 Good evening, everyone. It's with great pleasure that we have the opportunity to hear Nader Tehrani speak and present the work of his New York-based practice, Nada, tonight. Nader was appointed dean of the Irwin Shannon School of Architecture at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2015 and has, over the past six years, transformed the school in inspiring ways, at once cementing and building on its long legacy of approaching architectural education first and foremost as an art, with all its potential for deeply meaningful and poetic dimensions, while also reaffirming its place as a significant leader shaping the burning questions that animate our field at this time. Certainly, one can read this intimate connection with the moment through Nader's leadership of the school during these complex times, at once so difficult and so full of potential for change. Tonight, though, we have the pleasure of hearing Nader present his other side, that of the practicing architect deeply committed to practice and to building buildings. Nada has, since its founding in 2011, built an impressive body of work, which includes the New Daniels building at University of Toronto, RISD's North Hall, the Melbourne School of Design, the Beaver Research Center and Design, and the Tongchuan Gatehouse amongst other. Having had the pleasure of spending time in a number of Nader's buildings, I have always been interested in the firm's capacity to combine a certain spatial and programmatic immediacy and straightforwardness with a sense of rich layering and complexity, which cuts across every scale in the building. I've always been struck by the sensuality of materials, experiments in fabrication, playful details, and the feeling of constant pushing against reductiveness without ever overwhelming the ease and pleasure of use and being. This is most evident in the now numerous architecture and design schools Nader has designed and built, where ideas about pedagogy, collaboration, technology, and the necessity for a sense of community, always in the making transpire, as at once formal and informal, pared down and highly articulated elements. In Nada's work, surfaces as well as spaces not only coexist or are sequenced, but also find themselves nested one in the other with a sense of great sensitivity to scale and the blurring of hierarchy and a play with systems. Tehrani's work has received many prestigious awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and 18 Progressive Architecture Awards. Prior to his appointment as Dean at the Cooper Union, Tehrani was head of the Department of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, where he served from 2010 to 2014. He has started the Harvard Graduate School of Design at RISD, the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as the Thomas Ventilate Distinguished Chair in Architecture and Design, and the University of Toronto, where he served as the Franco Gary International Visiting Chair in Architecture. Nader Tehrani was born in London to Iranian parents. His father's work as a member of the Iranian Diplomatic Corps, meant that Nader grew up in many places, including Pakistan, South Africa, Iran, Italy, and the US. I always think of him in this diplomatic way, as an incredibly sophisticated citizen of the world who is at ease in the most local of conditions. It has been very special having him as a colleague, both as an architect and as a Dean, and I'm really delighted to have him with us this evening. Please join me in welcoming Nader Tehrani. Thank you, Amal. That's a very kind introduction, and I hope I'm able to do justice to the format that you've set up for me. It is actually a pleasure to see you every week as you are the host of our weekly Dean meetings. What I'm gonna present tonight is slightly new. I'm just testing it out, and I'm hoping that you and all of you can serve as a critic, but essentially it's the notes for a new book on our work presented thematically rather than project by project. The title of timely anachronisms refers to an ambition, at least in not only in the work, but in my dialogue with you that attempts to position us not merely responding to the challenges of our time, as it were, as important as they are, but in conversation with a history that has long passed, whether it's 100 or 500 years ago, and as much in conversation with generations that have yet to be born. Here I present to you the unmatched hair who finds herself in an ecological environment that would have been this some geological times ago. And so I want to imagine that there is an optimism in a focus on the discipline that is not merely responding to here and now, but has other themes in which it's invested. And so the themes are as follows, the monomaterial ethic and the catalytic detail, the idea that we may work from the bottom up rather than thinking of architecture diagrammatically with a kind of end point in material thinking, the idea that the material and the detail may inform a larger architectural capacity. And in tandem with that, configurations and configurations part to whole reciprocities with an agenda that seeks to establish what of the interiority of architecture has an impact on its exterior and vice versa. Drawing from nature, how is it that the tectonic grain gains a certain agency through whether it's materials born out of the industry or materials out of nature, a way in which materiality gains a kind of presence in architectural expression. And then three segments at the end that have to do with the challenges, the positive aspects and the difficulties of social engagement, whether it has to do with our own zealousness in controlling architectural work or our openness to collaborate with others. In the context of the pedagogical building, as Amal mentioned just a few seconds ago, not only the building in which learning happens, but the building that has an intelligent audience, schools of architecture, where the building invariably becomes a didactic artifact. And then finally we end with political entanglements, moments in which the autonomy of forms, spaces and materialities engage in the politics of everyday life. So a way of beginning then are some examples and some conversations that we're having across time here with Leverence, my constant fascination in the mono material conditions under which he operated, refusing sometimes to cut the brick, discovering that the mortar is not the space between but also a protagonist within the brick wall. And then by essentially announcing the floor, the walls, the vaults, the ceilings as brick, producing new forms of knowledge about those things that normatively belong in different categories. In tandem with that, as we look at the work of Pledgenik understanding the catalytic detail here, the kind of foundational stone wall, the