Pratt Session: Nader Tehrani

Nader Tehrani will join GA/LA/UD Chair Andrew Holder to present a canonical project from his practice NADAAA as part of the Department’s series of Pratt Sessions. For over two decades, Nader’s work has led the effort to integrate complex geometric and computer-based fabrication into he core of Architecture’s age-old concerns with organization, tectonics, and aesthetics. Recently, though, he has accepted a number of cultural commissions in historic buildings that tend to suppress exactly the complex visual signatures with which the firm has long been identified. The session will take up a close reading of NADAAA’s project “Villa Varoise” to clarify the continuing concerns of his practice, changes in the architectural milieu, and the possible ways that design might respond.

Pratt Sessions are a format for discourse at the Department of Graduate Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Design. The sessions seek to refine and intensify the event-structures commonly found in the design academy. Whereas lectures desire general audiences for broad overviews or introductions, Pratt Sessions focus on just one piece of work by a single author or practice. Whereas juries convene faculty to critically engage student work at the end of a project, Pratt Sessions gathers colleagues to support the intellectual project of a figure we mutually admire.