Conversations: Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, Martin Finio, and Nader Tehrani
Nader Tehrani, Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, and Visiting Critic Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh speak with Martin Finio, Senior Critic (and soon-to-be Associate Dean), about historic preservation, the design of architecture schools, and the state of pedagogy today.
Martin Finio You’ve spent time at Yale; you’re familiar with the campus, and I know you’ve participated in Yale events. But just to get it out of the way: in just a few words, tell me who you are.
Nader Tehrani I’m Nader Tehrani. I’m an unregistered architect.
MF There it is on speaker!
NT I’m a principal of NADAAA. I’ve been teaching for many years now—at RISD, Northeastern, Harvard, MIT, and as Dean at Cooper Union—and I am committed to continuing teaching. But I’m also a committed practitioner, and I try to build bridges between the two.
MF Ghazal, tell me about yourself and how you’re both connected. Have you worked together in this capacity before?
Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh We haven’t. I started working for Nader and Monica [Ponce de Leon] about twenty years ago and I stayed with them for five years. In many ways I’ve learned everything I know from NADAAA. For the past ten years I’ve abandoned practice in the traditional sense to teach. I started down south at the University of Virginia and then I made my way out to Lebanon, where I taught at the American University of Beirut. I’ve been hiding in Beirut for seven years and just returned. Beirut has a dimension that was entirely unfamiliar to me, which is all the NGO work. That’s how money comes in and how it gets distributed.
MF You said you abandoned practice. Was the NGO work architectural?
GA I wouldn’t say that I ever attempted to build anything in Beirut. In a way you become an “activist” in Beirut. That ranges from working with communities to marching and “activating” the streets, so to speak.
NT I should mention that the reason Ghazal came to collaborate with us is that she had experience with curtain walls that we didn’t. So all of the detailing of the Macallen Building, our first and largest commission of the time, was on the coattails of her experience. From my perspective, a lot of the work we’ve done in the past revolves not only around architecture but also urban design and planning. Although I received my masters in urban design, we never got the opportunity to develop our practice in that direction until recently, which is what we’ve been focused on in the past few projects. A lot of Ghazal’s work, on the other hand, has dealt with community work in the field and on the ground, participatory work, engaged work in the trenches, and revolution—things that I certainly had no experience with. So much of my recent learning comes from her experiences abroad.
MF That’s a great segue into the next question, which is about the studio you plan to teach at Yale, “Reconsidering Representation,” a great title. You’ll be taking on the U.S. Embassy in Athens, designed by Walter Gropius. I think it’s so interesting, the idea of operating in, on, and around an existing building and how that’s becoming a more urgent and acceptable method of pedagogy in schools of architecture. I loved your comment that the studio “will offer students the humility of inhabiting a different authorship.” How did you come to want to do this particular project at Yale?
NT When Ghazal and I were first speaking about this opportunity it was just a pie in the sky. I said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we did something in Beirut, where you have so much experience and where I have a lot more to learn?” We didn’t realize Yale had these traveling studios, but invariably there would have been problems with visas and logistics, so we redirected our focus to conceptual issues. While we were having these discussions, I was on an Overseas Building Office (OBO) review for an architect designing an embassy in Europe. It was such a pleasurable experience that I asked if OBO would be interested in engaging a university on a conceptual exercise. We started looking at continents and locations and cultures with which we are familiar but also unfamiliar, and between the budget and the issue of preservation we landed eventually on Athens. It was serendipity at some level, and also very focused on doing something international at an American school.
MF Tell me, where does this idea of wanting to operate on an existing building come from? NT There is a general assumption that architecture school is about creativity, self-will, and freedom. This approach comes instead from a space of humility, deferring to another’s authorship, along with the confidence that there’s probably much more to learn in the confrontation with constraints born out of others’ priorities through small spaces of invention and, in turn, a more critical stance on how one adds to the world. I have always been interested in case studies and historical examples, and Cooper Union formalized that interest in the context of the Analysis Studio, an entire semester dedicated to close inspection and dismantling of historical precedents. It educates the teachers as much as the students. It relieves the anxiety of immediate intervention, delaying it with a more forensic study of analytical explorations of typologies, spatiality, technology, and incremental interventions undertaken by different architects over time. In my mind analysis requires a form of projection in itself, and in this sense the Gropius building will require a close understanding while opening up a space for intervention. To be fair, this is not one of Gropius’s greatest buildings. But it’s still important. So transforming it may also entail corrective acts. It’s embroiled in a range of issues that I think both of us will find productive. And also, why build more?
