Hasta La Ideas

Iranian-American designer Nader Tehrani has been made dean of architecture at The Cooper Union in New York, one of the most prestigious art and design universities in the United States.

Tehrani, principal of the firm NADAAA, has long been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led its architecture department from 2010 to 2014. He now joins the Irwin S Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, the institution announced today.

“It is a great honour for me to join The Cooper Union,” said Tehrani. “With its historic legacy, distinguished faculty and the exceptional spirit of the students, the school of architecture offers an ideal environment within which to speculate, experiment and engage in the critical architectural debates of our time.”

He aims to engage disciplines beyond architecture, to “expand our conversations with the schools of art and engineering, and the faculty of humanities and social sciences, to catalyse the broadening of architectural discourse within the institution as a whole”.

Founded in 2011, Tehrani’s firm has offices in Boston and New York. Its projects range in scale, from furniture design to buildings to urban planning.

The architect takes up the new position this month.

“We are delighted to welcome Nader Tehrani as dean of the Irwin S Chanin School of Architecture,” said Richard S Lincer, chairman of the Cooper Union board of trustees, in an official statement.

“Not only is he a highly respected designer whose work has been widely published and exhibited, but he is an academic leader who intermingles pedagogy and practice in a way The Cooper Union community can recognise and appreciate.”

Tehrani has spent the past 25 years advancing architectural research and developing new protocols within academia, with a particular focus on materials.

“Nader Tehrani is in tune with the traditions of the Irwin S Chanin School in terms of our emphasis on exploration and the processes that are at the core of the creation and production of architectural form,” said school of architecture professor Diana Agrest, who chaired the dean search committee.

Tehrani was formerly a founding principal of the now-defunct firm Office dA, which he ran with his ex-wife, Monica Ponce de Leon. The widely publicised dissolution of their Boston-based studio resulted in a court battle, as they both fought for control of the firm.

Ponce de Leon was recently named the architecture dean at Princeton University, after heading the architecture school at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor since 2008.

Tehrani has been recognised with the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture (2007), the US Artists Fellowship in Architecture & Design (2007) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture (2002). He holds degrees from Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was founded in 1859. Notable alumni include Daniel Libeskind, Shigeru Ban, Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Lebbeus Woods and John Hejduk.

The post Nader Tehrani appointed architecture dean at The Cooper Union appeared first on Dezeen.

When the wine shop across the street from me packed up to move, I saw a new dumpster out front and a huge stack of empty wooden wine cases inside the store. Doing the math, I asked the owner if I could scavenge some of the boxes before they went into landfill.

“Well, I can sell them to you,” he said. “This wood is from Chile.” He said it like the boxes were exotic.

“But it’s…pine,” I said. Found out or not, he still wouldn’t budge and wanted $10 per box.

Being able to distinguish pine from teak didn’t do me any good in this case, but for the designers among you that work with wood, learning to identify wood types by sight is as important as it is basic. For newbies among you, you’ll find identifying the common breeds is easy; just read our Wood Series and you’ll have a good start.

But that’s assuming you have a whole board to look at where you can easily read the grain/figure/color. If you’ve got a small piece, a weathered piece or a situation where only a small part of the wood is visible, to figure out what that is you can go more scientific. The Bible on this topic is R. Bruce Hoadley’s Identifying Wood: Accurate Results with Simple Tools, where he teaches you to ID 180 different breeds of hardwoods, softwoods and tropicals using your eyes and a loupe or microscope.

Then there’s the seriously scientific way to tell wood types apart. As NPR reports, The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab in Oregon—the world’s only such facility—has a man named Ed Espinoza as their deputy lab director. A few years ago, an investigator asked them to ID a confiscated shipment of wood that was under suspicion of containing an endangered species. Espinoza somehow figured out that they could use a freaking mass spectrometer to calculate the breed.

Photo by Jes Burns of Earthfix

The mass spectrometer they use is a sophisticated machine called a DART-TOF (Direct Analysis in Real Time – Time of Flight) mass spectrometer…. Espinoza shaves off a small sliver of the wood. With tweezers, he feeds a sample into the DART. It needs just seconds to whiff the compounds and identify agarwood’s unique chemical signature.

In April, the lab became the first and only facility internationally certified to tell law enforcement that one sample is, say, legally traded Amazonian rosewood, versus contraband Brazilian rosewood. Shelley Gardner, the illegal logging program coordinator for the Forest Service, says the new DART technology gives law enforcement a better chance to stop illegally harvested wood from becoming someone’s guitar or a new dining room set.

There’s no word on what the DART-TOF machine costs, but we’re guessing it ain’t cheap; I wonder if Hoadley’s microscope method would be equally effective. In any case, there’s bound to be a demand for technicians who can identify different wood breeds. “International timber trafficking is a huge global business,” says the article. “Interpol estimates it’s worth up to $100 billion a year.” Anyone fancy a side job helping to nab wood traffickers?

There has been no shortage of Guardian US news this summer. The American side of the paper has recently announced plans for a news innovation lab, welcomed a new editor and added its first L.A.-based entertainment writer.

Today, editor in chief Katharine Viner announced three more major moves, two of them involving a new West Coast bureau being set up in San Francisco. Executive editor Merope Mills (pictured) will relocate to the Bay Area from London to serve as West Coast editor of Guardian US, while Washington correspondent Paul Lewis is also making the move there, where he will work as Guardian US West Coast bureau chief.

A Guardian spokesperson tells FishbowlNY that Jemima Kiss is also joining the West Coast bureau later this month. As head of technology, she will lead coverage of “tech trends, gadgets, gaming and startups.”

Mills has been with the paper for more than a decade. Prior to becoming executive editor in January 2014, she worked as Saturday editor, with Weekend magazine and as an editor of film and music. During her time at the University of Manchester in the late 1990s, she was editor of the student newspaper.

The Guardian also announced today that Christian Bennett, head of video for Guardian US, has been promoted to global head of video and audio. He will relocate to London.

CNN wants in on the fashion game, and so it has launched a new vertical: CNN Style.

The site is edited by George Webster and features content for people who enjoy the finer things in life.

A quick browse through CNN Style and you’ll find pieces on a $40 million private car collection, the Cartier panther (which features 545 diamonds) and Dolce & Gabbana’s history. The launch of the site has been guest-edited by famed architect Daniel Libeskind.

The reason for the who like the high-end focus, of course, is to attract high-end ad dollars. Our only question: Will Don Lemon contribute?

We’re a little late to this Upworthy announcement, but we thought it was still worth highlighting because of the ways the post breaks away from the dry norm.

1) It starts with the engaging, narrative headline. The folks recruited are from Discovery, The Guardian and The Daily Beast, but that’s not what Upworthy led with. Bold, refreshing.

2) Then there’s the way Upworthy has highlighted each individual. True to the headline, they combine data + storytelling. Among the notable devices is the fact that each quote – from incoming head of content collaborations Nicole Carrico, vice president of marketing Jennifer Lindenauer and chief revenue officer Ben Zagorski – is italicized and separated. A small but good thing. Here for example is Callorico’s comment:

3) Finally, the bio of each new “Upworthian” in the memo from Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley winds its way to informal personal mission statements. In the case of Callerico, they tie a key professional skill to her latest professional move:

Nicole’s philosophy that branded entertainment isn’t cleverly disguised commercials but an opportunity for a publisher to leverage sponsor dollars to bring great content to the screen is what led her to Upworthy. We’re really glad it did.

Well done.