How does architecture shape our daily lives beyond just aesthetics? Nader Tehrani, principal at NADAAA and former Cooper Union Dean, reveals the hidden systems behind modern buildings and cities that most of us never consider.
Tehrani challenges conventional architectural thinking by prioritizing construction techniques before design concepts – a complete reversal of traditional methods. He explains how his firm reclaimed control over building processes when contractors deemed certain designs “unbuildable,” and discusses the transition from mass production to mass customization in architecture.
The conversation explores how climate change is forcing architects to rethink building longevity, the unexpected environmental impact of glass facades, and why Boston has more architects per capita than anywhere else in the world. Tehrani also shares insights on architectural education, explaining why he teaches students to “design for uncertainty” rather than specific workplace skills.
Whether you’re fascinated by urban spaces, sustainability, or how technology is transforming creative fields, this episode offers a thoughtful look at the innovative architecture that shapes our built environment.
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Watch the episode here
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About Nader Tehrani
For his contributions to architecture as an art, Nader Tehrani is the recipient of the 2020 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, to which he was also elected as a Member in 2021, the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in The United States.
Nader Tehrani is a professor at and former Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union in New York. He was previously a professor of architecture at MIT, where he served as the Head of the Department from 2010-2014. He is also Principal of NADAAA, a practice dedicated to the advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and an intensive dialogue with the construction industry.
Tehrani received a B.F.A. and a B.Arch from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and 1986 respectively. He continued his studies at The Architectural Association, where he attended the Post-Graduate program in History and Theory. Upon his return to The United States, Tehrani received his M.A.U.D from The Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991.
Tehrani has taught at The Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, The Georgia Institute of Technology, where he served as the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design, and The University of Toronto’s Department of Architecture where he served as the Frank O. Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design, Landscape and Design. He also recently served as the William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at The American Academy in Rome and the inaugural Paul Helmle Fellow at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Tehrani has lectured widely at institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Harvard University, Princeton University and the Architectural Association. His work has been published in a variety of journals internationally that reflect his research on materiality, fabrication and tectonics, and exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, LA MoCA, and is held at the Nasher Museum of Art and the Canadian Center for Architecture.
Tehrani’s work has been recognized with notable awards, including eighteen Progressive Architecture Awards, a finalist for the 2017 Moriyama RAIC International Prize, and a nominee for the 2017 Marcus Prize for Architecture. Other honors include: a 2014 Holcim Foundation Sustainability Award, the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the 2007 United States Artists Award, USA Target Fellows AD award, and two Harleston Parker Medals. Over the past seven years, NADAAA has consistently ranked as a top design firm in Architect Magazine’s Top 50 U.S. Firms List, ranking as First three of those years.
Reinventing the Architectural Process
Traditional architectural education often treats building technologies and construction as secondary considerations, positioning them as “support courses” rather than central components of the design process. Nader Tehrani’s approach flips this model completely, starting with construction techniques before developing design concepts.
As Tehrani explains, “The construction preempted the vision.” By understanding the fundamental details of how materials work and how structures are assembled, his firm NADAAA gained a significant advantage in the architectural process. This deep knowledge allowed them to take over what’s called the “means and methods” for fabrication and installation of projects when contractors were unwilling to build certain designs or priced them prohibitively.
This innovative approach coincided with the rise of computer-aided design and fabrication technologies. Tehrani’s firm was at the forefront of “translating that into modes of fabrication” through techniques like laser cutting and CNC routing. This technological integration represented a broader transition from mass production to mass customization in architecture.
The Hidden Systems Within Buildings
Behind the beautiful facades we admire lies a complex system of technical considerations that most laypeople never consider. As Tehrani points out, the fundamental difference between 20th and 21st-century buildings isn’t just about aesthetics but about energy efficiency and insulation.
“Modern buildings of the 20th century basically didn’t have a weather barrier,” Tehrani explains. “Because of that, they leaked air. They either required a hell of a lot of air conditioning or a hell of a lot of heating.” Contemporary buildings focus much more on controlling the transmission of heat and cold through the building skin.
The conversation with Dr. Awesome reveals how glass, once celebrated as a symbol of 20th-century architectural progress, was actually “environmentally devastating” due to poor insulation properties. Modern “rain screen” systems now allow architects to separate the visual appearance of a building from its functional elements: “The image of the building has nothing to do with its performance.”
Innovative Architecture in the Age of Climate Change
Climate change presents an existential challenge to architecture. Tehrani speaks candidly about how environmental concerns are reshaping design priorities: “We’ve never confronted the existential nature of our decisions like we are now.”
He points to specific examples of how climate change will affect cities, such as in Florida where “the water is coming from underneath” rather than just from rising sea levels. In Miami, where rapid development continues, Tehrani predicts that many new buildings will have lifespans measured in decades rather than centuries.
One solution he suggests is building less and renovating more: “The real key to sustainability one could argue is not by using just green materials or green protocols, but rather to build less and to renovate and use buildings into the centuries.” He points to mill buildings from centuries ago that have been repurposed multiple times, demonstrating “typological resilience”.
The Future of Architectural Education
As both a practitioner and educator, Tehrani offers unique insights into how architectural education is evolving. He emphasizes that schools should prepare students for uncertainty rather than specific workplace skills: “Practice as we know it today will be very different in five to ten years than what it is today.”
