Holding Together: WORKac's Amale Andraos on Focused Creativity, Setbacks, Advances, and Generosity
Amale by Andrew Boyle.
By Julia Gamolina
Amale Andraos FRAIC co-founded WORKac in 2003 with Dan Wood. She is a Principal of the firm and also a Professor and Dean Emerita at Columbia University where she recently served as an Advisor to the President on the University’s Climate Initiatives and the Climate School.
Andraos is recognized as an architecture thought leader and lectures widely. Her publications include The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, a critical engagement of contemporary architecture and urbanism in the Middle East, We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge, an overview of the firm’s first fifteen years of practice, and 49 Cities, a re-reading of 49 visionary urban plans through an ecological lens. In her interview, Amale talks about her multi-cultural upbringing, the precarity of practice, and engaging with the climate emergency, advising those just starting their career to combine hard work with freshness and curiosity.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years - where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
AA: I was born in Beirut, and at age three — a year after the war broke in Lebanon — moved to Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia. My father, who is a painter and architect, practiced architecture for about ten years in Lebanon but once in Saudi, he started a pre-fabricated housing company. My mother, who is also Lebanese, lived in Argentina and then Brazil until the age of eighteen, and still speaks Spanish to her siblings. So, it was always a very multicultural upbringing, speaking French, Arabic and learning English by watching Sesame Street on Aramco television.
I have fond memories of the empty stretches of beach in Saudi — Al Khobar was still a little town at the time — as well as walking around my father’s construction sites and seeing his team’s experiments with lightweight modular concrete panels. But we also travelled a lot, to Lebanon, to see family, as well as to Europe. Endlessly visiting museums and different cities with my parents was the most foundational part of my education, I think.
The Adams Street Library is Brooklyn Public Library’s first new branch to open in more than 40 years. The result of over dozens of meetings and charrettes with the community and other stakeholders, the Adams Street Library delivers over 6,500 square feet of new public space to the area. In addition to books and resources, patrons have access to gender-inclusive restrooms, flexible meeting rooms and programming space with modern technology. Photography by Bruce Damonte.
WORKac’s rethinking of an iconic Hans Hollein bank headquarters in Lima, Peru creates new interior and exterior spaces with design elements inspired by Hollein’s vision— yet firmly rooted in contemporary ideas about virtual and in-person collaboration and interaction. Photography by Ramiro Del Carpio.
How did you decide to pursue architecture in the first place?
Because my father was an architect, and art, architecture, competitions, construction sites were so part of my growing up, I was adamant that I would never become an architect! We moved to Montreal when I was seventeen, and I applied to McGill without knowing what to major in. I would wake up at night and flip through the big brochure of programs offered. That’s when it became obvious architecture was the only thing that I did want to do. But by then, the start of the fall semester was just weeks away and it was too late to apply to the program at McGill. I ended up doing a year of economics! When I finally got to architecture school, it just felt like I was finally ‘home.’
What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
What I love about architecture is its capacity to hold things together — to build them together — even if they are not fully resolved, or remain in tension, or even in opposition. There is a way in which the parts of a work of architecture — which of course can be at the scale of the building, or the interior, or the city block — can exist with autonomy, even as together they are still forming a kind of whole.
Even the most ‘powerful’ works of architecture are still vulnerable to weather, to aging, to destruction. For me, architecture has always been like a delicate flower, hardly grounded yet still of the ground. Architecture opened up a certain lightness and freedom to imagine other ways of being and never take for granted what is supposed to be.
“What I love about architecture is its capacity to hold things together — to build them together — even if they are not fully resolved, or remain in tension, or even in opposition.”
How did you get your start in the field?
After graduating from my B.Arch at McGill, I worked for a number of firms in Montreal — Atelier Big City, Saucier+Perrotte, Julia Bourke — which were all very different and interesting and exposed me to different aspects of the profession. I always knew I wanted to continue studying, and applied to graduate schools in the US. At the GSD, I had the chance to study with two of my favorite teachers, Toshiko Mori and Michelle Addington, who were great mentors.
