How Lebanese-Born Architect Amale Andraos Made U.S. History
Article originally appeared on Architectural Digest Magazine (February 1st, 2018)
As a woman, immigrant, and the first female dean of Columbia University's architecture school, Amale Andraos is breaking down barriers.
Amale Andraos is dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation—and the first woman to hold that position. She is also the cofounder of the New York firm WORKac with her husband, Dan Wood.
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Andraos developed a passion for architecture while watching her father, architect and artist Farid Andraos, at work. She has lived in Saudi Arabia, France, Canada, and the Netherlands (where she worked for Rem Koolhaas at OMA).
Her publications include 49 Cities, a rereading of 49 visionary plans through an ecological lens (Inventory Press, 3rd edition, 2015), Above the Pavement, the Farm! (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), and The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016).
At Columbia, she has been described, in a DesignIntelligence profile naming her one of the 25 most admired educators of 2016, as integrating "real-world problems into the curriculum with a bold vision and strong leadership."
At WORKac, she helped design Public Farm 1 for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Edible Schoolyards at PS216 in Brooklyn and PS7 in Harlem, new offices for Wieden+Kennedy, also in New York, and a conference center in Gabon. The firm recently completed the striking renovation of a public library in Kew Gardens, Queens.
Andraos says: "I never thought of myself as an immigrant, just someone who lived in and loved many different places—all interesting to try to understand.” And that, she says, is a good background for an architect. “The idea that you can always look at something in a completely different way,” says Andraos, “means that you can always reimagine it.”