He advocates teaching “critical creativity” to help students navigate changing circumstances rather than just technical skills that might become obsolete. Tehrani notes that technologies have already transformed architectural education dramatically, from hand drawing to various software programs and now to AI tools like MidJourney.
Perhaps most interestingly, he suggests that designing systems may be more valuable than designing individual buildings: “You can educate an architect to design a beautiful building, and that’s not bad, but you can also educate an architect to design a beautiful system that then somebody else can deploy into many beautiful buildings or many beautiful environments.”
Boston: A Uniquely Architectural City
When asked what makes Boston special, Tehrani reveals that it has “the most architects per capita anywhere else in the world”. He attributes this to Boston being a “city of schools” with a diverse, international, and youthful population.
For Tehrani personally, the Charles River provides a special connection to the city: “The Charles River Basin is the lung of ours. And you get the best view of the skyline of Boston from Cambridge and vice versa.” As a runner, he describes how his routes often take him past construction sites, allowing him to witness the city’s ongoing architectural evolution.
Call to Action
As we navigate our daily lives through buildings and cities, it’s worth pausing to consider the hidden systems that shape our experiences. The next time you enter a building, think beyond its aesthetic appeal to consider how it manages energy, how it might adapt to future needs, and how it contributes to the broader urban fabric.
Take time to “read” your city by walking its streets and observing how different buildings interact with each other and with public spaces. As Tehrani suggests, “Reading cities is a thing. Because when you arrive at a place that you’ve never been before, you always know it feels different, but you don’t know how it works.”
Finally, consider your own relationship with the built environment. How do the buildings and spaces you inhabit affect your daily life? What role can you play in advocating for architecture that responds thoughtfully to both current needs and future challenges? By engaging more deeply with the architecture around us, we can all contribute to creating more sustainable, functional, and beautiful cities.
Links
- Nader Tehrani, LinkedIn
- NADAA
- Cooper Union
- Episode with the City of Boston Office of Emerging Technology
Transcription
This interview has been transcribed using AI technology. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, the transcription may contain errors.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Futurist Society. As always, I’m your host, Dr. Awesome. And today we have a very special guest for you, Nader Tirani, who is the principal at Nada, which is an architecture design firm. But really you’ve done a lot of amazing things in architecture at large. He’s been a professor at many different prestigious universities.
And we’re gonna be talking today about the future of architecture. But before we get into that, Nader, tell me a little bit about how you got here into Boston and kind of what you’re known for in the architecture space.
Well, first, thanks for having me here. It’s a great pleasure to be here. I landed in Boston essentially as a student of architecture. I had graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. I needed to learn about practice. And so I got a job locally and was trying to figure out what to do next.
And that happened to be the urban design program at Harvard Graduate School of Design. And that sort of launched me into a practice that sort of blended my time between building buildings and teaching as it turned out. And at that time I had my eyes on New York or LA or maybe even Europe.
But I got an offer to teach one semester at Northeastern University. And before I knew it, a few years later RISD, then Harvard, then MIT where I was the head for a few years. And then subsequently at the Cooper Union where I am now and where I served as Dean for about seven years. So all of this just kind of happened in sequence and here we are.
So I know that right now you’re with an organization that is doing some pretty amazing things, especially pushing the boundaries for collaboration between construction and architects, also innovative designs. And I think that when I think about architecture, I think about what the past has been, right? Like my rudimentary understanding of it is like, oh, this is like Greek architecture or this is Roman architecture or this is modern architecture.
But you guys are trying to push the envelope and take it to the next level. So tell us a little bit about that.
Well, the kind of design that we do and that we’ve been doing has been very proactive on exploring and experimenting with materials and modes of construction. And as a preamble to that, I should say that most schools during my period, my era, did not treat building technologies or construction as a central part of the design process. They were sort of support courses on the side.
Once we graduated and we stumbled into practice as it were, learning about the idea that the architect has absolutely no authority over what’s called the means and methods of construction, that that is under the purview of the contractor. We also learned about the substantial disempowerment of architects to oversee their vision or their intent or their idea about materials and technology. So it was during those very first courses that we taught, and it was during the first projects that we built, that we took over what’s called the means and methods for the fabrications installation at the Museum of Modern Art, for the Interfaith Hall of Prayer at Northeastern University, and for our first Project Mantra restaurant downtown.
These all involved elements and aspects that the builders were unwilling to build or in some way had priced at such an expensive rate that they were deemed unbuildable. And so we absorbed these responsibilities under the banner of the architect, either actually building them ourselves or building mock-ups for them, or giving them essentially a manual of how to build them and teaching them how that might be done, and then radicalizing our relationship with the trades. Now, this is all happening at the same time where the, let’s say the infancy of the role of the computer was being brought into the architecture studio.
Where we came into the picture is that we were on the forefront of translating that into modes of fabrication. So laser cutting, CNC routing, all of the things that are pretty normative at this point and germane to what we’d learn in school were in their infancy. And so we were playing with those techniques and tools to translate immediately the things that we were trying to do into actuality.
And really that is also a kind of transition of what was happening more broadly between the 20th and the 21st century, basically going from mass production to mass customization.
So as my layperson understanding of it is that in a very similar to like how a car is designed, you have this idea of what’s presented in the initial design phases. And then because of the limits of technology, you kind of have to scale back a little bit and it looks much different from its initial design. Is that kind of what I’m understanding? Like, is it?
