or the performance of the building, the building is exemplary in the sense that it’s a didactic artifact. Now let’s think of it from the reverse way around. If you know already that you have a captive audience of 2000 students, 200 faculty and 10,000 alumni, all of which are as erudite, if not more than you, in the discipline to which you’re speaking, then the interpretations of this building are happening at a far higher level, and so its pedagogical function is even more. So the suspended studio is a kind of direct inversion of both tectonic senses and the way that one would build a building up, in that sense, using a naturally renewable resource for the greater part of the building, ensuring that that roof is, in a way, the mechanism that controls structure, daylighting and the hydrological control of the building in a part of the country that is still relatively dry to save the water as part of the cistern and irrigate the site. Connecting that to the idea of the very dedicated studios that we could afford for the visiting critics was of symbolic charge, and so inverting those tectonics in massive pieces of timber that get thinner and thinner and more laminar as they get suspended down, is part of an affect, an emotive aspect of architecture, something experiential that I’m not sure if it’s well transmitted through the radio or through a podcast, but it is something that is very intentional and very much part of our thinking, that these so called narratives about the catalytic detail and the means and methods actually result in anticipated audiences. Let’s say both the educated audience as well as the non-educated, the ones who are not educated in architecture that is to be able to participate in some way, in a way that sponsors reactions positive or in surprise or whatever that is significant.

Miljački  36:24
How is University as a client and university campus as a context in which to build?

Tehrani  36:31
It depends on what kind of architect you are. If you are insecure about their participation, you’re dead meat. But if you embrace it, you will, it’s probably the best ride in your life. In both of these schools, Daniels and MSD, the stakeholders have, well, they have a stake in the building, their research spaces, their areas, to which they have impact is huge. And so, the form of some of these buildings is very much indebted to those faculties, the Grit Lab that is sponsored by the landscape department and the Daniels, on the roof of the building takes its form directly because of their directives, not ours. The emergence of the Fab Lab, the very people that built all the millwork in the school, the stage on which it happens on the outdoor space, the theater that it creates in relationship to Spadina North, all of this is a nod not only to Richard Summer, who was the Dean, but also the faculty that had great agency. So, I suppose we could have suppressed that kind of participation or succumb to it. In our case, we, well, we are teachers also, so we’ve also been on the other side of the barrier. And so, we understand also how great works or great conditions or great situations may come out of somebody else’s idea. And so those, to some degree, you see these buildings as having a strong diagram, but to some degree, actually, there’s informal conditions that emerge and erupt out of spaces that are the result of the informal participation of a great range of people that have an impact on them.

Miljački  38:37
Is there a difference for you between architecture schools as clients and university as a client? Because I think you answered university with architecture school examples.

Tehrani  38:50
It’s true. Look, I think in any university, and certainly MIT was not an architecture school, it was 10s of stakeholder meetings, the public, the City of Cambridge, the business groups, this and that research. I think the great thing about the, let’s say, the university process, is that it is a committee driven process. So, to the extent that you know how to hold a certain narrative in check. You can make ideas that are the embodiment of their ideas, not yours, and to the extent that you can create consensus means that the democratic process that these large projects require, can become something larger than the sum of their parts. The great danger, as always, is that if you listen to everybody and every group and the building becomes a kind of heterogeneous hodgepodge of allowances for everybody. You may not have a piece of architecture, but to the extent that you demonstrate that they have a common denominator and that that can achieve something stronger for them all, the committee process has been a very strong one for us. I should say that Site Four and The Gateway are two different processes. The Gateway was a moment that you never imagined will happen in architecture, that you draw something up… It wasn’t a competition. We just drew it up, we submitted it, and there emerged in the institution a kind of overwhelming support for it, and by having driven it to some place with an idea about solving the immediacy of the base conditions in one voice, but having an image, a spatial image, an iconic image, something Civic, something public, was where everybody came around in support of that project. And there wasn’t much committee work. It was just a kind of Hurrah.

Miljački  41:24
What is the role of private residences at NADAAA?

Tehrani  41:29
If I had it my way, we would do one per year, but we, that’s not the case. We have pretty much consistently had one house here at any point in our career, but it’s difficult because they are time consuming as much as any big institutional project. They are finicky because an individual’s socks and underwear are as important as the programming of the landscape department and Daniels faculty and the expectations, strangely, are much higher. So, from a perspective of sustainability, they tend to, it’s strange that we, we’ve done opulent houses, and we’ve done low-cost houses, and strangely, from an architectural perspective, I see no difference in them. They both have the same value to me, one of them just happens to cost a little bit more. But there is a, I guess there’s an appreciation in those houses, that allow architecture to become a protagonist in in their domestic lives, and that matters, because at the end, it’s not just a house, so it’s not just a home, it’s also, architecture has a role.

