Andrea Leers, “Crossing Scales/Cultures/Disciplines: a Personal Reflection on 10 Years of Design Studios”

Taken together, this series of studios reflects the investigations and trajectories within our school as well as in the global architectural culture.
Andrea Leers is principal and co-founder with Jane Weinzapfel, of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, a Boston based practice whose work lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and infrastructure and is notable for its inventiveness in dramatically complex projects.  The firm’s acclaimed projects include the Expansion of the Harvard Science Center, the Harvard New College Theatre/Farkas Hall (formerly Hasty Pudding), the University of Pennsylvania Chiller Plant, several courthouses including the Federal Courthouse in Orlando FL and the Taunton Trial Court in Taunton MA, and the recently completed Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital. Leers Weinzapfel Associates has received over 65 design awards and was honored in 2007 with the AIA Firm Award, the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm.  A monograph on the firm’s work “Made to Measure: the Work of Leers Weinzapfel Associates was published in 2011 by Princeton Architectural Press.
Andrea Leers holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Wellesley College, and a Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts.  She is former Director of the Master in Urban Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she was Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design from 2001 to 2011 following several years as Visiting Critic.  Her studios integrating architecture and urban design include Japan Transfer (2003), Extending Modernism in the Monumental City: Washington’s Southwest Waterfront (2005), Search for a Modern Monumentality: Master Plan and Design for the New Paris Courthouse (2006), Tokyo’s Book City (2007), and three Beyond Paris studios (2009-11) investigating new universities on the outskirts of Paris.
Leers has also taught previously at Yale University’s School of Architecture, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts, the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and Tokyo Institute of Technology.  In 2007, Leers was invited to be Chaire des Amériques at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris), and she is currently Chair Professor at the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.  In 1997, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, and her several national grants include a NEA/Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Design Arts Fellowship in 1982. 

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