Yes and no. So the way that architecture is often taught and practiced is that you’re led to the point of having a vision of something without understanding how it’s being built. We turned that upside down, both in our teaching and in our practice. We started essentially studying the DNA of material constructions, what I call the catalytic detail.
We went down to the scale of the detail. How does that aggregate? How does it assemble? What are the geometries it is prone to? How can you transform that mode of construction? Sometimes we worked with metal workers or woodworkers or masons. Sometimes we just did it on our own in our workshop. And by understanding how the detail works, then there was no big leap in taking that to the bigger vision because we had already solved the biggest problem of translating a vision into construction. The construction preempted the vision.
Interesting. So it gave you more tools to work with because you were basically designing the tools yourselves.
It’s not only the tools, actually. It gave us a political authority that the architect no longer had. Basically, we could short circuit the contractor or we could demonstrate proof of concept to the client when others were not ready to have that discussion yet. Because usually a design process has a conceptual design, a schematic design, design development, construction documentation. Often that proof of concept is delayed till DD and CD process. We were already working on that in the conceptual phase.
What is it for the person who’s actually interacting with that building? How does that translate?
I think it’s a good question. At a moment in time during the 80s where architecture was being optimized in the most corporate sense, everything was being designed around the building industry. Windows were generic, wall systems are generic.
Basically, there was very little innovation happening. And so we were looking on two fronts. One, how to bring the question of craft, materiality and experience back into the frame of the user groups. But also very early, not very early actually, probably too late, we were also getting into the question of how to optimize construction from a sustainability perspective. When you think more broadly, it doesn’t matter what experience you have if you’re wasting 42% of the materials that you’re using. So we were also looking at our means and methods and their protocols as a way of saving materials, saving labor and having less waste in the construction process.
So we were looking at it from both perspectives. From a global perspective, how does all of this change the way that we have a relationship with resources and the sustainability of materials and the lifecycle costs of a building? But on the other hand, we were also giving people the pleasure, the desire of being in a space that is no longer generic but culturally specific to the uses of that specific building.
And of course, buildings are for different people and for different uses. And sometimes it is important to recognize that the building in Miami and the one in Boston and the one in Karachi need to interact with their environments and their cultures in completely different ways.
Yeah, I like the fact that you’re talking about the community aspect of architecture because I know that you’ve spoken in the past about how a building is not really just a building, it’s part of a community. And are we having more interactions with smart cities and data acquisition in architecture or is that kind of like a separate field of urban development? Is it something that’s now pre-programmed into some of the things that you’re doing or is this something that you kind of build the building and it tends to be a separate aspect?
Look, I think it’s a good question, but to answer it, maybe we should step back and look at the relationship between architecture and urbanism more broadly. We come from a school of thought that doesn’t see architecture as buildings per se, but we look at buildings as part of an instrument of having a larger conversation with the evolution of the city and the environment of which it’s a part. And so it’s a rare occasion that we would ever think of doing a building without thinking of the urbanism around it, the landscape around it and the prospect of public spaces that serve a broader community. If buildings are not in service of a larger civic ecology, then what are they doing?
Now, during the same period, the way that we studied urbanism really changed. Before we were looking at plans of the city and their relationship to policy, but meanwhile around us, whether it was from Google Earth or other kinds of environmental data that we were getting from pollution control and trades across oceans and countries, we were understanding that urban design is not the result of merely local policies but really global phenomena. And that has changed almost every urban design program in the last 20 years.
By global phenomenon, do you mean like climate change?
Climate change, pollution, trades, anything, you name it. Anything that has the capacity to be mapped is something that we’re seeing almost in real time. Look at what’s happening in the Middle East right now. We can essentially document everything that has happened in Gaza right now because all of that has been essentially published in the New York Times today.
Yeah, no, I see where you’re coming from. Like I think that there’s so many different macro forces that are affecting our cities at large. The last episode that I had was with the director of the Department of Innovation at the City of Boston, and he was saying that the three things that we’re gonna tackle is number one, it’s gonna be climate change, number two is gonna be traffic, and number three is gonna be just the community, right?
And I feel like there’s this big focus on climate change from an urbanism perspective, and maybe from an architecture perspective too. I guess I just don’t know enough about the other macro forces that are affecting buildings, that are affecting communities. And I think that from our perspective as some people who interact with this stuff, we’re looking for like a good community experience, a good place to walk our kids to school.
Walkability is a huge reason that brought me and my family to Boston in general. And so I guess when the reason that I’m asking is like you’re making these spaces, what are you looking at, right? Like what is it looking at from the top down view? I’m looking from the bottom up view.
Actually, that’s exactly the point. We are taught not to look from the top down view only, but from the bottom up view. How are buildings responsive to the environment of the street?
How do they sponsor a level of interaction such that they are desired to be part of the organism of the city? How do buildings that were deemed 20 or 30 year buildings valuable such that they have a lifespan of two or 300 years?
The real, let’s say, key to sustainability one could argue is not by using just green materials or green protocols, but rather to build less and to renovate and use buildings into the centuries. Look at the mill buildings of two, 300 years ago and how they’ve transformed and been used for different purposes over time. Those have to do with the essentially the typological resilience of those building types that they can actually have different lives over centuries.
