Hadighi to Chair UB Department of Architecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Mehrdad Hadighi, associate professor of architecture in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, who has received repeated notice over the past several years as one of the world's up-and-coming young architects, has been named chair of the school's Department of Architecture.

Hadighi will replace Kent Kleinman, professor of architecture, who has served as chair since 1999. Kleinman will step down to begin a semester-long academic leave as a Study Centre Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), and will return to UB in the role of professor.

Hadighi's scholarly work focuses on the parallels between 20th-century theory and criticism and the constructive principles of architecture. He has received considerable national attention for his innovative work and was named one of the country's six Notable Young Architects by the Architectural League of New York in 1996.

He and his wife, architect Shadi Nazarian, clinical associate professor of architecture at UB, are the principles in "Studio for Architecture," a Buffalo architectural design firm that focuses on architectural research and experimentation, residential design and public design projects.

In July 2004, the firm was named one of the 25 most intriguing, innovative and intrepid architecture firms in the world by the influential British design magazine Wallpaper* in its Annual Design Directory issue. In 2003, the Design Vanguard issue of Architectural Record magazine named it one of "10 Young Firms Reshaping the Globe."

Hadighi has produced site-specific installations for galleries in Washington, D.C., Buffalo, Ithaca and New York City, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Council on the Creative and Performing Arts.

He has taught at Columbia, Cornell and Miami universities, and also has served as a guest professor and critic at the University of Arizona, the University of Texas/Arlington and in the countries of Korea and Liechtenstein. His work has been widely exhibited and published.

This year, Kleinman was one of 16 recipients of the prestigious CCA Study Centre fellowships, and will conduct research there on architect William Muschenheim. Muschenheim's life and work illuminate many of the most significant impulses and debates that framed the development of architecture in the United States between 1925 and the early post-war years.

Kleinman's work on the Muschenheim Digital Archive recently received national recognition as well. The archive virtually unites materials on Muschenheim held at the Avery Drawing Center at Columbia University and those in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. His most recent book, "The Krefeld Villas," written in collaboration with Leslie Van Duzer, associate professor in the Arizona State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design, will be published in February 2005.