Miljački  42:58
I’m wondering, and maybe I’m putting words in your mouth, and I don’t want to do that, so stop me if that’s the case, but I’m wondering also what role they have in the research feedback loops in the office or training feedback loops in the office?

Tehrani  43:15
A lot of the material explorations we do, we’ve done at that small scale. The reality is that of the material explorations we’ve done, the installations, have been far more radical than any of the houses have. I think if the houses have taught us and continue to teach us any lessons they have to do with lessons of humanity, diplomacy, human engagement, and it’s in those areas where we all tend to fail more often than the technical parts.

Miljački  43:56
There was a small aside in your lecture at the ETH in which you tell this sweet story about late Terry Riley inviting you to do an installation. And you say, naturally, we knew it was a fake call, so we hung up on him until he called back, very angry to say, “What the hell is wrong with you?” And this seemed like a really interesting anecdote, not so much about structural experimenting, which is the key topic of that particular lecture, but about architects feeling like they deserve or don’t deserve a commission or recognition. And we have encountered this in some of our previous conversations, but I thought maybe we could ask you or talk about, when in your career, did you start believing you had something important to offer?

Tehrani  44:48
That’s hard to say. I suppose there is a certain illusion of validation you get as you start getting this and that award. So that’s natural. But I actually think, when Monica and I were working together in those early days, and when we were both of us, neither of us having had any substantial experience in professional offices, we basically had to invent those standards by ourselves. So, while we were working for Terry on the fabrications installation, we were also doing the chapel, the Interfaith Chapel at Northeastern we’re doing a house in Back Bay and we did the Mill Road House in Casa La Roca. These are all the early works that got the PA awards. The control that we demonstrated over the areas of architecture and the knowledge that they required was so overwhelming that they can only be described as an over-compensation for the lack of authority that we assumed we had, and it’s at that point when we won all the battles, essentially at Northeastern University, where we realize that it’s not just a question of drawings. These drawings have authority on many levels. They are already constructions. They are already legal documents. They are already something that is insurable. So, we recognized a different kind of authority, not ours, it was not about our cultural status. It had to do with knowing that architectural knowledge, in and of itself, has a particular value that the best doctor or lawyer cannot have. And so, it’s at that moment that we realize this is something that we can work on.

Miljački  47:08
I’m going to change it a little bit. Your recent lectures are filled with beautiful structural animations. And I wanted to talk about those and I’m wondering, do they correspond to conceptual thinking that is also animated in some way, deeply internally, or to optimization? There’s a kind of drama in these animations, but this could also be a segue into talking about research and feedback loops that occur across projects in the office, and how this particular way of showing research or thinking about work participates in that.

Tehrani  47:53
The animations that you’re referring to are probably from that Animate Analytique lecture that I give, these have been a central part of the transformation of our thinking over the years, in part because representation and the generation of drawings has, was always so important, but also that analytical drawings play a formative part in the way that we articulate ideas. It just so happens that when I entered Cooper Union, I discovered that they have, and have had, over the decades, the analysis studio, which is an entire studio dedicated to the forensic unpacking of historical antecedents, and that worked really well with my thinking. Now, while I was thinking all of this through, I was also looking at the drawings of Daniel Castor, a classmate at the GSD who did a really thoughtful book on representation and Berlage’s Exchange building. And I was also looking back at the kind of older professors we had had at RISD who were doing the kind of 19th century French analytique drawings, the Beaux Arts watercolors, as representations whose fragments capture the whole of architecture, that they demonstrate the part to whole relationships just in one vignette. And so, these animations for us are twofold. They are moments of discovery that we identify through the design process, though not linked to other phenomena, and they are also a kind of narrative that is tethered together through certain sequences at the very end of the process, that conceptually bind the project as one coherent story. As you well know, a design process is anything but coherent, and it can go in many ways contradictory, but there’s a moment of critical synthesis where you veto certain options, you edit things out, and a narrative comes out. Now sometimes that narrative is used, the animation that is, to persuade somebody: this is it, this is your project. And sometimes it’s a way of illustrating to them that these are the key choices you made, and that’s why this makes so much sense. But they have become very central to being able to seamlessly weave an urban design narrative all the way down to a detail through different instrumentalities of representational modes. So, it’s also the way that we’ve been able to bind the plan, the section, the sectional perspective, the fly through all together, each of them, if you like, telling a different story or a different narrative of the argument.

