NADAAA: How to Own the Means and Methods (w/ Nader Tehrani, Arthur Chang)

Join us for Best Practice, a virtual fireside chat series dedicated to practice operations at architecture firms and beyond. From pain points to potential, hear how leaders in the architecture and engineering industry are innovating through new business models and managerial techniques. We’re chatting with Nader Tehrani and Arthur Chang of NADAAA about how to own the means and methods.

For his contributions to architecture as an art, Nader Tehrani has been selected as the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' 2020 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize. Working on interdisciplinary platforms, Nader Tehrani's research has been focused on the transformation of the building industry, innovative material applications, and the development of new means and methods of construction, as exemplified in his work with digital fabrication. Tehrani's work has received many prestigious awards, among which are the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and Eighteen Progressive Architecture Awards. Tehrani is also the Dean of the Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and former Head of the Department of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning where he served from 2010-2014.

Arthur Chang, AIA is a Principal of NADAAA. He has been a key part of NADAAA and a collaborator of Nader Tehrani's since 2004. In Chang’s seventeen years of practice, he has led a variety of large, award-winning institutional and commercial projects. His work in construction management and technologies confronts complex questions of means-and-methods to make bespoke aspects of our building designs both deployable and affordable. His efforts allow us to collaborate with local trades earlier in the schematic design phase to draw out the best in our design partnerships. Chang’s investments in fabrication, mock-ups, and materials testing have served our clients in many ways and have led to his work receiving some of the most prestigious national and design international awards. Chang holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Architecture from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

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