Interesting, yeah. Where do you see cities and buildings and architecture going right now? I mean, like you mentioned mill buildings, right? They served a very specific purpose at that part of time and now societal forces have changed to now they’re being repurposed into urban housing and maker spaces and stuff like that.
The people who initially designed that probably didn’t think about that when they were initially designing these buildings, but what are people thinking about now? Where is society projected and how is architecture responding to those forces?
I think that’s a hard question.
Yeah.
We’ve never confronted the existential nature of our decisions like we are now. More so because there are two or three forces that are going against anything this discussion would want to acknowledge. That is funding is being pulled from education and research, essentially the US is stepping out of the Paris Climate Accord and policies in general are going towards the way of opening up oil fields coal fields or whatever you want to call it.
So where are cities going? We know that climate change will have an effect of democratization over the next decades in the sense that it will impact the wealthy and the impoverished equally, at least at the moment of the fire or the flood.
And certainly the wealthy will have access to provisions that others will not have. But the scale of impact will be devastating. We’ve seen that in Los Angeles. You will see it in Florida soon, if you haven’t already. Because it is not a question of the encroaching water of the oceans. The water in Florida is coming from underneath. And so in a time when there’s rapid development and speculation happening in Miami and other places, the lifespan of many of these follies will be in the decades, not in the centuries.
So in many ways we’re living through a curious anachronism. At a moment where urbanism and architecture need to be seen organically, they’re being brought apart. And at a moment where policy and design should be treated hand in hand, they’re being pulled apart by the current administration. And that will speak volumes to the evolution of the city, things that we as architects cannot control because we will be subject to the very laws that are handed down to us. We can resist, we can say no, we can try to select our jobs judiciously. But the reality is that phenomena that you and I are the result of, like suburban sprawl are the result of policies that proliferated over years and decades. And that defines, let’s say American culture as we know it today.
So maybe going back to the larger theme of your podcast, the idea of optimism and the idea of where the future lies, there is an interesting ambivalence here that our access to technologies, an understanding of global phenomena is unprecedented on the one hand. We actually have instruments to study, to mitigate and to establish alternative paths. And at the same time, political forces are making decisions that contradict the very flow of existential crisis that awaits.
Yeah, I think it’s certainly climate change is on everybody’s mind. I guess my question is more so along the lines of like technological progress. Is there anything that you guys are looking at that you think is going to change the way that we interact with cities in general?
I know that Tesla had this big presentation about if robo taxis were commonplace, what does the city look like when you don’t need parking lots? And I thought that was a really interesting and honestly, a big frame shift for me because that’s so integral to how suburban sprawl happened, right? Everybody has a car and everybody drives to work. And it’s something that I’ve subconsciously been trying to like work against because I really pride the walkability of Boston. I really love going down and getting a croissant with my daughter and my wife, which is not something that I was given the option to have growing up in a suburban environment.
But certainly the cars are gonna be something I think that are gonna shift the way that we interact with cities. I don’t know if like artificial intelligence other than like maybe the design aspect is changing the way that you interact with buildings. But tell me a little bit about the technological progress that you’ve experienced and are going to be experiencing over the next few decades that maybe you and other thought leaders in the space are looking at.
So various themes we could discuss. I’ve already spoken to the manufacturing process and digital fabrication and how you can virtually build anything now. Things that were either too costly or that required too much labor or craft in the 20th century through digital manufacturing have become accessible and commonplace. Just because you can build it, it doesn’t mean you should. But still we have greater reach in building things.
I think that the point that you bring up about the role of accessible pedestrian-friendly cities has been on everybody’s mind for a long time, since the advent of suburbanization certainly.
And oddly enough, even, you know, with the phenomena of Lyft and Uber and all of the other ways in which mobility has become, has proliferated over the years, it has not actually lessened traffic. If anything, what you and I have experienced in the last 10 to 20 years is that traffic is no longer coming to downtown. It’s going to the suburbs and downtown at the same time.
So it is also true that because of online work, working from home, there’s a population of people that are on Zoom while others are working in person. But this has not lessened the volume of traffic. It is also true that as flights and the prices of commuting outside of the city have decreased, more and more planes are packed.
All of these demonstrate that with technological change and the democratization of the prices that give access to people, people don’t stop using them. It only proliferates even more. So it is true that while you and I get to benefit from a walkable city and a more local presence, globally, we are still suffering from the very access we’ve given to these technologies, which is not a good thing for the environment at large.
More flights, more cars, etc., etc. But typologically, you’re absolutely right. The recent urban design studies that we’ve done or the commissions we’ve gotten have situated parking garages as part of the project, but in a way that they can be transformed over time as the need for cars lessen.
Those parking garages will be transformed into housing or workspaces and so forth. It’s difficult because not all structures, not all ceiling heights and so forth work for these things, but they can be studied to preempt such things. There’s also other kinds of very basic transformations in assumptions.
Let’s say the revolution in building technologies of the 20th century revolved around the invention of the steel frame and the reinforced concrete frame. That changed everything. We went from buildings to skyscrapers. We went from certain densities to others.
Now we are looking at a broader initiative of mass timber construction, knowing that the rate at which lumber burns, large-scale timber, is slower than steel. Steel melts and therefore it collapses long before wood, because wood chars first before its failure. The laws have not caught up with innovations in mass timber as a material use. In other words, you can build up to five floors, but you still can’t build 10, 20 floors, even though from a structural point of view you could. We lag behind as an American society, but those are all in the works.
