The Abend Family Lecture: Amale Andraos and Dan Wood

The Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology welcome Amale Andraos and Dan Wood for the Abend Family Lecture, "Housing Public." This lecture presents WORKac's public work, recent completed projects, and ongoing housing work. The talk opens with Buildings for People and Plants, WORKac's second monograph published by Park Books, which brings together a selection of the firm's work from the past decade exploring architecture as a shared environment for people, plants, and other living systems. Drawing on cultural, educational, and civic projects from the book, the lecture discusses how buildings can support ecological coexistence while remaining playful, inclusive, and deeply rooted in everyday life. The talk then turns to housing — presenting new completed projects alongside work currently underway — extending these ideas of shared, living environments into residential design. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with the audience.

Amale Andraos AIA, HFRAIC co-founded WORKac in 2003 with Dan Wood. She is a Principal of the firm and the Dean Emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation where she recently served as an Advisor on the University’s Climate Initiatives and for the newly launched Climate School. Andraos is recognized as a thought leader, contributing widely to the field through her lectures and writings. Her publications include Architecture and Representation: the Arab City, co-edited with Nora Akawi, and We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge, 49 Cities, and Above the Pavement, the Farm! in collaboration with Dan Wood. Andraos has served on numerous juries, advisory, and selection committees, including most recently as Chair of the Aga Khan Award, and is currently serving the Advisory Council for the New Museum’s incubator space, New Inc, in New York. She is a licensed architect in the State of New York and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (HFRAIC). Andraos was born in Beirut, Lebanon.

Dan Wood FAIA co-founded WORKac with Amale Andraos in 2003. He is a principal of the firm, leading many of the practice’s US and international projects. Dan Wood has taught extensively, most recently at Columbia University. He held the 2017 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design at the University of Toronto and the 2013-14 Louis I. Kahn Chair at the Yale School of Architecture. He also held both the Trott and Baumer Visiting Professorships at Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture and the Friedman Professorship at UC Berkeley. Prior to forming WORKac, Wood was a partner with Rem Kollhaas in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture where he led the design of many significant projects including the Seattle Public Library and the Guggenheim Hermitage and Guggenheim Las Vegas projects. Wood is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Vice President for Design Excellence of the New York Chapter of the AIA. He is a licensed architect in the States of New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Colorado and is LEED certified. His publications include ‘WORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge,’ 49 Cities’ and ‘Above the Pavement the Farm!’ co-authored with Amale Andraos. Wood is originally from Rhode Island.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.