Born in 1973, Amale Andraos is a Lebanese New York-based designer. She was dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation from 2014 to 2021 and serves as an advisor to the Columbia Climate School.
In addition to being a very important figure in academia, she also founded in 2002 the New York City architecture firm WORK Architecture Company (WORKac) with her husband, Dan Wood.
Her venture in architecture around the world was recognized in Canada, where she was awarded the Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in 2021.
WORKac was also selected to build the Beirut Museum of Art, a stunning museum featured with different geometries across 12,000 square meters. The firm was chosen for combining art and architecture in Beirut.
Andraos has also a life goal to influence and ease climate change in her architectural endeavor, research, and writings, focusing on the relationship between urbanism and the environment.
WORKac is the winner of many prestigious awards. It was named the #1 design firm in the United States by Architect Magazine in 2017 and has also been recognized as the AIA New York State Firm of the Year in 2015.
And more recently, it won the Merit Award, AIA New York Designs Award in 2021.
WORKac has also achieved international praise for projects such as the Miami Museum Garage, The Edible Schoolyards in Brooklyn, a public library for Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, the Stealth Building in New York, a student center for the Rhode Island School of Design, and new offices for a headquarter bank in Lima, Peru.
WORKac has been featured in many magazines and publications including Metropolis, the New York Times, Frame, Vogue, Azure, and the Architects’ Newspaper.
Amale Andraos received her BArch from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and her MArch from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
She also worked as an Adjunct Professor at the Harvard GSD and Princeton University’s School of Architecture.
Dan Wood, her husband, graduated with a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a MArch from Columbia University and had a career as an adjunct professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture.
