Amale Andraos Appointed Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Dear fellow members of the Columbia community:
 
I am pleased to announce that I have appointed Associate Professor Amale Andraos as our new Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  An inspiring teacher, a respected colleague, and a pioneering practitioner whose innovative commissions in cities around the world have earned widespread admiration, Amale is a new leader among a rising generation of creative architects and designers of our physical environment.
 
Amale joined Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in 2011.  She has quickly become a highly valued member of our academic community, while continuing to produce celebrated and provocative designs that bring together architecture, urbanism, and ecology as co-founder of the New York-based firm WORKac.
 
Amale assumes the deanship at a moment when our Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation possesses a greater capacity for making transformative contributions to society and the world than ever before.  Mark Wigley’s decade of deeply thoughtful and daring leadership as dean has established Columbia as an interdisciplinary hub where everyone—faculty, students, and visitors—feels elevated by the powerful force of experimentation and creativity.  Amale impressed me as being ideally suited to continue this wonderful trajectory of the School.
 
Amale Andraos received her M.Arch. from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and her B.Arch. from McGill University.  She began her teaching career at the American University of Beirut and has held faculty posts at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.  Along with her WORKac co-founder and husband, Dan Wood, an alumnus of the School, Amale has been at the forefront of a contemporary wave of experimentation and the profession’s reconsideration of long held assumptions about the interplay of built environments and the natural world.  Their long list of projects ranges from a master plan for rebuilding downtown Beirut to the design of the Edible Schoolyard at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn.  
 
As we welcome Amale to her new position, I want to take one more opportunity to say again how grateful we are to Mark for drawing all of us into his unique way of thinking about the world and about how Columbia can best serve that world.  I also want to thank the members of the search committee for the judgment and guidance they provided me throughout the entire process.  They were a special group, and they helped immensely in pointing the way that brings us to this announcement.  
 
Please join me in congratulating Amale Andraos on her appointment and in welcoming her as the new Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.  
 
Sincerely,

Lee C. Bollinger