With other materials advancements, are we going to see other different types of buildings? Let’s say we’re going to have larger timber buildings. Are we going to have more glass and beautiful like mid-century modern buildings?
I’m not really sure what the design advancements are going to translate to with all these different material advancements that you’re talking about.
It is true that glass was in many ways a symbol of the 20th century. The transparency it evoked, its light weightness, but environmentally it was devastating actually.
Really? I didn’t know that.
Well, they didn’t have insulated glass at the time. The fundamental difference, arguably, between the 20th and 21st century has nothing to do with the steel frame only, is that it really has to do with insulation and creating a weather barrier such that the energies of the exterior and the interior are not transmitted from one side to the other.
Modern buildings of the 20th century basically didn’t have a weather barrier. Because of that, they leaked air. They either required a hell of a lot of air conditioning or a hell of a lot of heating. You wasted most of that because of the lack of insulation between the inside and the outside.
What the end of the 20th century and these past couple of decades have brought to building technologies is a more concentrated understanding of the transmission of the heat and the cold in the skin of the building. That has fundamentally changed what we do.
The rain screen system is a way of basically waterproofing a building. Almost like imagine a building wearing a raincoat, but then the image that you apply to that on the outside can be almost anything you want it to be. Because the water is able to go behind the skin of the building as long as it doesn’t leak. The image is now all of a sudden divorced from the infrastructure that protects it.
This has also fundamentally changed architecture. The image of the building has nothing to do with its performance.
That’s really interesting. I never really thought about that.
I want to change gears a little bit because we’re kind of running close to our time. I know that you’re a professor. I also teach some classes. I know that one of the things that you’ve also been a big proponent of is changing the way how we educate and pedagogy in general.
Tell me a little bit about your perspective on that because I know that you changed the way that architecture was taught. You went from construction being kind of a side topic as now it’s like the forefront for what you’re teaching your students.
What do you see as that being different in the future? Are we going to have more interactive artificial intelligence tutors? What do you see your students’ experience 10 years from now as opposed to now?
First and foremost, there’s something very precious about the educational years. To the extent that we see ourselves as teachers preparing students for a workforce in the near future. That idea is on the verge of obsolescence because practice as we know it today will be very different in five to ten years than what it is today. Lest it be forgotten, what I do today in practice has very, very little to do with what I was taught 20 years ago in school.
From a conceptual point of view, I think our responsibilities as teachers is to educate students for uncertainty, to teach them a form of critical creativity such that they know that the circumstances that they have to confront in class today or in studio today may be very different than a real-life practice problem that they are given five years down the road, but they have the critical faculties to navigate that transition.
Teaching for uncertainty is point number one. Point number two is that the technologies have changed a lot already. In our generation, we drew by hand, and then the software that we’ve had to navigate in the last 20, 30 years have gone from AutoCAD to FormZ to Rhino to Revit to scripting tools to algorithms and AI of different kinds.
All of these remain in some way or another active today in the way that we work. Some of them are already obsolete actually, but we know that we will continue to work differently.
AI is one of those things. Obviously, through programs such as MidJourney, we’ve seen amazing imagery emerge on the internet as to the form and the image of buildings. It hasn’t yet arrived to the point where its configurational understanding of buildings’ infrastructures can become operational at the level of a studio, at a practical studio, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and it will. It won’t lessen the role of the architect in being able to feed it data because a program is only as good as the data that you feed it.
Right. Garbage in, garbage out.
That’s right. And so it changes what we teach each other in the context of school. I like to say that you can educate an architect to design a beautiful building, and that’s not bad, but you can also educate an architect to design a beautiful system that then somebody else can deploy into many beautiful buildings or many beautiful environments. That is even more valuable. Sometimes, when you are operating in the environment of computation, you’re designing frameworks where parameters, constraints, and the infrastructures are being developed, and there’s an elegance to a beautiful script in the way that there’s an elegance to a beautiful built environment.
A lot of what we teach right now also toggles back and forth between tactile material qualities that still matter in the built environment, but also virtual phenomena that impact the way that we produce buildings and will increasingly become part of the workforce and will change the environment of the design studio as we go forward. What’s wonderful about Cooper Union, which is primarily an undergraduate program with a small graduate program, is that in some ways it is pretty anachronistic.
There are elements of what students are doing that are centuries old in that space, but there are other elements that are conversant with the state-of-the-art technologies, whether in AI or digital fabrication or any other thing today. Being able to maintain a kind of agnostic attitude towards those tools has allowed them to speculate with a level of delay and freedom such that the kind of suspension of disbelief allows learning to happen.
Interesting. Healthcare is so different, especially surgery, which is my area of expertise. I feel like when I’m teaching my students, it’s all about technique, and that’s the same technique that was taught in the 1960s.
It’s very, very dogmatic, and it’s interesting to hear your perspective because I feel like the technological progress is probably more significant as opposed to healthcare. I see it coming down the pipeline. We’re a little bit insulated from that, but realistically, the way that I’m teaching them is the same way that I was taught, which is the same way that my professors were taught.
May I ask you, have you done robotic surgery?
Yeah. Here’s the thing about robotic surgery is that it removes the the slight hand tremor. It is much more controlled, but the setup that’s required to put the patient to the correct position, and it’s still not as versatile as me making an incision and seeing with my own eyes and using my own hands.
