My House is Better Than Your House

(Paperback)

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Description

In the South of France, sited on a hill of olive trees, pinus pinea, and a vineyard, a family retreat was designed with a key mission of maintaining the vitality of the site. A small agricultural plot, the site offered the possibility of amplification. With the introduction of a garden and many outdoor living spaces, the family had the intention of cultivating the landscape as part of their stewardship. In part a response to a programmatic brief, but moreover, a discursive response to architectural predicaments of geometry, typology, and anomaly, the house is also a response to Preston Scott Cohen's pedagogies on architecture.

Reviews

"Dubbed the "Dortoir Familial," or family dorm, when it won a P/A Award in 2013, the now-completed Villa Varoise in southern France provides flexible accommodations for extended family gatherings that range between five and 22 people. Nader Tehrani of Boston-based NADAAA--working with Paris-based associate architect Bidard & Raissi--designed the 5,300-square-foot house on a sloped site overlooking the Mediterranean." --ARCHITECT, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects
"The art of this book is that it can be enjoyed on several levels. It is a deep dive into the design process and the meticulous execution of one single house, and its surrounding landscape, taken from initial concept and site strategies through drawings, diagrams, models, and construction details.... But the book is also a manifesto--a reminder to all of us that as architects it is "our responsibility to change the status quo . . . to motivate the discipline, and produce not novelty, but innovation." If you manage that, then the results of the design process just may be "better."" --Architectural Record

Author Bio

NADAAA is a Boston-based architecture and urban design firm led by principal designer Nader Tehrani. NADAAA is a platform for design investigation at a large scale and with a great geographic reach. NADAAA has evolved over three decades as a practice dedicated to bridging between design disciplines: from landscape to urbanism, architecture to interiors, and industrial design to furniture, with a focus on craft, construction, and digital fabrication.

Nader Tehrani is Dean of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union and Founding Principal of NADAAA. Tehrani's work has been recognised with notable awards, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, the United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture.