2017 Architect 50: Top 50 Firms in Design

Patience is its own reward, as the proverb has it, but it’s nice when it also pays off in more tangible ways. For New York–based WORKac, this year brought a major reward: the opening of the Kew Gardens Hills Library in Queens, which the architects have expanded and transformed with a new exterior, made of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete, that looks like an open book. The project had been delayed for years. “We are always imagining the future,” says Dan Wood, FAIA, of the practice he leads with Amale Andraos. “Especially,” he adds with a laugh, “because projects sometimes take a long time.”

Kew Gardens Hills Library (click here for more photos)

Stealth Building (click here for more photos)

WORKac earned another major reward this year: the Number One spot in the design ranking of the Architect 50. The firm’s portfolio included the Edible Schoolyard at P.S.7 in East Harlem, a bright hands-on children’s garden with a greenhouse and kitchen classroom; “Stealth Building,” a renovation, featuring a sharply pleated rooftop addition, of a cast-iron Tribeca building; and an off-the-grid “earthship” house in Arizona.

“Playful, colorful, and well-detailed projects that emphasize space over form and surface,” is how one judge described WORKac’s submission. “The work uses a fresh formal vocabulary to engage social and environmental ideas.”

Andraos is dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, so it’s not surprising that research is interwoven with the practice. “It’s a way for us to keep ahead of our own work,” he says. “We use research in the same way we teach, to think more broadly about architecture’s ability to engage with issues. When we have a project, these ideas come back into play.” Investigations into ecology and urbanism have shaped the firm’s work in the past, but its current research focus is preservation, as evidenced by its Chicago Architecture Biennial installation (with James Ewing) about a 1930s Art Deco villa in Beirut.

Edible Schoolyard at P.S.7 (click here for more photos)

A mission statement on the firm’s website reads: “We hold unshakable lightness and polemical optimism as a means to move beyond the projected and towards the possible.” There’s something heartening about a commitment to “polemical optimism” in fraught political times. “As architects, we’re always manifesting change. We’re creating things where something didn’t exist before,” Wood explains. “You always have to be optimistic that you’re going to contribute to the city or the site or the discipline. I think we are kind of like science-fiction writers.”

Top 50 Firms in Design

Design Judges

Sheila Kennedy, AIA
Kennedy is a founding principal of Kennedy & Violich Architecture, which was established in 1990, and is professor of the practice of architecture at MIT. In 2000, she started MATx, a pioneering materials research unit, at her firm. Kennedy studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and received the Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Mark Lee
Lee is a principal and founding partner of Los Angeles-based Johnston Marklee, which was founded in 1998. He has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Princeton University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Technical University of Berlin, and ETH Zurich. With partner Sharon Johnston he is the artistic director for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Jennifer Yoos, FAIA
Yoos is a president of Minneapolis-based VJAA, which was the recipient of the 2012 AIA Firm Award. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was most recently the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She is co-author, with partner Vincent James, FAIA, of the book Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (2016).