Iranian-American designer Nader Tehrani has been created dean of architecture at The Cooper Union in New York, one of the most prestigious artwork and style universities in the United States.
Tehrani, principal of the firm NADAAA, has lengthy been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technologies (MIT) and led its architecture department from 2010 to 2014. He now joins the Irwin S Chanin College of Architecture at The Cooper Union, the institution announced nowadays.
“It is a excellent honour for me to join The Cooper Union,” explained Tehrani. “With its historic legacy, distinguished faculty and the exceptional spirit of the students, the college of architecture gives an excellent atmosphere inside which to speculate, experiment and engage in the essential architectural debates of our time.”
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He aims to engage disciplines beyond architecture, to “broaden our conversations with the colleges of art and engineering, and the faculty of humanities and social sciences, to catalyse the broadening of architectural discourse within the institution as a whole”.
Founded in 2011, Tehrani’s firm has offices in Boston and New York. Its projects range in scale, from furnishings layout to buildings to urban organizing.
The architect takes up the new place this month.
“We are delighted to welcome Nader Tehrani as dean of the Irwin S Chanin College of Architecture,” mentioned Richard S Lincer, chairman of the Cooper Union board of trustees, in an official statement.
“Not only is he a hugely respected designer whose work has been widely published and exhibited, but he is an academic leader who intermingles pedagogy and practice in a way The Cooper Union local community can recognise and value.”
Tehrani has invested the past 25 years advancing architectural study and establishing new protocols inside academia, with a particular concentrate on supplies.
“Nader Tehrani is in tune with the traditions of the Irwin S Chanin School in terms of our emphasis on exploration and the processes that are at the core of the creation and production of architectural type,” said school of architecture professor Diana Agrest, who chaired the dean search committee.
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Tehrani was formerly a founding principal of the now-defunct company Office dA, which he ran with his ex-wife, Monica Ponce de Leon. The broadly publicised dissolution of their Boston-based studio resulted in a court battle, as they both fought for manage of the firm.
Ponce de Leon was recently named the architecture dean at Princeton University, following heading the architecture college at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor because 2008.
Tehrani has been recognised with the Cooper Hewitt Nationwide Design and style Award in Architecture (2007), the US Artists Fellowship in Architecture & Design (2007) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture (2002). He holds degrees from Harvard and the Rhode Island College of Design.
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded in 1859. Notable alumni include Daniel Libeskind, Shigeru Ban, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Lebbeus Woods and John Hejduk.