rustication that is not only where it belongs but also migrates up. And in the Ljubljana public library articulates the very surface of the entire building of which it is a part. It does not distinguish between the base, the shaft and the top, but it becomes the kind of endemic detail, the catalytic detail. Another part that has to do with figures and configurations, the bowl effectively smoothed out, it erases the granular and molecular aspects of its aggregates. The nest is virtually the same thing except the bird takes strand by strand, the blades of grass and the twigs to create a similar figure, but here in its articulate tectonic grain, if you will, allows us to imagine that if we work bottom up, we can make many different figures out of that. The part to hold reciprocities comes into conversation with the little prince and the way in which our semiotic minds come into conversations with the things that we see. The hat or the ingested elephant suggests one reading that is iconic and on the surface, the other one, a deeper reading that has to do with the constitution of the inner workings and the organs of an architecture as expressed on the outside. We have seen the way in which art is able to de-familiarize the known of a classical building, but sometimes we forget that within that same classical building normative to our eyes are organisms and configurations that are radical departures from the symmetries that we may see on the outside. So the complex and contradictory alignments and alliances that we make are part of this discussion. In the context of the tectonic grain, more of a metaphor in my mind, it's a conversation not only about the directionality or the affect of a building, but it also has to do with the ways in which we understand things at different scales. The devil's tower from a distance and as a skyline exudes one reading, but at a close up, we begin to see the horizontal traces of other geological strands that are embedded within that set of striations. In the context of social engagement, as I said before, there are few projects that are more explicitly engaged in our collaborations with others and the theme of control and collaboration are part and parcel of a common set of predicaments I'd like to underscore here. The pedagogical building, as I said before, are these buildings, all of them schools of architecture somehow that were born out of the crisis in 2008 and what kept us aloft from 2010 to just a couple of years ago where the materiality of those buildings, their mistakes and their successes invariably become didactic in their mission. And finally, our engagement with political entanglements has to do with a range of issues. In this case, I'm just showing a slide of the AIA statute that deals with the means and methods of construction and how that is given over to the purview of the contractors with architects merely stating design intent, but political entanglements deal with a wide range of things dealing with architects, attempting to reengage in the public realm in a world increasingly privatized in our ability to think through infrastructure and engineering as part of that commitment to the public realm and or rethinking programming before we even start to even imagine architecture. So with that, what I'm gonna try to do is actually go relatively fast through a whole range of projects because it's less important to understand each project as it is to understand the perspective from which they emerge. The monomaterial ethic emerged in our minds very early on, some 20, 25 years ago, in Casa La Roca and our interest in thinking through, whoops, sorry, let me try again. Does that, is the animation showing or not? Well, okay, it doesn't matter. What matters is that this was a building that in the tradition of leverance, we discovered through the invention of a detail that was somewhere between a running bond and a Flemish bond, what we called a variable bond to exact a seam, a folded seam through which lateral stability would be given to a wall. We did indeed get to practice this and build it in a different project in Tongshan, China where the materialities and the programs that were embedded in the context of this detail got to get played out in terms of the mechanical systems that were embedded in there, in terms of the areas of figuration that required bending and folding within the context of its facades and where the brick is not merely just a material but it is catalytic in the formation of the figure of the building and its organization in its entirety. Now, if that were to be seen as a detail, that detail can be quite large also because in the context of cross laminated timber, for instance, those bricks are planks that are five feet by 40 feet as it is in the Sharon building that is here being organized for the Biennale. A structure that is essentially a rural apartment building composed of a series of apartments all identical, circulated around with a single stair with the idea that the CLT can only work actually if it is paired up with a stud wall on the interior because that is the only way to ensure the transmission of air and electricity and all of the infrastructures that would go inside of it. A building that is relatively simple in its organization because the stair effectively organizes it but then most importantly because of that one gets to take advantage of its net to gross area by occupying all of the spaces above and below the stair making it one of the most efficient typologies and organizations that we've done in the past. And it's composed obviously then of two types of spaces, an efficiency that has a bed, a closet, kitchenette, et cetera, but then a pochet space around the edge of the building that is composed of these two conditions of showers, of toilets, of bunk beds and these interstitial spaces and then the staircase on the opposing side. And so the concurrence of these two is what creates an effect in this monomaterial condition. The catalytic detail then has to do with the way in which certain details pre-empt and condition our understanding of certain architecture. So here in the context of RISD where Amal and Dan have their own building down the hill we were tasked with the master plan of the freshman quad within which North Hall, the dormitory is composed as an entirely almost too large a building that we wanted in one way or another to contextualize. The idea of contextualizing such a building is almost ridiculous given its scale, but we decided to work through the shingling systems of the neighboring buildings of which there are a lot and draw them into dialogue with the East and West facade which are the long faces of our building. This shingling then acquires a very radical presence given the orientation of the building East and West gaining the light and the shadow