Spring 2026 U-SoA Tecnoglass Lecture by Nader Tehrani of NADAAA and Cooper Union
About this Event
1215 Dickinson Dr, Coral Gables, FL 33146
#tecnoglassJoin us for a lecture by Nader Tehrani of NADAAA / Cooper Union; part of the Spring 2026 University of Miami School of Architecture Tecnoglass Lecture Series, Mixtape. U-SoA revisits highlights from the last decade with speakers re-invited for an update on recent work and to discuss change/career trajectories in a rapidly transforming world.
"The Sixth Elevation"
Of the many contemporary architectural challenges, the reflected ceiling plan is possibly the most overlooked. If historic architectures of the 19th century and eras prior celebrated the sublime capacity of domes to emit light and spaces of imagination, the contemporary ceiling conversely needs to attend to the entanglement of building systems, fire suppressions mechanisms, lighting, acoustic mitigation, and various other services. If these systems were conventionally housed in the ‘poché’ zones of the building, the reflected ceiling plan of today stands to overcome some of the most complex of architectural traffic jams. If the main aim of ceding design was to coordinate the complexity of building systems, then the task would be simple enough, but this talk seeks to the draw out the capacity of these ceilings to transcend the terms problem solving: to transform the spaces of architectural systems, creating something larger than the sum of their parts.
Due to weather conditions, this lecture, originally scheduled for Wednesday, February 26, has been postponed to Wednesday, April 1, 2026.
6:00 pm Reception - Jorge M, Perez Architecture Center, Thomas F. Daly Loggia
6:30 pm Lecture - Jorge M, Perez Architecture Center, Stanley and Jewell Glasgow Lecture Hall
followed by a discussion with Dean Rodolphe el-Khoury
Join Zoom Meeting
https://miami.zoom.us/j/91070896997
Meeting ID: 910 7089 6997
Nader Tehrani, Principal, NADAAA + Professor, Cooper Union
For his “contributions to architecture as an art”, Nader Tehrani is the recipient of The American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States. With nineteen Progressive Architecture Awards, he is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Design, and recipient of the Design Visionary Award from the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum. Tehrani is the Founding Principal of NADAAA, an interdisciplinary practice with works across scales from infrastructure to urbanism, architecture, and installations. The former Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT (2010-14), Tehrani was also Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union (2015-22). Widely exhibited at MOMA, LA MOCA and the Venice Biennale, NADAAA’s work is also in the permanent collections of the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
