WORKac

Since its founding by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood in 2003, New York-based architecture office WORKac (Work Architecture Company) has developed a body of projects aimed at pushing the traditional definitions of architecture, envisioning and realizing alternative possibilities for the built environment. WORKac creates architecture and strategic planning concepts at the intersection of the urban, the rural, and the natural. These works include Wieden+Kennedy's New York office, the 2008 Young Architects Prize installation PF1 held in MoMA PS1's courtyard, Brooklyn's first "edible schoolyard" at an elementary school, a new entry pavilion at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, and other projects for Anthropologie, Diane von Furstenberg, and Creative Time, as well as numerous projects abroad, including a cultural center converted from 300-year old warehouses in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a new diplomatic center in Gabon. Operating under the motto, "A building has to perform something," Wood and Andraos operate by a set of principles that distinguish them in today's form-obsessed practice: Engage with reality; Be all-inclusive; Produce an excess of life. This book is far less of a conventional monograph than what they call a duograph: an ongoing conversation between Wood and Andraos about architecture, paralleling the conversations they have had about their work since founding the practice, never assuming what architecture "is" but always imagining together what it could become. WORKac covers the first three phases of the office's output over fifteen years, including a dozen key completed projects and many smaller scale works, proposals, books, and research endeavors.