that it requires to give depth to what is otherwise a very thin face. But most importantly, the catalytic detail has to do with the condition of shingles overlapping each other almost like an awning window. And then using the alibi of the awning window to also reciprocate with the shingles. In other words, that skin and the window are doing the same thing and speaking to each other in the context of a detail that is trying to mute itself in the context of the urban landscape. Similarly, when we're dealing with an urban design proposition to create a connection between downtown Melbourne, the Yarra River and the tennis open of Melbourne, we sought the presence of the means and methods of how to build with Rebar as the precondition for designing the entirety of a pedestrian bridge whose presence is more known because of its connection to the park than to the tennis open. The idea was to build a massive bridge over the highway that takes advantage of the maximum moments in the center of the bridge dipping it down but also eliminating the apparent difference between structure and skin by weaving the Rebar both on the longitudinal and lateral axis and giving it a kind of presence, a web-like presence on both axes. The Rebar in fact has different dimensions and it has a presence as an underbelly, as a rail, as a guard and ultimately as lighting elements that speak to the silhouette of the skyline of Melbourne itself. The project lives in this liminal space between above and below. It is occupied above only two weeks a year and the majority of the year lives in the nature of this park as a kind of trellis structure. In the context of the Daniel School of Architecture, the Daniel's Faculty of Architecture, Design and Landscape, the operative detail of the shingle revolves in a fashion that runs north-south using the cladding system as a mechanism to reinforce the lateral axis from east to west. The shingling conceals the apertures, the apertures are allowed by the shingling itself and in this sense they reinforce the pedestrian access to the buildings themselves as they conjoined, the north side being the new and the south side being the neogothic structure to which we attach. The idea of figuration and configurations also speak in tandem to each other. Obviously, the figure that is carved out of the brick to the left has a certain legibility, a figural legibility and yet it doesn't emerge from the body of architecture itself. Whereas on the right, the tectonic logic of stacking produces certain legibilities even if it is less literally so. And so our architecture is constantly on the edge of these two conditions. We are sometimes rather overt about our referentialities, but at the same time are working within a medium to exact certain effects. In the context of the Western house, for instance, the discipline that reigns it has to do with the idea of a ruled surface, the knowledge that the line at the top of corrugation and the bottom are the same length and as a consequence, they allow for the material distortion to enable the unruling of a surface. The animations just aren't showing, but let me see if I can cheat. I think understanding that the discipline of the ruled surface and the relationship between a part and whole plays itself out in a similar way, though distinct than upper crust where the triangulation of flat sheet metal is able to navigate complex geometries and surfaces that in our project in downtown Manhattan are then pixelated as smooth surfaces navigating complex structural forces from above and programs that are contained within the bodies of this dining and server area for this corporation. Similarly, here, all of these, by the way, share one component that will come into play and the idea that the reflected ceiling plan in these contexts have a significant and vocal role that maybe arguably the most important elevation in architecture today in so far as the sprinkler systems, the lighting, and so many of the elements of architecture come to ruin our lives. But in the context of bank, the laminar conditions of these proscenia that adorn the columns, the wine room, and contain all of the mechanical equipment are all a kind of precursor to the Adams Library that we are almost completing right now, which involves an important topography. And if this doesn't work, then we're really screwed. In the context of the Adams Library, I really apologize that the animation is not showing. It is an important one where a seamless surface of a roof transitions from a front face that captures the length of Main Street not only with a single pedimented roof, but a single pitch whose interior captures the transition of that single fold into the multiple folds of those very same surfaces of the roof into the programs of the back of the building where the different offices, conference rooms, and meeting rooms are situated onto a garden where the overflow of the water is captured. And so here one realizes the presence of the reflected ceiling plan as being one of the most important elements of that project. And so too for the Villabarroise in southern France where the top and the bottom floor produce a kind of courtyard building, but in section, again, bringing together two elements of the landscape with a stair as a protagonist that holds it all together, a kind of loop that allows for not only the structuring of this building, but the insertion of the landscape going from the inside of the outside. I have no idea why the animation is working right now, but let's not complain. The distortion of this pure type allows the plan to open up to the Mediterranean. The section allows it to drop on one side so that everybody gets the same view. The stairs on each corner connect to each other while allowing the roof to distort to produce the passage of light and views towards the west where there are the great views of the Penus Pinae on the opposite side of the building. And so this now effectively built here as a monolith that invites the landscape towards the interior and onto the opposite side. The reflected ceiling plan, the distorted surface of that concrete being really the shrink wrapping of both the structure and the stair on that underbelly with an expression onto the face, on the eastern face of the building. The building is rather simple, actually. It's essentially like a case study house. But in fact, as one navigates on the interior, you realize that the structural span is not only going laterally but longitudinally as the large vaults run the length of the building in order to allow the views to be able to be opened onto the western side. The tectonic grain has a lot to do with the actual materiality of nature. Trees are different in their species and types, but they're also different once they're industrialized in terms of plane saws, quarter