The speed at which I can do a surgery with robotic surgery has not caught up to how I can do it with regular hand-eye coordination. That’s the holy grail is that I could be doing something, and I can have a big cup of coffee, my hand’s not shaking, and it controls for all of those factors, but speed in surgery is so important from an anesthesia perspective. You want to be under anesthesia for the least amount of time, and then also from a reaction perspective, like God forbid if I hit an artery, then I have to be able to react like that.
We’re still doing it the same way that we’ve been doing it for decades. I know that there’s technological advances that are happening, but it’s still pretty much the same.
I don’t want to underplay the role of technique in our teaching. I like to say that we don’t draw pictures of buildings, we build drawings in the sense that there’s a discipline to how you draw something, because if you draw it with discipline, its translation to fabrication becomes obvious. Building something by folding it is distinct from building something by stacking it, and understanding those protocols makes for a huge difference.
It’s funny that you bring all of this up, because we try to demonstrate through our teaching that technique is not a perfunctory act of labor that happens after the fact, but that it’s always already invested in a kind of intellectual agency, that how you do something matters as much as what you do.
Absolutely. I can totally see that. Especially in the days where we’re relying more and more on AI, you have to have those fundamentals of technique to troubleshoot. I feel like that’s something that I will never downplay, especially in medicine, that you have to be able to see the forest for the trees.
It’s just interesting to see a field like yours that you know, realistically, it’s very digital, it’s very online, and it’s much more of, I would say, a cerebral field than it once was. I went to the University of Florida, which has an architecture school, and I had friends that were…
In Gainesville?
In Gainesville, yeah. I would see them building the models and doing all that stuff, and I’m sure that that still happens. Now, knowing the technology that we have, I feel like the majority must be on software now. Is that correct?
Well, in terms of model making, we still make models, but you can 3D print models, you can laser cut them, which gives the burn marks at the edges that you have to sand off in order to glue together. The technique, the question that you brought up, it’s always present. You can’t escape it.
You’ll be surprised that as much as digital fabrication and AI eliminates certain problems, it instigates a whole lot of labor to input the frameworks that it requires to get them to work effectively.
Yeah. Also, I just feel like, from my field, I feel like you would always be having to be a little bit paranoid and second guessing because you don’t know if that AI knows the difference between right and wrong, especially when it comes to somebody’s life in your hands.
Whether it’s AI or whether it’s just drawing through digital software, it’s empowered us to do many iterations. In the old days, we would do three or four drawings to demonstrate the possibility of an idea. Those three or four drawings are now 30 drawings, 40 drawings.
Now, all the more important are the critical faculties of the architect to be able to discern the difference between one and the other. Why is this one more valuable than the other?
Absolutely. Yeah. That’s my techno-optimistic viewpoint. I think that it’s going to be a force multiplier for humanity. I don’t think it’s going to be as much of a threat to our existence as people think it is.
Certainly, there’s this idea that it’s an existential threat, but I’m thinking more along the lines of, is it going to replace me as a human being? If I’m a truck driver, is it going to be all autonomous vehicles going forward? I think that it’s going to be more of this idea of a cobot that makes your life a little bit easier, but also allows you to be more productive. Would you agree with that or do you feel like it’s different?
Well, I can’t speak to other disciplines, but my sense is that within the simple ecology of our office of 20 people over the last 20 years, we have not lessened the population of our staff. They simply do different things. They are more productive, they are more fast, they’re more interactive with technologies, but they haven’t been replaced. It’s that simple.
I think what we needed, even just the administrative work that’s required for being a citizen in the United States in 2025, there’s just so much stuff that we have to do to be productive. It would be great to have some sort of productivity help, at least in my perspective. Catching up with emails, remembering birthdays, and all sorts of stuff. I feel like there’s a use case for that.
One of the things that I’m reminded of is that people say, oh, this is the end of architecture with Pinterest and Instagram. And it’s true that architecture has never, in history, been so present on people’s algorithms, in social media and all of that. But that doesn’t mean the discipline is present within their algorithms, because behind that image, there are a lot of protocols that are quite complex.
Now, as images go, there are some very complex images out there, but not all of them are necessarily good. When you take a deeper look, you realize that architecture requires a level of integration and synthesis that a lot of mere images cannot provide. I guess so.
That remains a huge task of the architect that needs to be underscored here. Architects don’t make objects. They provide for integrated systems that, in the same way a film director has to think of the screenplay, the scenography, the actors, the improvisation that may happen, and the cinematographer.
In their mind, they have to synthesize all of this. The architectural work is very much like that also. There are many question marks that cannot be answered, except at a certain moment in time, but they all impact each other. And if you’re not thinking laterally across the discipline, you will miss out on that, on the pleasure of that, but also the asset it can provide you.
I guess I just don’t really understand that, because when I think of Instagram and Pinterest, I think of this whole trend in our society as being much more focused on aesthetics. And architecture is such an integral part of that. Like you were saying, in the 80s and 90s, I don’t think that I really looked at buildings in the same way.
I think that the majority of buildings that I would think of are famous landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. But now, with Instagram being so popular, you take a picture of a beautiful building, and then people want to know a little bit more about it. They want to know, oh, is this a Nader Tehrani building? Is this a Hadid building? Is this a whoever building? And I think that it’s certainly brought a lot of focus on the aesthetics.
