Andrea Leers is the current Director of the Master in Urban Design Degree Programs and Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.  Prior to her appointment as Adjunct Professor in 2002, she was a frequent Visiting Critic in the Architecture Department since 1975. Her studios integrating architecture and urban design include: Japan Transfer, Extending Modernism in the Monumental City: Washington’s Southwest Waterfront, Search for a Modern Monumentality: Master Plan and Design for the New Paris Courthouse, Tokyo’s Book City, Beyond Paris: A New University Campus in Aubervilliers.

Recognized for her ability to synthesize the issues of practice and the academy, Leers has also taught at Yale University’s School of Architecture (1981-88), University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts (1988, 1999), and Tokyo Institute of Technology Department of Architecture (1991). In May and June of 2007, she was invited to be Chaire des Amériques at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris- 1). In March 2009 she was co-organizer of “The Architecture of the Courthouse: A Franco-American Perspective 1991-2006,” a conference held in Paris, sponsored by Harvard and the Sorbonne. Since 1979, Leers has been involved in research and design in Japan. She has received several national grants including an NEA/Japan U.S. Friendship Commission Design Arts Fellowship in 1982.

Her Boston-based firm Leers Weinzapfel Associates, established with Jane Weinzapfel in 1982, was honored with the AIA Firm Award in 2007, for “enriching the public realm…through their dedication to the science and craft of building.” Their work lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design and infrastructure, and is notable for its inventiveness in dramatically complex projects.  Award-winning projects include the Expansion of the Harvard Science Center, the Harvard New College Theatre (formerly Hasty Pudding), University of Pennsylvania Chiller Plant, and the MBTA Operations Control Center in Boston.  Her firm has also designed several awarded courthouses including the new Federal Courthouse in Orlando FL, and the Judicial Center in Lawrence, MA.  She has taught an Executive Education seminar at Harvard on courthouse design since 1993.  The firm is currently working on two new Social and Behavioral Sciences buildings for the University of Connecticut, a new courthouse in Taunton, MA, and the new Massachusetts General Hospital Museum and History Center.

Leers is the author of several published articles on Japanese architects Tadao Ando, Fumihiko Maki, and Shin Ichi Okada; “Extending and Redefining Traditions:  Recent Boston Architecture”, A+U with Alex Krieger; and “Urban Design and the Courthouse:  How Sites Shape Solutions” in Celebrating the Courthouse, Ed. Steven Flanders. She is currently working on a book to be published by Princeton Architectural Press entitled Made to Measure: the Work of Leers Weinzapfel Associates.