Amale Andraos Stepping Down as Dean of Columbia GSAPP
Photo © Raymond Adams / courtesy Columbia GSAPP
Amale Andraos will step down as dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in December after seven years in the role. A previous member of the school’s search committee, she was appointed in August 2014. As of July, Andraos will begin serving as special advisor to President of Columbia University Lee Bollinger with a focus on the work of the Columbia Climate School, the university’s first new school in 25 years that was founded in 2020 under Andraos. She will retain her professorship and continue her practice as co-founder of New York-based firm WORKac with her husband Dan Wood.
“Climate Change is one of the main reasons I accepted to serve as dean seven years ago,” Andraos said in a statement, in response to Bollinger’s announcement on May 20. “I hope that in this new role as special advisor to the president, I will be able to continue to advocate for our disciplines’ urgent transformations so that they may help address the challenges already here and across our shared planet.”
Andraos, a 2016 RECORD Women in Architecture honoree, was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and attended McGill University before receiving her M.Arch. from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, later working for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam before founding WORKac with Wood in 2003.
As GSAPP dean, Andraos oversaw the creation of two centers and two new academic programs—the first PhD in Historic Preservation in the US and the Computational Design Practices program—whose first class of students will be the summer of 2022.
While no successor has been named yet, Bollinger said in a statement that he will share details on the appointment of an interim dean “soon” and mentions “the creation of a search committee to identify Amale’s successor.”
Andraos did not respond to RECORD’s request for comment and Columbia GSAPP declined to comment further.
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