And that’s what I was really hoping to talk about with you, because I feel like the direction of cities is just going to become so much more beautiful. There’s so many cookie-cutter McMansion cities that are out there. And now, with Instagram and Pinterest, with this whole idea of making things much more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, do you see that direction happening?
It’s possible that I’m the wrong architect with whom to have that conversation. It’s not because of my lack of appreciation on aesthetics. It’s that what happens is that an overbearing emphasis on aesthetics often comes at the cost of the beauty of the systems that underlie it.
And so, dare I say that if the beauty of the definition of an architect emerges out of the problem of synthesis and integration, then it also tolerates the redefinition of aesthetics. Because if there’s a beautiful idea, it may redefine what’s beautiful today in something that you would otherwise find slightly grotesque today until you understood the beauty of the idea, at which point society would change and accept the imagery of something because of the way that it works.
We’re getting into aesthetic philosophy a little bit. From my perspective, working with the head and neck, I always think of that form follows function. The most beautiful people tend to be very healthy, tend to have excellent function.
If you look at just the overall body shape, if you look at athletic people versus people who are not using their body, the aesthetics follows the people who are aesthetic. So I hope that it translates into architecture, that we get more beautiful buildings that have beautiful systems that work out beautiful for the layperson.
Let me translate this into cultural terms that you may understand. Probably there is no place on Earth that has nose operations as much as in Iran. Why do you think that is?
Because they have an idea of aesthetics that doesn’t match up with the genetics that have been handed to them.
And they have constructed an ideal about aesthetics that is probably more Swedish than Iranian. Right?
Right, yeah.
And so aligned with this question about aesthetics is something deeply culturally problematic that we automatically assume that the large nose isn’t dignified, isn’t beautiful, or is lacking in something. So my point to you really simply is that there are many forms of beauty, far be it from me advocating for lack of a healthy existence or eating bad food or being obese or this or that. No, but the reality is that we have different genetic makeups and we come out short and tall, squat and elongated, and there are beauties.
So there are different canons that allow for these beauties to coexist. But how they work and the way that we construct an idea about how they work as a system remains to me a far more interesting question.
Yeah, listen, there’s a lot of beauty. There’s a lot of beauty in the way that the system is set up. I don’t wanna take anything away from that.
But I just see, I see cities today and I think that there’s much more focus on making them beautiful. And I think that’s a good thing. And I think that the system stuff is certainly important. I just, I don’t see it as much as you do probably.
I should say also that a beautiful city maybe does not depend on a beautiful building. There are many beautiful buildings and the idea of beauty changes over time.
I happen to think that City Hall of Boston is a very beautiful building. I maintain that to this day. But I know it is a building that everyone loves to hate. It’s associated with the brutalism of concrete. The barren emptiness of its plaza has been worked on for decades and decades over. But I recognize that the beauty of the city comes from the totality of forces of its landscape, of its civic spaces, of its buildings that speak to each other in dialogue.
And in some ways, that is what makes Boston a beautiful place is that it is all of, it’s the sum of the natural and the built systems of that environment that make it a special place.
Yeah, let’s get hyperlocal for the last few minutes that we have. What’s your favorite neighborhood in Boston? From an architectural perspective. Like what are you like walking through and you’re like, man, I’m so glad that I live here.
So I’m a runner. So I run through the South End, through the Back Bay. And when I get to the Charles River, that’s it.
Oddly enough, as much as I love the architecture of the city and all of my runs coincide with construction sites. So there were many years where East Cambridge, right down the street was my site. Not only was our building going up, but many other buildings were going up at the same time. Now my runs take me to Northern Avenue where there’s that whole new Alston project being built.
So I’m invested actually, not only in the beauty of the historic fabric of the South End and Beacon Hill and all of that, I’m invested in how we are projecting new aesthetics and new neighborhoods and new urbanisms in these central areas. And so my runs coincide with those.
And the question of what is my favorite, it remains the Charles River because it’s sort of, it is like Central Hall, Central Park, excuse me, serves as the lung of New York City. I think the Charles River Basin is the lung of ours. And you get the best view of the skyline of Boston from Cambridge and vice versa.
I love those big towers that are on the bridge there. I mean, like there’s so many movies that have that is like this quintessential scene. So, I mean, I’m particular to East Cambridge because I live here. So much stuff is happening here, but cool to see your perspective.
What do you feel like Boston does better than any other city? Obviously you’re here, you’ve been here for a long time and what’s your favorite part?
It’s a cultural condition. We are, whether we like it or not, we’re a city of schools. And that’s why the population between the winter and the summer is so different.
But because we’re a city of schools, we’re also very cosmopolitan. So we have an extremely diverse public here. We have a very international city and it’s very youthful also because of all of the students.
And I love that. But because of also its intellectual might, it has been the site of incredible environmental speculation over time, which is why it’s a great city for architecture. Per capita, it has the most architects anywhere else in the world.
Interesting, I didn’t know that.
But at the same time, totally low key.
Yeah, right. It feels like a neighborhood.
So if you like, it’s not that I don’t go to museums here or the theater here, but relative to what I do in New York, here, I live in the neighborhood. I work, I walk, I run, I bike. It’s a great city to reflect. But the activities that I go to happen to be in New York.
Interesting, yeah. I just feel like it’s very livable. Like if rent prices were much more affordable, like this would be just a great place to raise a family. I mean, I’m raising my family here because I think it’s worth it.
