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Nader Ardalan is an award winning and critically acclaimed international architect. In over four decades of professional and academic life, Ardalan has practiced architecture in two geographic/cultural zones: North America and the Middle East, with project excursions to the Far East, Central and Western Europe. His project designs range from cities and urban centers to cultural and educational facilities, hotels, shopping malls, office towers and apartment buildings, private villas and palaces.

Ardalan’s approach is based upon four design forces structured upon the concerns for function, environment, culture and advanced technology. In the book “Contemporary Architects”, Mitchell Rouda writes of him: “Nader Ardalan is a man dedicated to the search of origins.” The origins are his starting point, giving him a structural and scientific base for anticipating profoundly valid and sustainable architectural solutions to the built environment. His designs have been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and the Avery Library of Columbia University has selected one of his architectural drawings for their permanent collection.

He is a graduate of Carnegie Institute of Technology, and Harvard University where he received the Masters in Architecture degree in 1962. Upon graduation, Nader joined the San Francisco office of SOM, where he worked closely with Charles Bassett, the Chief of Design and an Eero Saarinen devotee. SOM gave him the opportunity to experience the process of world-class design creation and technical production.

Having spent many years in America, there was a deep-rooted need to know his origins. “Little did I know that this quest for origins would lead me ‘deeper’ than I had ever expected,” Nader observes. In 1964, he accepted the position of “Architect of the Fields” from the National Iranian Oil Company and moved from San Francisco to Masjid-i-Sulaiman, in Southwest Iran. At first, the shock of the drastic change from America to Iran was immense, but soon the splendor of Persian art and architecture captured his imagination. There, in the shadow of the cyclopean stone platforms of Masjid-i-Sulaiman, Nader met the archaeologist Dr. Roman Ghirshman and helped draw some of his finds at the Parthian Bard-i-Neshandeh and the Elamite site of Choga Zambil. His first appreciation of the value that history places upon great architecture came while observing these ancient ruins being excavated with the loving touch of soft camel hair brushes and the exactitude of theodolite measurements.

After two years he moved to Tehran, where as a design partner of Abdul Aziz Farmanfarmaian, he directed the design of Iran’s first high-rise residential apartments, the Asian Games Sports Center and the Iran Center for Management Studies in association with Harvard Business School.

Soon he began teaching architectural seminars at Tehran University Faculty of Fine Arts and conducted a series of personal surveys of the architectural vocabulary and aesthetic concepts of the culture of Persia, which resulted in the 1973 co-authorships of a publication by the University of Chicago Press entitled: “The Sense of Unity” – The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture. It was during this time that he formed his own architectural and planning firm, The Mandala Collaborative.

In Boston from 1979 to 1994, these broadening dimensions of research continued, with a particular emphasis on the key concepts of Western Architecture, as a result also of the Post-Modern movements increased interest and scholastic publications on the early roots of classical Greco-Roman architecture. Specifically through his Boston-based architecture, Nader explored the new world architecture of America through the works and writings of H.H. Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. Those studies were presented in fragments over a number of years through lectures, symposia, published articles and built architectural works.