Archinect - News

Five New York projects by WORKac: Your Next Employer?

2024-12-09T07:00:00-05:00

Following our previous visit to Laney LA, we are moving our Meet Your Next Employer series to New York City this week to explore the work of WORKac.

Co-founded by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, the firm has amassed a portfolio that includes public, cultural, and civic projects. The firm describes its ethos as using “the power of architecture and design to engage environmental and social concerns, and to create new possibilities for the future.” Last year, Archinect covered the firm’s success in the 2023 AIANY Design Awards.

Over on Archinect Jobs, the firm is currently hiring for a Senior Architect to join their New York City team. For candidates interested in applying for a position or anybody interested in learning more about the firm’s output, we have rounded up five projects in New York by WORKac that exemplify the firm’s ethos.

Kew Gardens Hills Library. Image credit: Bruce Damonte

Kew Gardens Hills Library, New York, NY

The new Kew Gardens Hills Library branch integrates an existi...

MVRDV, Studio Gang, Henning Larsen, WORKac, and SCAPE design a new neighborhood for San Francisco

2019-10-17T16:30:00-04:00

A new neighborhood is coming to San Francisco's southern edge, where developers Tishman Speyer, the San Francisco Giants baseball team, and the Port of San Francisco are collaborating with a team of architects on a new 28-acre master plan for an existing surface parking lot and an underutilized waterfront.

For the masterplan, dubbed "Mission Rock," Studio Gang, MVRDV, Henning Larsen, and WORKac have come together as design architects to craft an approach that will bring a series of mid- and high-rise mixed-use buildings to the vacant site. Landscape architects SCAPE, Miller Company, and Min Design are providing landscape architecture services, including the redesign of a 5-acre waterfront park.

View of MVRDV's pixelated tower. Image courtesy of Binyan Studios.

Phase one of the project includes a 540-unit tower designed by MVRDV, in collaboration with Perry Architects, that will contain 550,000 square feet of retail uses spread out within a pair of shorter commercial buildings. The ...

Win a Copy of “WORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge”!

2018-03-01T12:00:00-05:00

In their latest “duograph”, as WORKac co-founders Amale Andraos and Dan Wood call it, “WORKac: We'll Get There When We Cross That Bridge” revisits the firm's formative projects that shaped their practice to what it is today. Thanks to The Monacelli Press, Archinect is giving away five copies of the book to our readers!

Encased in a hardcover accented with bright colors and various paper stocks and page sizes, the book spotlights WORKac's core principle since its founding in 2003: an “utterly personal, ongoing conversation about what architecture could become,” Andraos and Wood write in the introduction.

Anthropologie, Dos Lagos retail store. Photo: Bruce Damonte.

Stealth Building. Photo: Bruce Damonte.

Some of the projects include the biodegradable Public Farm 1 at MoMA PS1, the first two buildings of Edible Schoolyards NYC, an addition to the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, their proposal for the Beirut Museum of Art, and the Kew Gardens Hills Library expansion in Queens that was fina...

Eyebeam selects WorkAC for New Brooklyn Home

2014-02-27T20:09:00-05:00

The art and technology center Eyebeam has selected WORK Architecture Company (WORKac) to design its future home in Brooklyn, another addition to the Brooklyn cultural district in Fort Greene. “It’s a great moment in Eyebeam’s trajectory to think about the relationship between art and technology,” said Dan Wood, a principal in WORKac, with Amale Andraos — both of whom worked on the cultural district’s master plan.

'I Have No Words' Emoji and the New Visual Vernacular from Eyebeam Art + Technology Center on Vimeo.

Blaffer Art Museum, designed by WORKac, opens in Houston

2012-12-10T19:15:00-05:00

WORK Architecture Company's dramatic new addition and renovation of the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas has opened to the public with a twenty-year survey dedicated to influential American sculptor Tony Feher.

Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum is a preeminent contemporary art museum without a permanent collection set in the midst of University of Houston’s enormous central campus. With high-profile exhibitions that are free and open to the public, as well as extensive educational programs, the museum has the potential to act as a gateway between the university and the city. However, its visibility and identity were previously hampered by the fact that its entrance was hidden and accessible only through an internal courtyard. Within, its galleries were excessively impacted by circulation, including a stairway in the middle of two galleries, and another gallery only accessible by a hallway through the administrative offices.

The project represents an important sh...

WORKac, Henning Larsen and SO – IL compete to design UC Davis art museum

2012-12-06T14:00:00-05:00

The university believes this to be the first design-build competition for an art museum in this country. Each team gets four months to design a museum and prepare a bid for the museum.

The teams competing to build the museum are:

Contractor: Kitchell; design architect: WORKac; executive architect: Westlake Reed Leskosky
Contractor: Oliver and Co.; design architect: Henning Larsen Architects; executive architect: Gould Evans
Contractor: Whiting-Turner; design architect: SO – IL; executive architect: Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

Assembly Hall for the 2014 Summit of the African Union by WORKac

2012-11-07T21:01:00-05:00

The proposal "L'Assemblée Radieuse" by NYC's WORK Architecture Company has recently been named winner in the international competition to design a new Assembly Hall in Libreville, Gabon for the 2014 Summit of the African Union.

The Yale Daily News summarizes last night's WORKac lecture

2012-09-07T12:50:00-04:00

“We don’t believe architecture can solve anything,” Andraos said of the relationship between environmentalism and design in WORKac’s creations. “Rather, we feel this is a question of impacting culture. In the architect’s Sisyphean relation to power, we believe in the visionary, and his agency to radicalize and to move culture.”

The Housing Question

2012-06-25T13:48:00-04:00

Foreclosed is controversial because it suggests that the state, or the public sector — conceived along with civil society in terms of multiple, overlapping, virtual and actual publics — might play a more active, direct and enlightened role in the provision of housing and, by extension, of education, health care and other infrastructures of daily life in the United States.... Simply put, can we no longer imagine architecture without developers?

Earlier this year Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream opened at MoMA in New York. The exhibition quickly became controversial, with some decrying it as elitist and paternalistic, others defending it as powerful and ambitious. On Places, Reinhold Martin, co-organizer of Foreclosed, and Raphael Sperry and Amit Price Patel, of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, continue the debate — in a virtual roundtable — along with IDEO.org fellow Liz Ogbu and urban planner Tom Angotti of Hunter College.

WORKac to Redesign New Holland Island in St. Petersburg

2011-08-05T19:22:00-04:00

New York-based practice WORKac is the winner of the competition to select a master planning consultant for the future development of New Holland Island in St Petersburg, Russia. [...] New Holland is an 8-hectare island bordered by two canals and a river in the heart of St Petersburg, within 20-minutes walk of the Hermitage and the city’s other major cultural sites.