saws, and so forth. And so we are looking at the push and pull between these material grains and trying to understand what happens to them as they enter into the linguistic realm of construction here with the board and baton and the shiplap details and to mine out of those details certain possibilities for transparency, operability, and so forth. In this case, a barn in New England trying to eradicate the presence of the garage doors, flushing them out, but then allowing the door handles to become an unfolding of the very battens that are part of the fixtures and the handles of these operable doors. In the context then of Villa Vargoise, a lot of that detailing we hoped was going to be born out of recognition not so much of the aggregate parts with which we're so familiar, but a liquid tectonic which gains its expression from either the formwork beforehand or the manipulation of that concrete after the fact. And you have seen a lot of the historic and contemporary work around fabric-formed concrete work. Our task in this instance was to find a way to work with fabric-formed concrete to embed into the smooth surface of the concrete a kind of rustication that is evocative of the landscape within which we were operating. Alas, somewhat overtly representational, we said, what if we took on a completely different approach and tried to extract out of the aggregates certain scales that are respondent to the stone walls of southern France and in that sense the smooth interior would beget different panels with different sizes of aggregates such that the figure ground relationship between concrete and stone or mortar and stone is inverted by the time it gets into the landscape allows for those stone walls to demarcate different areas within the landscape behind their house. In effect, the natural and the artificial at the end came into conversation as we were unable to undertake some of the operations that were our priorities but by sandblasting the studs with which we were working the evocativeness of that grain the luxury of that grain was also what we were able to bring out. Here the natural and the artificial come into conversation in the context of CLT in the context of RISD where brick was the critical element to allow that building to contextualize itself within the context of the central campus it also became the material that connected North Hall to the existing Nickerson Hall through a brick loger and became the foundation and the southern and northern face of this building working within a depth of brick which is quite shallow in fact a veneer of brick our task was to give illusion of depth and weight to what is otherwise a thin skin and so creating of that mass the possibility of weight and thickness was part of our way of allowing this building to speak to the kind of historicity of Providence while working with prefabricated brick panels that are somewhat banal in their construction and so each of these different brick panels some are carved out some are corbelled out but the combination of all of them give the illusion of let's say nine or ten inches of depth where they only have three in the context of the East and the West facades then we do exactly the opposite how to radicalize the thinness of that tectonic grain as they come to an end the East and West Faces are not merely veneers they are exacerbated by the thinness of the blades that articulate the edges and the fins that speak to not so much the turning of corners but the bracketing the book ending of that building on two sides a similar strategy is adopted for the MIT site for building that is just completed the overall massing of the building essentially rotating so it's not pointing excuse me the apartments are not pointing south facing south but rather the building is facing south meaning that all of the windows are facing East and West the cladding strategy adopts a way in which the folding of the facade protected from the extreme light of the afternoon while the panelling system reinforces a structural idea about the moment frame that is the entire structural system of the building allowing it to cantilever north and south with a base condition that is distinct from those panels the structural system skewers the building entirely up while the cladding is allowed to oscillate north and south with different colors and then the logic of the building is to minimize its thickness by containing all of the core service elements within its interior and thinning out the face of the building and its services on the interior are meant to as thick as they are are meant to objectify the thinness of those corners the delicacy of this face that then captures the light as it faces the south on the north they evolve as pilasters that capture the morning light as the sun rises so as we look at nature not so much as an inspiration but as a muse it's when we go through these slides that we realize that architects in fact operate in the realm of artifice we all know that the striping of zebras are not vertical but are in fact vertical and horizontal as they navigate not only the torso but also its legs with the architectural moment being the turning of those corners but everything that you and I do is in the realm of artifice and so the imposition of these tectonic grains has a lot to do with what you and I are in charge of in the realm of control and collaboration we have done some work the most obvious of course in your neighborhood with the broadening of a discussion about the closing of Rikers Island and coming to an understanding of all of the injustices that happen to not only the victims of those people incarcerated but their families the community and so forth and so this project of which we were only a minor part but a critical part in trying to understand how the justice system compromises so much of the city by being centralized and isolated victimizing so many of the people involved probed the collaboration of many people people in the jail system families of people in jail system and it was essentially a series of interviews with them asking us what would it mean to decentralize the justice process into what they call justice hubs so that centers of education social help and the ability of family to be in touch with those in jails would enable them to come out sooner if that is an overt relationship between architecture and social engagement a lot of the other things are much more molecular in our collaborations with individual artists such as Adam Silverman understanding his craft and his work was central to our understanding I guess this may not work it may work Adam Silverman's work is extraordinary in not only its formal capacities but the way in which he is working with ceramics the kiln and the glazing process and the earth to imagine certain vessels that he makes in this