15 Years of a New York Architecture Firm: Why It Matters to Imagine What Architecture Could Become

“An idea you put out there may find other ways to get built. There is never only one road.”

Architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood rarely dwell on what architecture is. They would rather imagine what it could become.

In 2003 the married architects left OMA, the globally known firm, and started their own studio, WORKac, in New York. Last November they published a book looking back on 15 years of running it. The title borrows a proverb — We'll Get There When We Cross The Bridge — whose Chinese counterpart says the boat straightens itself out once it reaches the bridge. It fits their imagination-first temperament exactly.

In the book, and on their website, you will find plenty of wild projects that were never built.

Take Urban Aqualoop, a public space made of giant glass tubes that they hoped to build for the 2009 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. The shape was strange. The length of tubing resting on the ground formed a ring, with one end lifting slightly to make an arch. Opposite the arch, the tubing rose into the air and opened in two places. The higher opening was packed with hydroponic plants; the lower one held fish. A pipe joining the two pumped water up from below to feed the plants, while fish of different species swam freely through the glass.

As Amale and Dan imagined it, people could walk around the tubes, or step through the arch into the middle of the ring, and watch the fish move inside the glass the way you would at an aquarium. They deliberately made one side of the tubing low and flat so anyone who wanted a rest could sit on it, or simply lie down. They even pictured a cook or a bartender stationed inside the ring, with one stretch of tubing turned into a bar or a dining table, giving the installation a second life as a place to serve food and drinks and throw small parties.

“Urban Aqualoop could have been built. We came very close. We found the right way to construct it, we found a factory to make the water slide, and we picked out the fish,” Dan said in the interview.

But the client “was very worried the goldfish would die easily,” and the project stalled. In the end it appeared at the Shenzhen biennale only as a concept installation.

“Architects do have to work with clients, but sometimes you still have to put the idea out there, whether or not a client exists for it,” Amale told QDaily when asked what an unbuilt project is worth.

The confidence in that answer was nowhere near as steady when Amale and Dan first arrived in New York from Europe.

In WORKac's early days they no longer got the large buildings and urban-planning schemes they had worked on for OMA in Europe, and they no longer flew business class. Their first office was their own apartment.

The dining room became the model shop. The kitchen cabinets held the printer and the fax machine. Late at night they moved out into the hallway to work, cutting large sheets of model board there, or spray-painting in the stairwell.

Like any young architects starting out, the commissions they landed in New York were all small interior jobs. A few turned out to be unexpectedly good fun. Their very first was a doghouse.

So that a dog living in the city could taste the pleasures of country life, Dan and Amale put a treadmill and a scent dispenser in the middle of the doghouse and mounted screens on three walls to play brightly colored scenes of nature — only to learn, after the job was done, that dogs cannot make out a wide range of colors.

They named the studio plainly: WORKac, short for WORK Architecture Company. The name matched the studio's first five years exactly — “work,” and “say yes to everything.”

By 2007 that take-anything habit had piled up more than 100 projects. The range of the work gave them room to try out all sorts of spatial structures.

Designing the layout for the exhibition The Good Life, they tested a structure they called “wiggle,” with display panels twisting through the gallery like ribbons. “There's a Möbius-strip quality to it, which disrupts your initial sense of space — either you think you're inside something or outside it, and your sense of space changes depending on where you stand,” Dan said.

A structure like onion skin turned up in their interiors too. The building's façade served as the outermost skin, with one layer of space nested inside the next; what divided them might be a wall, or it might be a ring of curtain.

Taken with the “ideas about narrative, freedom and the sky” of Yona Friedman, the visionary architect of the 1960s, Dan wrote to him. Their subjects ranged widely, and the correspondence itself was a pleasure.

“Yona answered everything by email. After I sent one, his daughter would print it out for him to read, then scan his handwritten reply and send it back. But it wasn't that I asked a question and he answered it. Often I asked one and he came back with several more. We went back and forth three times, and the process itself was fascinating,” Dan recalled in an interview with QDaily.

Inspired by Yona's flying cities and by Superstudio, the radical practice of the same era, WORKac entered the 2008 design competition for MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program summer installation in New York with a proposal called Public Farm 1 — and won.

The competition has run every year since 1999. MoMA PS1 wanted no more than a temporary installation with shade, seats and water, somewhere people could enjoy themselves. Dan and Amale designed something else: a farm in the air.

They made a great many round tubes out of recyclable cardboard. Every six tubes formed a group around a seventh, arranged in a hexagonal “daisy.” The seventh tube, at the center, stood on the ground and held up the other six, which were planted with crops and hung in midair; it also let people reach the fruit and vegetables growing overhead.

The farm grew 51 species of herbs, fruits and vegetables, laid out by the “daisy” pattern — one species per daisy.

This long, slightly V-shaped temporary structure was split into activity zones, like the Urban Aqualoop above, with every tube standing on the ground marking a different function.

