The Principal profiles Mehrdad Yazdani
September 25, 2018
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The Principal—an emerging architecture design publication—has profiled Mehrdad Yazdani and the Yazdani Studio of CannonDesign in a new Q+A feature piece. As both a design principal for our national practice and the director of the Yazdani Studio, Mehrdad is one of the most respected architects in the world.
Here's some excerpts from the Principal profile:
What interesting projects is the studio working on currently?
Our team is excited about a number of ongoing projects including four high-rise residential and hotel towers in Dubai. Two of the towers are located in the city’s downtown while the other two are part of a new development at Dubai Creek. These are our studio’s first towers in Dubai, so we can’t wait to see them completed over the next two years. We also recently completed our design of a 40,000-square-foot exhibition at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem.
Three recently completed projects we’re extremely proud of are the Lassonde Studios at University of Utah, Jacobs Medical Center at UCSD Health and CJ Blossom Park in South Korea. Lassonde Studios is a first-of-its-kind building that combines student residences with a 20,000-square-foot entrepreneurial hangar where students live, learn and launch companies. The building has helped the university quadruple the number of student-led startups on campus. Jacobs Medical Center—the first hospital the Studio had designed—elevates patient experience through thoughtful design, technology integration and embracing nature, and has won numerous prestigious design awards. And CJ Blossom Park is a novel research and design center for CJ Corporation that was named the best new laboratory in the world by R&D magazine.
Can you talk about your passion for sketching and how you still leverage it as design becomes more tech-driven?
For me, sketching is both a passion and a vital creative tool. My interest in drawing really stems from my schooling. I took several drawing and painting classes during middle and high school and wanted to pursue a career in the arts but my father didn’t think I’d be able to shape a future in that field—so I began to look into architecture, which ignited a passion that has never weakened in 40 years.
Through my introduction to architectural drawing, I began to sketch and paint more tectonic and architectural forms. My sketching was one of the leading reasons I was accepted into the University of Tehran and then when I moved to the United States, it became a signature element of my work at the University of Texas Austin.