instance we were researching certain lands within which certain artillery artillery had become part of that soil and he was interested in developing these bullet-like forms that became part of that expression what we introduced into his process was an algorithmic process whereby each bullet was cut into different metrics and therefore reconfigurable in different ways and in different places as the show migrated from one venue to the other and finally landed at the Nasher where it rests right now that collaboration was central not only to what he was doing but from what we learned in a similar way our collaboration with Raya in Jordan bringing our budgets together to imagine an installation that is rooted in the process of weaving allowed us to work with a certain economy to hang a structure in the warehouse within which the Biennale was supposed to take place but most importantly to engage in a process of labour that as its end result was not so much the opening of the Biennale but the unraveling of that same wool to make into blankets for refugees if these are overt sort of engagements with the social really the architectural project that is part of the building of large institutions involves many audiences many publics and in the context of the Daniels faculty an engagement with the public realm here the sustenance and the maintenance of the neogothic structure not only from the south side but from the north side was a big priority of the neighbourhood and the campus to press the building underground a good portion of it to allow the tower to read both from the north and the south and essentially develop a strategy that is indicative of how the building works and the tourism and the landscape that will revitalize Spadina circle was central to their mission part of that was an understanding that symbolically the building works north south but practically it works east west in fact part of its political nature was how to insert a street that is open 24 hours a day and by doing so allowing the interior not only to speak to Spadina north but to look up into some of the critical spaces of this project the civic space of the studio above but also the fabrication labs that are speaking to the urbanism of the site as massive as this building is it is a landscape where the programs leak out onto the east west north and south the fab lab is a central part of one of those pieces that evolves out of the street connecting to Spadina circle to the north and opening up with half of the work spilling out and essentially looking back into the street from the outside and then revealing the pedagogies and the work as one looks at the studio space in the fab lab from a distance in the context of the Adams library one of the most challenging aspects of this was that it involved a year of collaborations with neighborhood committees that this allowed us to design in the way that architects are used to designing we were meeting with different focus groups from the elderly to teenagers and from teenagers to kids to try to imagine what the spaces of their three sectors look like all while maintaining the centrality of a control station at its center bringing them all together the planning of this is less architectural than the kind of organization of an informal settlement somehow and yet it is important to recognize the anamorphic way in which that informality projects itself onto the neighborhood the very figures of the roofs that are indicative of that context operate on the axial or the oblique axis as you look at the building and yet that obliquity is then reverted to the axial as you look at the building head on from essentially the main street where only a portion of that anamorphic figure is revealed with the north garden in a way acting as a hinge point for that project other projects that we've tried to take on have to do with the idea of creating permanence out of Biennale projects that would otherwise waste a lot of material and resources and ingredients and in the context of the Schengen Biennale the idea that the scaffolding that we created becomes a permanent construction of a café and a marketplace that is able to live on long after the Biennale is over and so the major coup here was possibly not the design so much but the idea of a civic place that has a life long after we are departed and in the context of Austin Texas the idea that a civic place is actually occupied by the electrical exchange of the Austin center with us as designers of the civic realm designing only the periphery with these precast elements whose colors in a way are a registration of the different electrical programs that are on its backside. All of these involve certain kinds of political settlements that become more evident in some of the difficult projects that we've taken on and where I will end the talk here in Melbourne where a matte building so dense is positioned at the center of campus as an extension of its neo-Georgian courts we realize that the only way to bring light and air into its core is to introduce another court into the center of the building where the commons as it were of the building could come together. Those commons are characterized by an exhibition space to the left with informal teaching areas and in the center what ended up being the studio space but was designed really as a social space what is important about this project is that it was designed with dedicated studio spaces what Melbourne never had and within the first month we recognized that they didn't have money for that and they were able to forgo it entirely as a kind of building that had non-dedicated areas of work. What we did instead was to propose to them the elaboration of the circulation areas of the atrium to widen them ever so subtly by introducing dedicated desks collaborating tables and crit areas and then allowing them to leak into adjoining classrooms and studio spaces and exhibit spaces for certain portions of the schedule of the building and of course you are able to eliminate the railings that would normally been there put a mesh that contains them and then use the infrastructure of the FF&E to allow for the building to be populated 24-7 in a suret mode as they would always would have wanted it to be and so whoops I don't know what this is doing here we are going back to the political entanglements I myself forgot what I was doing the crowning moment of the Daniels building had to do with the translation of this concrete building into its vaulting system and that vaulting system was something that was meant to bring the lighting, the hydrological control of the building and the spanning of over 120 feet into confluence we were told it was not buildable even though we had brought to them many examples including Felix Candela to show them how shell structures or surface active