Miljački  51:17
I want to go back to that forensic class at Cooper. Or maybe, another thing that comes out of these particular lectures, and I know well from being on reviews with you, is a way that you reach for historical and disciplinary knowledge to situate and frame meaning in your own projects. And I want to situate this in the broader architecture culture. I don’t have a question that helps us do that, but how do you think about this particular sort of modality of thinking architecture in the current moment?

Tehrani  51:58
I have, let’s say, a high regard for architecture’s capacity to look back and look forward. Or I like to think that the conversations we have are not to our peers who are living today, but they resonate as much to buildings or protagonists of 400 years ago or 200 years from now. So, the idea that an architecture, a great building, can be anachronistic for its time, but foretelling something that could occur or should occur, even if it won’t for another 50 years, is somehow a desirable condition. But I think it’s also a way of, there’s an erudition that comes with just knowing great buildings. And the thing that I love so much about the analysis studio at Cooper is that it relieves the students, if only for a moment, of the pressures of creativity and the notion that the willfulness of the designer is why we’re here, the unpacking of somebody else’s work not only demonstrates, I don’t know, a kind of humility, but even more importantly, your agency in being able to transform their work to do something that even the original author had never anticipated. And that’s the reason I brought Daniel Castor into this thing, because I don’t think Berlage had anticipated those drawings or those conditions, even if Daniel Castor invented them. I very much like that. My investment in this audience, the academic audience, I know it’s completely irrelevant, let’s say, to commissions and more buildings, but I still think that our audiences are temporally much more vast than meets the eye.

Miljački  54:06
You mentioned earlier your immigrant status, but I want to ask about the trajectory through architecture and cultural contexts. So, you grew up in Pakistan, South Africa, Iran and the US. And how would you say your personal trajectory in architecture, but also through various cultural contexts, has impacted what you see and how you see it, or what you value and respond to in architecture?

Tehrani  54:36
I’ve said this before, but to some degree, because of all of that moving around during those early years, I was worldly, yet woefully undereducated in in a culture that you could assume to be your own, your own identity, neither Iranian nor South African, nor Farsi nor English. I stumbled my way through education, but visuality and the world as a construct stayed with me, and though I really didn’t end up taking any art classes of note during the first 12 years, when I had to confront the eventuality of applying to colleges, architecture seemed like something that could gain a kind of weight. An older cousin of mine had been at RISD at the time, and I had visited her for the weekend, and it just didn’t seem like school. It seemed like something else. I said, if this is what education is like, then I want to be part of this. RISD completely turned me inside out, and I think I’m very much indebted to that idea, because they also fulfilled, they gave me a lens to look at my own background in childhood to be able to give it a narrative.

Miljački  56:22
Did you ever regret not taking a commission or vice versa?

Tehrani  56:27
There was one commission we didn’t take. We thought we had too much work and we couldn’t handle one more work, and we gave it to friends of ours. And then 9/11 happened, and we lost, everything came to a halt. And so we went through a similar crisis that many are going through right now, with the tariffs and the temporary seizing of works. It was just a restaurant, and we had had experiences in restaurants by then, so we could have done it, but we elected to focus on what we were working on, rather than taking on more and maybe hiring another person or two. But in retrospect, yes, but you know, I can’t guarantee you it would have been a good a project.

Miljački  57:19
You regret it?

Tehrani  57:20
Yeah, of course! 

Miljački  57:22
So we counted 16 people on NADAAA’s website, and I’m wondering if you have procedures in place by which you both expose your office to the realities of running the office, and do you invite your team to think collectively about the commissions that you will and will not take?

Tehrani  57:40
I’m in the office right now. It’s an open studio space, and for the most part, everybody hears everything I say, unless there’s something really confidential and I go to the back. The reality is that we have an open environment here. Not everybody is interested in the business of architecture, but if they are interested in it, they’re exposed to it from day one. There’s a team of about three or four people that have been here for at least over a decade, sometimes two, and they are very much involved in both the management and the kind of procurement of new projects. The reality is that nobody enjoys the search for new jobs because, for the most part, over the years, most of it has come to them by people calling in or people sort of contacting me and I taking it to them, but there’s two answers, basically. One, it’s very open, and everybody’s invited into that conversation if they’re interested. But the other is that it’s also the majority of the projects are not gained through a process in which everybody’s included because primarily, I’m the one who’s writing their narrative. I’m the one who’s working with one or two people to do the layouts for all of the submissions that we have to do. But it’s very open. There’s a wall to my right, which is the pin up wall. I know, it still exists, despite the fact that we don’t do pin ups in the same ways as other people do, but, that’s part of the environment of the studio. And we stayed open during COVID. I think the studio environment, that is in some way antiquated for others, still lives here because of the commitment to model making and the physicality of daily engagement.