MF I agree completely. My last studio was on the Seagram building. It’s said that 80 percent of the buildings that are here today will be here 50 years from now. But the thing I’m most interested to hear is your assessment of the state of architectural education and pedagogy. You have been educated at several architecture schools and you’ve taught at so many, you ran an architecture school, and you’ve designed several architecture schools. So what do you see?
NT Because of all the things you just listed, I will punt the question to Ghazal first.
GA I don’t know if I am in a position to discuss the state of architectural pedagogy since I have been stationed at its periphery in the Global South, finding myself teaching the Western canon in an environment that could not be further removed from our concerns in the West, but also strangely global in many dimensions. I did teach in what I would consider a very American school, in that we did not really train architects. We trained what we liked to call “critical thinkers” in our program. Our French counterparts did a much better job of training architects. But our students did graduate as fully licensed architects, which really forefronts the question of how much “architecture” in the traditional sense do you teach and what constitutes the “built environment” beyond the “built statement.” As I found myself struggling to teach a Western-centered history of the discipline, I focused on regionalism as a way to decentralize the discourse, which is not entirely unrelated to the studio we are teaching. As we marched and revolted, I played up the year of global revolt, 1968. So my students somehow all became experts in the failures of Modernism. All the while I understood that they did not engage with the toxic environment we occupied—the environmental pollution, lack of basic infrastructure, refugee crisis, and looming economic crisis—from which they escaped. So the second iteration of my core history course included a month mapping the history of the discipline with respect to world events. Needless to say, architecture’s agency is limited to our tools—the methods and processes inherent to the discipline. And that remains the constant. So in a way my foremost occupation was to find ways to teach a balance of what I considered the core of architecture and its engagement with the expanded environment.
MF That sounds more student-driven than institutionally determined. I do believe that architectural pedagogy is as much connected to who the students are as to what we are presenting to them.
NT With all the dynamic changes in architectural education over the last quarter century—the shifts in technologies, the political urgencies of environmental and social issues—I find my relationship to architectural pedagogy strangely stable. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. My point is that for those who remain invested in the project of architecture itself—in its formal, spatial, and material qualities—there was always the specter of the underlying social, political, and economic realities. Architecture, in one way or another, is always complicit with the cultural contingencies around it, and at best the dialogue, challenge, and critique of it, but it is always relational. In recognizing that other fields such as anthropology, sociology, politics, and economics have significant urgencies to be addressed, we recognize that not all of them can be addressed through architecture. Yet to the extent that they involve formal, spatial, and material solutions, it is an arena in which we stand to contribute to the wider world. Part of it requires learning from and listening to the world, and understanding its urgencies, but also developing a spatial analog in relation to it and translating it into architectural terms when relevant. This said, I don’t think the academy needs to be anxious about working in a disengaged fashion, because I don’t believe that schools should be a mirror of so-called reality out there. Certainly if the goal were to prepare students for practice, it comes with the assumption of a static practice—this in a moment when many types of practice are on the verge of obsolescence. Practice, as we know it is so limited in imagination, so problematic and fraught with historical baggage, that my philosophy is that it’s best to produce agendas for students such that they can transform practice as we know it, not recreate its current conditions. I think you, Martin, understand perfectly the transformations that our generation has undergone over the past three decades since graduation. The lesson we might take away from it all is to prepare students for uncertainty. We are not here to lock them into one technique or method. If anything, we might succeed in arming them with a kind of intellectual latitude and empathy so they can navigate uncertain waters with equal dexterity when you and I are long gone.
MF What’s wonderful about all that is that there are so many different ways of approaching education now than there were when you and I were studying. I’m finding it so interesting: no matter what the students do after they leave the academy—whether it’s practicing with a firm, working for government, or serving in a political position—we’re setting them up to broaden the idea of architectural practice. John Hejduk always used to say, “We’re not here to teach you the profession of architecture. We’re here to teach you the discipline of architecture.” But I don’t know if you really answered me: What is the state of the state of architectural pedagogy?