Soon I realized that I really wanted to join Rem Koolhaas’ Harvard Project on the City and from there, went on to work for Koolhaas and OMA in Rotterdam. It is still one of the most intense but also rewarding learning experiences I have had - the bonds and friends we made then are still very strong.
How did your career evolve since OMA and did WORKac then come about?
I married Dan — who is my partner in WORKac and all other things — in Rotterdam on September 1, 2001 with friends and family coming from the Middle East, the US and Europe. Ten days later, September 11th happened. Many of the US projects at OMA were cancelled. Rem wanted to ‘go east’ and finally give his long-standing interest in China a chance. Dan and I decided to instead head to the US.
After a few months running an OMA competition from Los Angeles, followed by a year at OMA NY, which Dan was instrumental in establishing, we decided to start our own practice. We launched WORKac from a windowless loft and our first project was VillaPup – a dog house for a non-profit organization called Puppies Behind Bars. It set the tone for the practice! Now, WORKac is at a really exciting juncture – somehow, I feel we have succeeded in slowly directing the practice to do the kind of work that we love – committed to the public and cultural spheres, exploring social and environmental concerns through buildings, always looking for opportunities, however small, to push for new forms of collectiveness, all with a sense of pleasure in the work and exciting collaborations.
How did you also create a path in academia parallel to your practice?
Dan and I started to teach an eco-urbanism seminar at Princeton’s School of Architecture in 2003. I taught at various places until I became an assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP in 2011. I became dean of the school in 2014 and just stepped down to serve as a special advisor to the Climate School. It was an incredible privilege, honor and experience to lead GSAPP and I am excited to return as faculty in a year, after I have thoroughly enjoyed my leave and the opportunity to refocus on our practice.
A vibrant social institution in a diverse community, WORKac’s public library in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, creates a range of architectural spaces to accommodate all the library’s users. The exterior façade is made from custom glass fiber-reinforced concrete panels with rippled, curtain-like folds, and it acts as a 200-foot-long structural beam, resting on just two columns. The roof’s slopes provide an opportunity for a fifth façade: a green roof that reads as a continuation of the existing garden wrapping the back sides of the library. Photography by Bruce Damonte.
Currently under construction, WORKac has partnered with Ignacio Urquiza Architects to design two Pilares Centers. The Pilares are a series of strategically located public buildings across Mexico City offering spaces for education and culture that contribute to recreation, gathering and exchange among the city’s inhabitants. Photography by Onnis Luque.
Where are you in your career today? What is on your mind most at the moment?
I think for the first time, I am at a place where the work is at once personal and not at all. There is a lot of pleasure in the work, and making room for focused creativity is really important to me right now, with a deep commitment to our projects, to designing the practice and to supporting our team to grow. I’m particularly focused on our Beirut Art Museum, a project we’ve been working on in Lebanon. It feels like an extraordinary responsibility — to re-imagine what an art museum can be for a country that’s experiencing tragedies like the recent explosion in Beirut, as well as heart-wrenching economic and social collapse. The project also feels like an opportunity for architecture to really communicate something — hope and the possibility of a future as well as the importance of preservation to build that future. The museum will store, restore and present the most important pieces from the national collection — around 600 paintings amongst other objects. In a country where so much has been destroyed, this collection is one of the few last traces of Lebanon’s aspirations as a young nation trying to engage modernity since its founding.
Then, I also spent much of my deanship at GSAPP thinking deeply about climate and hope — and trying to find a way for the built environment to contribute to, instead of detract from, imagining and building a shared collective future. Now, I am focused on the scale of buildings and pushing our understanding and capacity to collaborate better and with more knowledge towards intensified energy performance even on tight budgets.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through disappointments or a perceived setbacks?