Miljački  59:42
Can we talk about the conditions in which you at NADAAA do your best work, or would prefer to do your work?

Tehrani  59:50
Well, I started by saying that there are engaged clients, people who, they either know and understand where your best quality can come out or they respect where their knowledge gets to shine and where yours gets to contribute to theirs. That’s a great starter. The rest has to do with a schedule that allows for the right financing of conceptual and schematic design, which is just a way of saying research, meaning that because commissions rarely give the right financial support for thinking and documenting and listening and collaborating with external groups. This is the moment where you stand to bring something completely different into the equation, and that’s basically what the Lincoln Center and the Met project allowed for us to do on the grander stage than a house would ever allow us to do. I think that when an institution understands what is conceptually at stake, they also make it part of their political mandate to give it the right support.

Miljački  1:01:24
That already sounds like the framework for an ideal commission. But are there ideal commissions?

Tehrani  1:01:32
For me, the ideal Commission is the one where you have a stake in the comprehensive plan, where it has urbanistic relevance. You know that I’m an urban designer also, but I, we often forget that it’s not about the building, it’s the spaces between. It’s the connectivities. It is the people that you connect, it’s, something else, always, and so being able to follow up on a comprehensive plan is a very, very unique opportunity. MIT gave us that, Lincoln Center did not. We did the so called master plan, but is now being built by Walter Hood and Weiss Manfredi, so it’s in good hands. But I’m saying the ideal commission for that one would have been the ability to follow through on that. But at the Met, the commission, interestingly enough, is a both-and condition. We analyze the site. We got to do the architecture and its infrastructure, but we also got to do the scenography of the casework, meaning down to the details and the nuts and the bolts. And so, there’s a pleasure that comes to that.

Miljački  1:02:57
Yeah, I heard you also describe that, The Met as a kind of urban question. So, you’ve got urbanism inside it…

Tehrani  1:03:06
For sure. I mean, I don’t know about you, but in the yester years that I used to go to the Met, I was always lost. And in part, it has to do with the accumulation of buildings over decades, centuries. And being able to make sense of that. I always compare the Met to Diocletian’s Palace, which is down the road from where you are, right? And the way that a building can be a piece of urbanism, for me is something that then allows you to operate on the building in a way that is external to the actual collection you’re doing, but it connects that collection to other cultures, other centuries, and other domains within the museum, which is what makes that project so pleasurable to work on.

Miljački  1:04:03
You have traversed important academic contexts as a student and as a teacher, and I thought we should end with a question to the former Dean Tehrani. What do you think we must cultivate at architecture schools today, and is there any constraint in contemporary architectural education in the US that you think is hindering us in adapting to meet the moment?

Tehrani  1:04:30
Well, I apologize in advance if this sounds cliche but, but I will say it anyway. I think if our goal is to prepare students for the industry, as it were, it will be very short sighted, because, as you know, the industry is changing every day. Office cultures, in some way become obsolete, or certain models of offices become outmoded quite fast, but preparing students for uncertainty — that very quality that I said we seek in the comfort zone of a collaborator that comes here — suggests that they have a conceptual preparedness to take on buildings or theater or any other media with a similar dexterity or creativity, understanding that sometimes one can produce a better form of knowledge out of innocence or a healthy form of ignorance, rather than the certainty of the two or three techniques they learned while they were in school. As you know, the way that we draw and the software that we use and the tools that we use are fundamentally different than what you and I may have had some 30 years ago, and yet, learning the new software is always interesting in the context of ways of visualization, conceptual visualization, that impact thinking going forward. So, I think that’s one aspect of what I continue to enjoy now as a professor at Cooper, but I would try to cultivate. But the other thing that we overlook, and I, you know that I was at MIT in the position of a chair, working under a dean, but it was already so advanced. And there are five discipline groups. It felt more like a deanship rather than a chairship. At Cooper, you’re a dean in the chairs position. It’s very small. You have a world stage underneath you in the Great Hall, you have a civic audience, but one must remember that the school is, in fact, very small and it’s undergraduate. Because of that, the question of foundational knowledge becomes even more important, and to produce an environment where the design of architecture has a much more embedded relationship with the humanities, with history, with technologies and with the other courses, is something that I continue to love and enjoy in the students at Cooper, because they remind me over and over again that it’s not just about the profession as we know it, but it’s about a profession that we wish to construct.

Miljački  1:07:50
Nader, thank you very much for talking to me today and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produce by myself and Julian Geltman,

Tehrani  1:08:00
Thank you.