structures operate they told us it is a million dollars over budget so we built that in the context of our fabrication lab through a stick system and with that kind of rhetorical act they were able to re-bid it in a metal system and bring it $800,000 down and with that the project continued in the fashion that many of our projects have undertaken the design build collaboration to enable the kind of transformations that these buildings require in this case with the heating in the ground and the cooling in a radiant panel within the GIP board this was also imbued with an environmental narrative as the building came to be closed in and then used in different ways the pedagogical building then has to do with the ways in which these teaching buildings are not places of learning only but that their details are critical in understanding how they work much like the Melbourne building the Georgia Tech building is this research lab that requires flexibility on the ground and because of that we treated the foundation the roof as its foundation by suspending ancillary studio space from the roof by suspending a second means of egress and by suspending the lighting from the top we were able to kind of invert the traditional tectonics by allowing the ground to be absolutely flexible and and a certain kind of levity this exact same strategy actually was used for the Melbourne studio space within all of the non-dedicated studio spaces the roof and the studio space were brought together in conversation with certain precedents to imagine an LVL system of structure that spans some 30 meters with lateral bracing through its coffering allowing natural light to enter into the space without any direct sunlight and then suspend those dedicated studio spaces from the top down with a kind of bulge of an entasis with a structure that stops short of touching the ground this structure then is a central let's say totemic artifact that brings this into play inverting that tectonics involves massive timber elements that are at the top and thin laminar plywood at the bottom you inhabit the lumber at the top and then you witness the thinness of the acoustic baffles of the cladding of that same structure at its bottom the combination of which is done all in a way that comes onto site and frames the space so successful at a popular level has been this building that people all over campus come to it disallowing the architects to get their work done so with that let me open up the floor to Amal and we can open up into conversation thank you, sorry Amal would you like no this is great thank you thank you Nadair this was amazing it's always it's always good to be an experiment so thank you for a lecture that's entirely fresh and where you're using us to test ideas about the structure I apologize for some of the tech problems but we'll iron that out as part of our next experiment exactly but I think it's really I know you're working on a book and this is a kind of preparatory talk I think it's a really interesting beautiful way to enter into your work and kind of almost sort of taking bits and pieces and regrouping them and reassembling them in new ways which I think your work does quite a bit amazing dive into I love the notion of the material catalyst and kind of reading that across scales in different projects and the capacity for materiality to really do more than occupy surface and it's also always interesting to remember your work's connection to landscape and tying the building to kind of landscape and your obsession with ceilings which I'm obsessed with ceilings too and I think they take on such a presence in many of your projects and so one of the things that I was thinking about the title and then your strategic thinking I think the last kind of what you're calling political antagonists is incredibly strategic thinking as an architect that is kind of negotiating everything from your desires to budgets and then kind of finding a really powerful kind of diagram but it's the building and the project sort of moves so far beyond that I think for me that section obviously with the vertical studios and I love that it's just really so interesting so one of the things that I was thinking about as you were speaking is it it's become so rare to hear someone speak about their work like I read this notion of timely anachronisms in a different way I want to ask about time in your practice and taking time like I feel like the buildings are so layered and the projects have such you're not flying over diving there's a lot of richness and complexity so what is the rhythm in your practice in this moment where we are zooming in and out literally it's so I think the material aspect is also a sort of resistance to a kind of two dimensional image thinking and so I'm curious about time for you as an architect in your practice well obviously it's somewhat unfashionable to it's somewhat not only unfashionable but also unreasonable to be interested immediately in buildings and built environments that are of the antiquities or centuries ago because from many perspectives they may seem irrelevant and yet as we look towards history's past and ways of thinking's past I'm constantly surprised at our ability to interpret them in new ways and in interesting ways that for us serves as a catalyst for new ways of operating today so I like the slowness of that commitment because possibly it's not something that is relevant to anybody from a problem solving point of view but from a conceptual ability to recast certain questions or pose new questions that are not being asked today they become relevant and in that sense being able to imagine a conversation with those who do not exist today or who have yet to exist means that we are only one piece in a larger narrative and that somebody else will and possibly if we're so lucky build on top of what we're doing today and produce new forms of knowledge out of it so that is one speed that I love the other speed that you may be referring to that people rarely take into consideration has to do with that which is here and now and because we are so used to talking about quality and context of a crit it would be kind of ridiculous to talk about speed but in fact if you're very fast what's amazing about it is that you have the ability to test out and research many options of a problem that instigates other possible architectural eventualities so there's another part of my existence that has to do with a maniacal rush to charrette not at the deadline of a project but in the beginning of a project where ostensibly all of the permutations of a problem are able to be somehow hashed out that much of that is invisible to the eye of a presentation like this because you have to do a hundred bad things before you establish a critical relationship with one or two paths and so that