About Ardalan Associates

ARDALAN ASSOCIATES, LLC, a Florida corporation with an office in Naples, Florida, is an independent design consultancy that brings to the marketplace an innovative architectural practice model based upon miniaturization. The firm has the capability of offering, within a small entity, a high quality network of innovative designers and engineers located throughout the world that complement and digitally interact in a creative, effective, flexible and cost effective manner with Nader Ardalan. The firm is structured to offer explicit, world recognized expertise in research and applied sustainable, environmentally adaptive and culturally sensitive planning and design services. It also provides advisory services to help enhance the decision making process and productivity of government authorities, universities, development companies and other professional firms.

As President of Ardalan Associates, LLC, Nader Ardalan is an Architect with a long and distinguished international career in the fields of Planning, Architecture and Historic Preservation and is a recognized world leader and expert in the field of environmentally sustainable and culturally relevant design. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Masters in Architecture from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

He has served as Principal-in-charge of International Design and Operations at Jung/Brannen Associates of Boston from 1983 to 1994. During this period he has won a number of International Design Competitions, including the Citizen's Bank Headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island and the Abu Dhabi Oil Company Headquarters in the UAE.

This was been followed from 1994 to 2006 as Senior Vice President and Director of Design at KEO International Consultants, a leading multi-disciplinary firm of over 2,000 staff located in a number of countries in the Gulf Region. Here he attained First Prize in a number of major design competitions, including the planning and design of large residential communities, hotel complexes, office buildings and significant academic facilities, such as the Information Technology College and the Student Activity Center/Teaching Facilities for the UAE University.

In February, 2011, he joined the Harvard University Graduate School of Design as Senior Research Associate and Senior Editor of the Gulf Sustainable Urbanism project, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. Preceding which, from 2006 he served as Research Fellow of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, where he was Project Director of the Gulf Research Project with Anthropologist Dr. Steven Caton and sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government. The Kennedy School next sponsored his currently on-going research for the Kuwait National Green Campus Initiative with Dr. John Spengler. He is currently the Senior Advisor for the Harvard GSD Project on Sea Level Rise for Southwest Florida.

He is the co-author of The Sense of Unity, published by Chicago University Press; The Habitat Bill of Rights: Residential & Community Design Guidelines for the United Nations Habitat Conference, with Jose Lluis Sert, Moshe Safdie, George Candilis and BK Doshi; Blessed Jerusalem: Preservation studies of the visual, functional and spiritual character of the Old City, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design; Exhibitor in MANtransFORMS, Smithsonian Institute, Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, NY; and lecturers widely internationally.

He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard, MIT, Yale and Tehran University. He has been written about in professional journals and publications including Newsweek, Architectural Review, National Geographic, Contemporary Architects and Who’s Who in the World. He is a registered consultant with the World Bank and a member of a number of professional societies internationally. He has been a founding member of the Steering Committee of the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Architecture; He is a frequent Jury member for major international design competitions. He was featured recently in the hour long Dan Rather Reports Television program on sustainability on HD/Net entitled: “Power to the People” and interviewed on NPR and BBC.