Nader Tehrani became Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in July 2015. He is principal of NADAAA, a practice dedicated to the advancement of design innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and an intensive dialogue with construction practices. The firm has offices in Boston and New York City.

Dean Tehrani joins Cooper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was professor of architecture and served as head of the Department of Architecture from 2010 to 2014. For over 25 years, he worked to motivate academic research to change practice and to test new protocols of practice in the context of academia. His own research targeted material culture as the basis for speculation—exploring material properties, negotiating materials and their geometric predispositions and challenging the means and methods of building processes. Working between the digital realm and the medium of full-scale mock-ups, he seeks to simulate and test alternative approaches towards tectonic studies. The work developed through a series of installations including “Fabricating Coincidences,” Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 1998): “Immaterial/Ultramaterial,” Harvard University (2001); “Change of State,” Georgia Institute of Technology (2006), and “Catenary Compression,” Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Space (2015).