is another thing the third thing that you bring up it has to do with our plight of the last year where most things are mediated through the zoom screen we actually did a lot of work but we failed ultimately at doing a lot of those things that just require the immediacy of co-presence in a space and so we've put on our masks, we've gone into my office my office is only three blocks away and all of those things that have to do with real scale that have to do with full mockups that have to do with fabrication or texture or those things that require the printing out of things at another scale are still and constantly done there and to the extent that we're able to succeed in doing this we try to bring each project team into the office once a week because we realize we don't actually need to see them every day but the week is about the limit that we're able to survive without having physical entanglements with each other and so this other temporal metric has worked its way into our working process which I don't know may survive even after the pandemic if the question of flexibility of working at home and all of that is important I think that there's another ecology that has emerged from a temporal perspective No, for sure we've been having a lot of conversations about what's going to stay what's worthy of keeping and the other aspect that I thought was so clear in your work and you touched upon it throughout but especially at the end is the AIA contractual what is an architect responsible for obviously that's been coming under attack, under questioning everything from issues of labor to issues of embodied energy sourcing of materials there's just so much that right now is at the heart of either trying to reclaim some of that or under the purview of the architect or what you're doing in a way is kind of saying I'm going to literally do fabrication and design build so you've engaged in that mode of practice and I was curious to hear more about that is that something that you're doing quite a bit what is your kind of experience and do you think this is something that we need to push more for do you think this is part of the kind of lines coming or that are already here in terms of a sense of re-empowerment a little bit of architects able to work Look, the reality is that the only reason that we got launched into an element of design build was because at that time when we launched the office in its early days with Rodolf Elchoury and Monica Ponce de Leon we were three essentially immigrants in a country with no clients and our passage into commissions was the building of models that we photographed to produce the illusion of reality and those led into a series of installations that became a kind of avatar for an architectural practice that then evolved into actual commissions parts of which we were building because nobody else was willing to build them or to build them at a price that was achievable No, it is not my intention to become a builder even though I enjoy it what I think it is what's important about the means and methods is to understand the instrumentality of certain techniques whether they be computational whether they be legal whether they be fabricational but it is your ability to strategically inhabit the mentalities and techniques of others external to what we do to understand fully how to engage them intelligently but also strategically that our entanglement with fabrication processes is only one facet of understanding the vitality of how the legal profession or the computational profession brings to us certain things that we need to know first hand even though we don't need to do them ourselves so it has to do more with understanding agency and the instrumentality of a technique in our ability to become vocal and intelligent members around the table I guess becoming part of the table or engaging in conversations I was also intrigued by how important collaboration has become or is to the practice and wanted to both with clients, constituents, meetings for me or artists or other the sense that the architect isn't acting alone at the same time your voice is so strong and so present I wanted to tie that a little bit to bringing it back to education today and how we teach students and the importance of collaboration and this tension between the architect still coming to develop their own personal voice and then at the same time increasing urgency of learning to collaborate and interest and I'm sure you see it amongst your students great interest in collaborating not only amongst architects but again expanding to other disciplines and joining forces so curious about that tension for you in architectural education I'm not going to say I mean this is a discussion that would be futile to take sides on because A that collaboration is inevitable is something that we have to be comfortable with because we cannot control everything but moreover it's a question about your comfort in learning from others through different voices ideological and methodological differences from which you may actually end up designing differently so I think there's an element of that that is super important but it's also a reminder that collaboration in and of itself does not guarantee excellence somewhere in there there's a process of your curatorial discernment there's a process of editing there's a process of posing the right questions essentially a critical engagement that produces hierarchy between things in order that a work of architecture or a work of urbanism gains the kind of presence and agency that is not merely the embodiment of hundreds of differences in one space but it rises to the occasion of being something larger than some of its parts so I'm very mindful of the democratic processes that produce developments today in the city and why it's important to build a narrative that has the ability to create something conceptually interesting and I think it's important that architects remember that for all of their impotence that we are educated in one realm similar to I guess choreographers and film directors and composers that we have this capacity to orchestrate a wide range of operations that are essentially undertaken by others but we have this capacity to integrate and to draw them into some kind of symphony and I do think that that is an important thing that we are able to do in building those narratives so telling that story is an important one but with it obviously comes a responsibility it isn't merely an entitlement it is a responsibility that comes with it so but I also remind you that what is it that we ultimately do as architects after all the narratives are over after all of the stories are told you come across a contract document which is a series of drawings and a book of specifications which is all about control it's all about the