[THE BIG APPLE]

New York Architect Picked to Lead Columbia University Architecture School


NY Times

Amale Andraos, a New York architect who was born in Beirut and has practiced in Montreal, Paris and Rotterdam, has been selected as the 13th dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning, the university announced Tuesday.

Ms. Andraos, 41, who has been teaching at the school since 2011, is the first woman to hold the post.

She has also taught at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the American University in Beirut and operates the design firm WorkAC on the Lower East Side with her husband, Dan Wood. The couple met while working for Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam and eventually opened his New York office before starting their own business in 2002.

“The university is very focused on global questions and global issues, and Amale’s background sort of bespeaks globalization,” Lee Bollinger, the university president, said in an interview. “It’s not a theory or buzz word, it’s who she is, and that’s very important.”

As architects, Ms. Andraos and her husband designed the crystalline Diane von Furstenberg headquarters near the High Line and a new library in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, as well as projects in Lagos, Nigeria and Shenzhen, China. In 2008, WorkAC transformed the courtyard of the P.S. 1 museum in Long Island City into an urban farm for the annual summer architecture pavilion program.

Ms. Andraos intends to emphasize sustainability at Columbia, she said, fusing it with what she called the design school’s progressive and experimental approach to architecture and planning.

“How do we build, at what scale do we build, does it even make sense to build? These are the questions I want every student to be asking,” Ms. Andraos said. “We must be thinking about what the impacts will be.”

Ms. Andraos, who succeeds Mark Wigley, is an accidental dean of sorts. She had been selected to the search committee for a new dean but was not on the short list of candidates. But after watching her work on the committee, Mr. Bollinger said, “we realized our next dean was sitting right in front of us.”