Ant Farm. Miami Museum Garage

WORKac is interested in positing architecture at the intersection of the urban, the rural and the natural. We embrace reinvention and collaborate with other fields to rethink architecture ‘in the world.’ In the face of overwhelming challenges and increasingly normative scenarios, we remain stubborn in our commitment to imagine alternate scenarios for the future of cities. We appropriate the more productive aspects of the urban discourse – from density and compression, to appropriateness of scale, the expression of intelligent and shared infrastructures, and a more careful integration between architecture, landscape and ecological systems – to bear upon architecture as we find shared concerns across our global practice. We hold unshakable lightness and polemical optimism as a means to move beyond the projected and towards the possible, an ambition with which we approach every project.

WORKac, recently named the AIA NY State’s Firm of the Year, has achieved international acclaim for projects such as the master plan for the New Holland Island Cultural Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, Wieden+Kennedy’s 50,000 sq ft, three story New York offices, the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Manhattan and the Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn. Currently, in Africa, the firm is building its winning competition entry for a new 200,000SF Conference Center in Libreville, Gabon. Targeting LEED Gold certification, the center will host diplomatic meetings. In the United States, WORKac is completing construction of a residential conversion of a historic New York cast-iron building, designing a distillery museum and gathering space in the Adirondacks, and a new storefront facade for a parking garage in Miami’s Design District. In China, the firm recently completed a 2,000-acre master plan for seven new university campuses in Weifang, and we are starting design of the 450,000SF main library on the first Weifang campus, where the master plan is now under construction.

WORKac was founded in 2003.

Dan Wood

Dan Wood, FAIA, LEED AP, leads international projects for WORKac ranging from masterplans to buildings across the United States as well as in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Wood holds the 2013-14 Louis I. Kahn Chair at the Yale School of Architecture and has taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture, and the UC Berkeley School of Environmental Design, where he was the Friedman Distinguished Chair. Wood is originally from Rhode Island and lived in Paris and in the Netherlands for many years before moving to New York in 2002. He is a licensed architect in the State of New York and is LEED certified.

Amale Andraos

Amale Andraos is the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She has taught at numerous institutions including the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania Design School, and the American University in Beirut. Andraos is committed to research and publications. Her work has recently explored the question of representation by re-examining the concept of the ‘Arab City.’ Andraos was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She has lived in Saudi Arabia, France, Canada, and the Netherlands prior to moving to New York in 2002. She serves on the board of the Architectural League of New York, the Advisory Board of the Arab Center for Architecture in Beirut and is a member of the faculty steering committee for the Columbia Global Centers | Middle East.