At the solar-powered juice bar people could press fresh fruit and vegetable juice. A periscope reaching out of one tube let them look closely at the farm overhead. A small pool fed by a water jet made a fountain to splash around in. One tube glimmered with starlight and chirped like crickets at night, while two others were used for charging phones and playing video.

Every piece of electrical equipment on the farm ran off 18 solar panels. Water for each planted cardboard tube came through a drip-irrigation system fed by a tank that collected 6,000 gallons of rainwater over the summer.

Dan and Amale also built a coop on site and kept 6 adult hens and 12 young ones. The chickens were fenced into the activity area and laid plenty of eggs that summer.

Inmates from Rikers Island who were learning to grow crops and run a farm came to help with the planting. Scientists and architects handled the structure and the power and irrigation systems. Once the farm opened, New York chefs turned up to cook with what had just been picked, and the people who came to the parties were adults and children from every sort of background.

“The project started as an idea — connecting architecture with food and agriculture — and ended up being a project about people. So many people took part. After The New York Times wrote about it, an organic farmer called me to say he was in New York and wanted to join in too,” Dan said.

The success of Public Farm 1 widened the road ahead for WORKac, and Dan and Amale gradually got more chances to build their ideas.

“When we were doing Public Farm 1 for PS1, at first we just put the idea out there. Someone saw it and came to us about working on the Edible Schoolyard in New York. An idea you put out there may find other ways to get built. There is never only one road,” Amale said.

The idea Amale and Dan set out in Public Farm 1 — placing architecture where the city, the countryside and nature meet — reached the Arturo Toscanini School in Brooklyn in 2014 and produced New York's first Edible Schoolyard.

The school's parking lot became an organic garden. Besides the open-air beds, it holds a greenhouse and an indoor kitchen classroom.

All 625 students at the school can take gardening and cooking classes alongside their regular lessons. They join in the planting, and in the kitchen classroom they learn to cook with what they have just picked.

The kitchen classroom walls are tiled in colored panels that make a cheerful mosaic, and several round windows are cut through them so children can engage with what is going on inside and out.

“When we look at a building we don't look only at the building. We try to weave a set of relationships around it. We're only interested in architecture that connects to other things,” Amale said.

That led them to test what a building's façade might do — whether, beyond dividing inside from outside, it could be designed to be something else.

“The architecture critic Alejandro Zaera-Polo wrote about the envelope, arguing it is the last territory architects still get to work with. Architects today are always invited in to design a good-looking shell. If a developer is putting up apartment blocks, every building may end up wearing the same shell. So we began thinking about thickening the shell. If it's a territory, let's make it different — rethink the line between inside and outside and turn it into a space for activity,” Amale said in the interview.

The connective forms and onion skins they had explored in early interiors moved into their buildings.

Invited to design the façade of the Miami Collage Garage, Amale and Dan pushed it 4 feet out from the body of the building. The widened strip became the new façade, and into it they fit a bar, car-wash equipment, a children's playground, a lounge, a reading room, a pop-up art space, a small garden of palm trees, a fountain and a gallery for street art.

As the face of a parking garage, this strip is no longer a dividing wall in the usual sense. It is a public space stacked vertically. “Everything starts with order and onion skin, and it is more about layering than thickness. In the end our interest in thickening the shell was rooted in an ambition to add complexity, depth and detail,” Dan wrote in the new book.

The same approach carried into the Beirut Museum of Art. The façade wrapping the museum's core galleries is made of functional zones spread around the edge of the building — like the half-open balconies common in Beirut — which ease the passage from outdoors to the galleries inside while giving people a new place to gather.

“The interesting part is that when you look back, you may not have noticed it at the time. Putting it all into a book was a good choice — you can see the earliest projects and the newest ones. We always worried our projects lacked coherence, but in fact the ideas were there all along,” Dan told QDaily, describing how he sees the link between old work and new.

They want to do more in future, to make architecture a medium that takes part more deeply in social questions and solves more real problems.

“Architecture can connect a lot of things. Connect the city and the countryside, connect different cultures, and you build new relationships… We keep asking how architecture can help solve bigger urban problems and contribute a new model, instead of just occupying a physical space the way it used to. We want to do more than be an object,” Amale said in the interview.

They said they will pay more attention to public buildings and infrastructure from now on, and want to do something about global warming, though they do not yet know what. Either way, putting the idea out there and starting to act on it matters most.

The cover image and in-body images (unless otherwise noted) come from WORKac

QDaily interviewed WORKac's founders at Design Republic's Design Festival. About the festival: it ran from March 16 to March 25, 2018. It set out to draw on the collective strength of the design community to reinterpret the inclusiveness, cross-disciplinary reach and inventiveness of design. The festival wrote in the importance of “cross-disciplinary collaboration projects” and “community,” deepening Design Republic's character as an inventive, wide-ranging platform that argues for bringing together the four basic elements of life — clothing, food, housing and mobility (as culture) — in search of a better way to talk about modern living.