Where Is the Future for Young Architects? A Veteran of 30-Plus Years Says: "Constraints and Uncertainty"

Nader Tehrani talked about his design philosophy and his work during "Celebration of Design," the cross-disciplinary exhibition staged by Design Republic.

"I think the best architects are produced by constraints." That is how the Iranian-American designer and educator Nader Tehrani defined the architect's role in an interview with QDaily, before adding: "Without constraints there is no innovation. Wisdom springs from these constraints too."

The answer doubles as Tehrani's summary of his own 30-plus years in the profession. As for how he has found room for invention inside every kind of constraint, the evidence is easy to find in his past work.

Take the BANQ restaurant in Boston. Out of a single, simple material — wood — it builds one continuous structure that runs from the ceiling all the way down to the floor. Broad, wave-like lines sweep smoothly through the space, wrapping the whole restaurant in the same water-like sense of motion. The frame, made of birch plywood, produces an artistic effect and works hard at the same time: besides holding up the space, it hides the drainage, the sprinkler system, the lighting and the audio equipment — all the infrastructure — inside it.

Designing a whole building is plainly more complicated than designing an interior. From the structure and the indoor systems to the choice of materials and the method of construction, every detail has to be bargained out against constraints: limited budgets and sites, the demands of the client and of the people who will use the building, government regulations, and more.

Today, with the world's natural environment steadily deteriorating and the economy slack, most architects are losing the freedom to build whatever they can imagine on a deep-pocketed client's money. They have to budget carefully and cut costs, and at the same time they are taking on a new duty: protecting the environment.

How the new generation of architects should meet the demands of a new era, and which direction the architecture of that era should take, is a question Tehrani thinks about as an architect and keeps probing as an educator.

But for Tehrani — who founded and runs the architecture firm NADAAA, taught at Harvard for eight years, spent four years as head of the Department of Architecture at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, and is now dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union — the most interesting way to explore that question is to put his two roles together: design a building for a school of architecture and make it a physical textbook.

The Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne is a case in point. It was finished back in 2014, yet the project — led by Tehrani's NADAAA in partnership with the Melbourne firm John Wardle Architects — is still, in his words, "one of the projects I'm proudest of."

It took 14 months to build, four months less than planned, and won a good deal of recognition in the profession: the Award for Public Design at the 2015 Australian Interior Design Awards, an Honor Award for Architecture from the American Institute of Architects, and a 6 Star Green Star Design rating from the Green Building Council of Australia — six stars being the top level in that system.

The exterior is striking. The north, east and west faces are clad in countless hot-dip galvanized steel panels, set in no regular order, jutting outward in places, their surfaces pierced with small holes. On the south face the designers stripped that cover away and put in dozens of tightly spaced glass windows. At the foot of the building, where it meets the artificial lawn, they set a row of glass panels tilting outward, each at a different angle, together forming a curve.

Tehrani believes that thinking about "the relationship of the part to the whole" is crucial to the design process. Nowhere does that show more clearly than in how the Melbourne School of Design's exterior was handled. In his design, "part" and "whole" mean not only the relationship between a building's components and the building itself, but also the relationship between the building and its surroundings, and even the wider global environment. "We're not just putting up a building. We should also understand the ecological environment a building sits in, and its relationship to bigger things — the landscape, the city, the region, the whole planet," Tehrani explained in the interview.

The building stands in the middle of the University of Melbourne's Parkville campus, about 7 kilometers from Port Phillip Bay. To make it last, the materials had to stand up to corrosion from sea air, and hot-dip galvanized steel, which resists rust extremely well, was the ideal choice. Hung vertically over the concrete structure, the panels do more than decorate the exterior: they block direct sun and provide a degree of insulation. Drilling their surfaces full of small holes solved the problem of impeded ventilation.

The south face was left "exposed" because in Melbourne, which lies south of the Tropic of Capricorn, that is the shaded side: no direct sun, relatively low temperatures, relatively weak light. Large areas of clear glass improve the daylight indoors and, like the galvanized panels shading and insulating the other facades, save energy.