specification of something so it tells you that even with all of that collaboration it really has to do with an understanding about how if you see it this way that the contract documents are very legal instruments and they represent the client's interests and to the extent that you want to hold them as such they also represent the interests of a discipline that is being chipped away at every opportunity and eroded and so what is it that we fight for is very much at stake I think that's really helpful to open it up to the public and actually tie it to one of the questions it says thank you for such an interesting presentation the built projects you introduced seemed very quote honest to me in a sense that some of the volumetric shifts or material changes seem very blunt or deliberate but are executed in a very refined fashion these characteristics make me curious about the design changes in the timeline of a project how are aspects of a design discussed and introduced during the process how are these proposals challenged are there very original principles that are used to push and pull proposed changes so as you can see that sometimes there are operations that run through the work so whether a shingling is running vertically or horizontally whether aggregations of brick are stacked or are running bonds you know that certain systems of thinking are embedded within our thinking and that doesn't go from project to project that goes from decade to decade so I guess I guess our preparation for change is infinite that at any moment we can see that we can see that we can see that we can see that we can see that at any moment a person in power whether it is a client or whether it is the contractor whose budget won't allow something may require the immediacy of change without which we will not survive nor the project so that kind of tactical flexibility is absolutely important at the same time you know in our practice what we try to do is to take on a lot of the complexities of means and methods prematurely in schematic design so that by the time you are deep into dd you also forego the invariable process of value engineering that you limit those kinds of changes that become catastrophic to many buildings whose aspirations are cut short because of the lack of integrative thinking that is embedded in them so I do think it's a very good question but it also has to do with processes of forecasting that only experience and anxiety can do well in a person I found the secret sauce move into sd what belongs to dd that's totally brilliant maybe to tie it to other questions you touched on the benefit of immediacy and speed at the beginning of a project is there a benefit to slowness and if so when that sounds like it I do think that slowness has to do with some other thing your intuitive understanding of space and time and a range of things that I used to make fun of are absolutely right part of the way that we become tourists as architects now we experience different mentalities geographies and people by eating their food and walking through their architecture they do require a whole element of slow experience that has absolutely nothing to do with the maniacal and paranoic speed at which we operate on a daily basis because there are no budgets that in a way give you enough money to do research you're either doing that research on the side for a lifetime or you're independently wealthy understanding the importance of that slowness that other people speak to more eloquently I'm not the right person Todd and Billy have spoken about slowness in much more eloquent ways but that slowness in my mind the anachronism of this talk our ability to speak to modalities and mentalities of years long gone so I really feel sympathetic to the question a question from Greg Pasquarelli good to see you your work is absolutely brilliant and inspirational but the means and methods conversation is truly important with the architects best chance to gain back territories lost over the past decades be to reinvent construction documents into new types of instruments for building modeling predictive AR or AI technologies ownership of the means of technological production other ideas and also what do you eat for breakfast Greg asks he is asking a question he has answered better than the rest of us a shout out to you right back at you Greg and what you and I discussed what was possibly 20-25 years ago in a conference together I believe at RPI or somewhere up there what you guys amongst others have done in a much smaller scale is really working out ways in which the linear process of conceiving and handing over CDs to other people is cut short by eradicating the shop drawing process by embedding it into the initial drawing process by owning certain packages that would otherwise be cumbersome as a liability not just as a design instrument and of course as you speak to predictive AR or AI technologies the ability to simulate a range of things that would have been inconceivable just 20 years ago is important we are by no means I would say on the cutting edge of those things but very open to it ideologically not so much for the quest for power but if it has to do with the quality of the environments then our Hippocratic oath to the amelioration of that environment has to do with thinking of ways of working with other industries and the clients and everybody that's involved the public to produce the opportunity for that quality to emerge and one last question I know we're kind of getting tight on time but since we started with the idea of the book Ethan Okain asks why are these the themes you have decided to focus on I would love to hear more on your process in determining these themes some of them if you know us and me and our work some of these terms were coined almost in an infantile mode 20 years ago 25 years ago and there a series some of them were theorized at the moment and then evolved into projects others like the sixth elevation like the ceiling plan were projects we worked on that once we were killed by the ceiling once too many times we realized no that's not just a thing it's an architectural paradigm it's a problem and it requires a thematic approach for it to become something disciplinary so some of them are thematically belong to architectural history and we've absorbed them as part of the traditions that we've inherited and others are born out of the real politic of architectural practice today but they require a kind of top down and bottom up thinking and so we've tried to kind of reframe some of these principles not as answers but as ways of engaging both design processes but also disciplinary priorities so we're working on both fronts right now. Nader thank you so much for stopping us for a moment and kind of giving us an hour of incredible deep dive into what architecture can be