NT In some ways it is more dispersed, often exploring techniques and scales unfamiliar to traditional pedagogies. With questions of climate change and sustainability, one of the more interesting aspects of education today deals with scales of analysis that are planetary, with drawings and predicaments that evade conventional urban-design strategies. This also means there isn’t a “core” around which we revolve, as we might have defined it some three decades ago. That said, what I lament about all this productive work being done is the loss of investment in the “built” environment as a specific focus—less architecture as an expanded field and more buildings as the basis for intellectual expansion.
MF That’s a good segue to my next question, which is more about space. Having designed several schools of architecture, I’m curious to hear what you believe a building designed to house students of architecture should be expressing. What should it be saying outwardly? What should it be saying to students? How can it embody a form of pedagogy? What do you see changing in the spaces where we teach?
NT I borrow the term built pedagogy from Tom Kvan, former dean at Melbourne School of Design, who wrote the competition brief that includes this idea. He didn’t actually define it; and curiously enough, we didn’t submit a building as the final proposal. We submitted spatial strategies focused on specific themes, and one of them was a more enhanced definition of built pedagogy. First, a school is about spaces for learning and teaching—and learning and teaching are two different things—but arguably it’s also a space of pedagogical negotiation. But even more importantly we recognize that in designing a school you are in an environment replete with students and faculty, many of whom are at least as erudite as the architect designing the building, if not more. No matter what you do, that building will become a didactic instrument—in all of its flaws as well as its virtues. So we set out to establish, in the organization and functioning of the building, in its details and moments of speculation, characteristic features that we could call “built pedagogies”—that is, didactic moments that are effectively built experiments demonstrating certain ideas. This is true, for example, of Georgia Tech and Melbourne, which share the common trait of suspended studios that maintain the flexibility of the ground. Yet the specificity of what happens from top to the bottom in Melbourne—the inversion of a structural idea, where rustication is at the top of the building and the building thins down as it descends, the CLT and plywood technologies—is a central part of a technological revolution. Behind that lies the fascination with the ghosts of other buildings that inhabit the one you’re designing today. I think the building needs to speak to both ages long gone and ages yet to be born, to different histories, to extending debates and conversations long after they are conceived. So the building is not just functional but also has a discursive capacity.
MF Your buildings all embody the studio model of instruction, right?
NT The two mentioned earlier, as well as the University of Nebraska (which is under construction), and the Daniels Faculty in Toronto, are all very different schools. But behind the differences is a deep conviction about the studio being a space of intersection and interaction, which includes designing sectional and programmatic scenarios that ensure the coming together of different disciplines.
MF What I’ve always admired about your work is that it is so rooted in making. Not just the aspects that architects fetishize like craft and detail, but in how construction happens in all its messiness, constrained by codes, and in how contracts leverage—all the ways that buildings actually come into the world.
NT So much of the architectural profession over the last 500 years has been dedicated to problems of representation, while construction is always treated as a sort of backwater of professional practice. How do we retheorize construction? How do we invent through it? Today everything revolves around the term means and methods, to which architects do not have rightful legal access. We have attempted to reabsorb it through our work over the years, through both research and commissions. Working strategically is part of it: in the Daniels Faculty, for instance, investing the idea of the building around the studio space and its roof, and the engineering at its core, meant it could not be value engineered. It became an idea that the client eventually owned and advocated for. On other fronts, we have continued to learn from Ghazal’s NGO work, among other types of social engagement with communities and urban projects. It has to do with reframing the world around us: the work we did with the Van Alen Institute on Rikers Island; the work that we’re doing for the Met to recenter the narrative of collections that include ancient Near Eastern and Cypriot artifacts; the work we’re doing with Lincoln Center to reopen the campus toward the west, where the San Juan Hill community used to live. These are all acts of recentering social narratives to bring architecture into conversation with urbanism and a history of politics that has obscured the inequities that older narratives have continued to perpetuate.