The interior takes energy just as seriously. The basement reading room draws its light from that row of glass panels at the base of the south face, and the daylight cuts electricity use. The five floors above ground are built around an atrium. So instead of the arrangement most teaching buildings use, with classrooms and other functions lining both sides of a long, narrow corridor, here the exhibition space, study areas, classrooms and offices are ranged around the void. Daylight passes through the glass panels at the top of the building and, following the slope of the plywood on the walls of the coffered ceiling, falls softly into the rooms.

To use the space better, the designers hung a tower-like volume in the middle of the atrium, joined to the ceiling but stopping short of the floor, with three workshops inside. The plywood covering its outside is dotted with small holes, packed more densely the closer they come to the ground, and dozens of vertical wooden boards line its base. All of this was meant to absorb noise in the open space and cure the echo the atrium created.

Daylight is not the only thing put to use. Rainwater collected from the roof runs into a 750,000-liter tank in the basement, and from there to the toilets inside the building and to the irrigation systems for the lawns and gardens outside.

The design team also fitted the building with many sensors that systematically track energy use, carbon emissions, humidity, temperature, air quality and more; the readings appear on a large screen on the ground floor.

To serve the school's teaching, much of the structure inside was left unfinished, exposed directly to the air, so that students can see how the building is put together. During construction the site itself became a classroom, with a series of guided tours to show students how the building was going up.

Besides honoring the "part to whole" relationship Tehrani talks about, and making the building energy-efficient, environmentally sound and good to look at, the construction itself was efficient. "We realized at the time that if we thought about it smartly and thoroughly, 80% of the entire building could be finished off-site," Tehrani recalled.

The galvanized steel panels, the concrete structure, the glass panels, the plywood and other components were all made in factories in advance, then trucked to the site and assembled. The same prefabrication approach was used at New York's Carmel Place apartments, which we have written about before. It saves time and blunts the effect of weather and other variables on construction, because factory work and on-site assembly can run at the same time; it also makes the quantity of material easier to estimate, so less is wasted. "That's why this project was able to finish ahead of schedule and under budget," Tehrani said in the interview.

For a building in the middle of a campus, the method had another benefit: fewer materials piled up on site, and less disruption to ordinary campus life.

What Tehrani calls "applying assembly-line production to building construction" has never been fully exploited in architecture. That has to do with the state of technology, but also with how hard an architect thinks about a building. What matters most in designing a building, Tehrani argues, is not necessarily how it ends up looking, "but how it was built."

Prefabrication is only one of the ways technology has changed the profession. GPS and GIS have found their way into urban planning; designing a city is no longer a matter of laying out streets and functional plots in the traditional way, but is now tied to the big data everyone talks about. Come down to the design of an individual building, and computers have altered not only drafting and modeling but the relationship between people and their surroundings: smart systems have made it possible to interact with the space around you.

All of this, in Tehrani's view, gives young architects plenty of openings. They can get information faster over the internet, and they can innovate on top of what earlier generations built. Picking up and mastering the newest knowledge and technology is no longer hard for a young architect; what matters more, by comparison, is understanding their own profession correctly.

He said: "The most basic thing is that you must not do anything that harms the world. Beyond that, you need the ambition to push the world forward." He also believes that "architects are bound by a social contract. We're not just putting up a building; we're also building a connection with an audience, and that audience isn't only human beings — it's the larger ecological environment around us." Ecological buildings like the Melbourne School of Design are, at bottom, what happens when those convictions meet concrete knowledge and technique.

And now that the internet has tied the world more tightly together, the ability to talk across different cultures and disciplines is, in his view, another skill architects must have. At Cooper Union, Tehrani is trying to build better connections between architectural design and other fields such as engineering and art: "One of my goals is to make Cooper Union an intermediary, so that each of these different roles can play its part better."

"Architecture is itself a way of thinking," Tehrani says, and he does not think an architect's responsibilities in the future need stop at building design: plenty of architects today have taken what they learned to Silicon Valley to write software, or turned into fine engineers.

"We have no idea what the world will look like in the future," he said. "I think the best architectural education doesn't just train you in professional skills. It should prepare you to embrace uncertainty, and to learn how to adapt yourself to different environments and listen to different cultures. Only then can you innovate under different conditions. In that situation, I think, even if you don't know what kind of design you'll end up making, you won't be afraid to do the research and go exploring."

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the images in this article come from Archdaily, photos by Peter Bennetts, John Horner and John Gollings.