As architects, we experience infinitely more ‘setbacks’ than advances! We are constantly competing against our closest friends, colleagues, the people we admire most, and most of the time, we are losing. Or if we win, there is no guarantee that a project actually gets built. If you compare the number of a practice’s built projects to the endless list of projects and investigations that fell through – it’s laughable.
The day I gave my first Orientation speech at Columbia GSAPP as an incoming dean was the day we learned the Libreville Conference Center we had been working on for two years, after winning an international competition, had been cancelled. The office had reached fifty people, many of whom had been hired to work on the project, and the building foundations were already in. I still remember emerging elated from Wood Auditorium and calling Dan, who just said ‘‘Gabon’ is cancelled.’ And that was that, back to zero, again.
Of course, it was totally devastating – losing people, ending the joint venture we had established for the project, etc. But people are counting on you, and so you have to keep it together, figure out how to soften the landing for as many as possible, think through how to move onto the next thing, refocus on other projects, and just keep going. There was a nice op-ed by Norman Lear in the NYTimes recently, on the occasion of his 100th birthday. In it he writes “Two of my favorite words are ‘over’ and ‘next.’”
“We are committed to...striving to do work that brings joy and a sense of belonging somehow, to those that will inhabit it, use it, transform it. We would like our work to have a certain generosity. And if it’s received as generous, then one might call this close to success I suppose.”
What are you most excited about right now?
Insulation! Seriously.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I am admiring anyone who is doing anything to address the climate emergency. Whether it’s through design or policy, through activism or creative practice — every bit counts.
Two specific people who I am admiring now are the marine biologist Ayana Johnson and the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. I find the ways they have brought so much knowledge together with so much creativity in translating this knowledge either through an amazing public audience podcast and reach in the case of Johnson (‘How to Save a Planet’) from which she has successfully transitioned into leading a series of nonprofit endeavors — or through building wonderful fictional worlds in the case of Robinson really inspiring as possible models that are at once impactful, creative and with real depth and breadth.
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? And, what does success in that look like to you?
I am not sure how to answer this, really. Maybe one way is simply to say that we are trying to build a practice, Dan and I, that we can be proud of, with a body of work that we can stand by — we are committed to doing public work, to doing cultural work, to addressing environmental and social questions through the work and to striving to do work that brings joy and a sense of belonging somehow, to those that will inhabit it, use it, transform it. We would like our work to have a certain generosity. And if it’s received as generous, then one might call this close to success I suppose.
WORKac’s renovation and addition to the Prov-Wash Building at Rhode Island School of Design created a new hub for student life, combining student services with a public program of gathering spaces, gallery, lecture hall, mail room, and one of the first custom-designed gender-neutral bathroom spaces in the country. Photography by Bruce Damonte.
WORKac’s Stealth Building has been hailed as a model of sensitive but stridently contemporary historic preservation and adaptive reuse. A gut renovation and two-and-a-half-story penthouse addition to a building in a landmarked district, the project makes the most of a Landmarks Commission requirement that rooftop additions be invisible to passersby. Photography by Bruce Damonte.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
I think architecture is really hard — as a personal practice, and as a profession. It is the lens through which I see the world; there is so much depth and scale, variety and forms to architectural knowledge. It really takes a very long time to become close to good. I am still learning every day, and still feel I am just getting started.
One thing that seems particularly necessary is patience — architecture takes a long, long time to get good at, and it can be incredibly frustrating to spend years designing for others. I know it’s not a very cool thing to say these days, but I still believe in hard, passionate work, that’s fairly compensated, combined with freshness and curiosity and a sense of humility. It’s a privilege to be able to continue to learn and grow, like one can do in architecture.
Finally, think it’s important to note that historically, women have been underrepresented in this field and I’m heartened to see that beginning to change, with more women starting and running their own practices. But the profession is still not only much too male, but also much too white and working to change that is a daily practice that requires constant awareness. I have become a strong believer in mentorship: looking for ways to mentor and support as well as be mentored and supported is crucial I think for all under-represented voices.