Nader Tehrani, a professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been appointed dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Tehrani served as the head of MIT’s Department of Architecture from 2010 to 2014. 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.

For over 25 years, Tehrani worked to motivate academic research to change practice and to test new protocols 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 mock-ups, he seeks to simulate and generate alternative approaches towards tectonic studies. The work developed through a series of installations including “Fabricating Coincidences,” The Museum of Modern Art (1998); “Immaterial/Ultramaterial,”Harvard University (2001); “Change of State,” Georgia Institute of Technology (2006), and “Catenary Compression,” Boston Society of Architects (BSA) Space (2015).

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 School of Architecture in London, where he attended the post-graduate program in history and theory. Upon his return to the United States, Tehrani received the M.A.U.D. from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1991.

Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences. For more information, please visit cooper.edu.

For more information see NADAAA’s blog, or www.cooper.edu