But I know that it’s a little bit out of reach for some people. But Cambridge, especially East Cambridge, it feels like Sesame Street, right? Like you can go from here to the grocery store and there’s all sorts of little things that are happening along the way.
And I think that that’s a reflection of really great urbanism, is that not so much how easy is it to get from point A to point B, but how many stops do you take along the way? And I think that’s something that I really appreciate about. I would consider Boston and Cambridge to be continuous with each other.
But very, very interesting to hear your perspective. The last few minutes, I wanna just take a little bit of time to ask the same three questions that I ask all of my guests. The first of which is, what is your inspiration?
Where do you get your inspiration from? And I know that for architecture specifically, there’s so many different styles or so many different schools of thought. You have everything from the classical Greek and Roman to a city like Savannah, Georgia, or a city like Tokyo. What are you getting your inspiration from when you’re designing buildings?
Look, I was born in England. I grew up in Karachi, actually. In Johannesburg, in Tehran. Later on, I came to the US, but also lived in Rome, in London again. And so, in great part, beyond loving the tourism that is involved in going from place to place, my inspiration, in great part, comes from the capacity to read different cities.
Reading cities is a thing. Because when you arrive at a place that you’ve never been before, you always know it feels different, but you don’t know how it works. And so, the way that you walk the city and the way that you navigate it for the first two or three days is part of building a kind of memory. And of course, along that way, you see great buildings and you see great icons. But understanding that city is, for me, if you like, what gives me great inspiration.
But the other things that do it is that architecture is part of an art, if you like, a discipline that is conversant with many other things, with theater, with film. And so, we also see ourselves in different cultural productions. Can you imagine a David Lynch without architecture?
Yeah, that’s very true.
Can you imagine a Hitchcock without architecture? And so, there is an element of what we do where we look outside in order to look inside also. So, in many ways, I would say my daily life revolves around two things.
One is this kind of reflection on other phenomena that surround architecture. But the other one is total silence and isolation to be able to focus on something, given all of the noise and text messages and emails and all of the other stuff that is inundating in many ways. Finding a way to isolate from all of that is something that I think everybody can relate to.meaning that inspiration comes also from your capacity to silence and block.
Interesting. Yeah, it’s very hard to do these days, right? So many different competing factors for your attention. So, interesting to hear that that’s a source of inspiration for you.
Where do you see architecture in 10 years? What is it gonna look like? Is it gonna be a different experience for your students being completely digital? Is it gonna influence a lot more from these technological aspects that we talked about?
It’s inevitable that technologies will make their way, not only into architecture, but other practices. Remind you that a lot of the projects that we’ve done through Revit in a totally integrated digital environment have not actually been built accordingly. Not because we as architects were unprepared for them, but because the trades were not prepared for them.
So whether it was the mechanical engineers or the builders, they were working in an antiquated way. That’s not gonna be the case anymore. But while that is happening, my suspicion is that we will be living in a very accelerated world where AI and other phenomena will change how we prioritize what we do in our curriculum.
And my focus at school is not merely teaching courses, but is also in thinking about curricula in the first three years. Like what’s foundational and what is not. And finding ways in which new technologies or new means and methods are brought into a speculative realm rather than merely a kind of technical unfolding of events is important. That way students get to play with these things rather than just assume them as givens.
Interesting, yeah. I think it’s gonna be an interesting time to live in because technological progress is happening in so many different fields and it’s just each one is building on each other.
Which brings me to my next question, which is because of all of this rapid technological change, all these breakthroughs are happening in all sorts of different fields. Outside of your own field, outside of architecture, what are you most fascinated by?
Like for me specifically is robotics. Like we’ve kind of touched on it with surgical robotics, but I can’t wait until I have a humanoid robot that can like do my dishes and do my laundry. I’m just, every time I see a video online, I have to look at it because I’m so interested in it.
Is there anything that you’re really interested aside from architecture that’s really amazing?
I have to confess, I’m not much of a technology buff.
Okay. Well, you know, that’s okay. I mean, I didn’t know if there was any scientific progress that you were interested in aside from the stuff that you’re working on, you know?
It’s not that I’m not interested in robotics and all of these things, but given the immersion that architecture requires between teaching and practice, time is the only asset that I have my eyes on. Meaning how much time can I escape from architecture to do those things which are just humanly pleasurable. And they revolve actually around exercise and food. So cooking is that main passion that I have.
Listen, that in and of itself is gonna be totally different in 10 years. Like wearables, I mean, the idea of wearables has probably changed your whole exercise routine. It’s something that 10 years ago, I didn’t really think was a big thing and then now it is.
And then food, I mean, gosh, just all the sorts of different technological breakthroughs. I had this woman on here that was making artificial beef from bacteria and another person that was doing hydroponic strawberries.
So I actually think the realm of agriculture and from farm to table and the whole culinary process is that arena which interests me most.
What’s your favorite restaurant in Boston?
I don’t go anymore because now I cook. I used to go to restaurants, now I cook.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s cool.
Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks so much for giving us your insight and talking to us about all the different aspects of architecture that we may not see on a regular basis.
And also thank you so much to our listeners and the people who are liking and subscribing. We would really appreciate it if you do like and subscribe. And for those of you guys who are listening on a regular basis, we will see you again in the future.
Thanks everybody, have a great day!
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