Andrei Harwell, B.Arch, M.Arch
Andrei is an architect, urban designer, and design educator with 20+ years experience developing award-winning conceptual strategies and physical designs that respond to contemporary issues and challenges facing American and world cities, towns and urban regions. Much of his recent work has focused on the integration of buildings, infrastructure, and the natural environment at the neighborhood scale, emphasizing the way in which good design can connect people and communities, contribute to economic, social and environmental resilience, and a create a strong sense of vibrancy and unique local identity. Over the course of his career, Andrei has designed individual buildings, parks, and public spaces, and produced neighborhood, downtown, and regional plans for a diverse range of clients. He currently directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop, and teaches design courses at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut.
Courses
Domestic Imaginaries
This studio will explore the relationship between the architecture of domesticity and its production and representation, both as idea and as space, through photography and photographic images.
Beginning with a critical examination of the latent assumptions, incentives, and intentions that drive the production and consumption of images of domestic space (and position domestic bodies in that space), we will think about how photographs send messages promoting particular lifestyles, ideologies, power dynamics, colonial histories, and cultural hierarchies, and how architecture is implicated in these. We will look at domestic representations produced not only by architects, but by social reformers, artists, governments, and popular media, with an eye towards the formal techniques used to convey those messages, and consider how these images mediate how we understand space, and broadly how they shape our lives and behaviors.
In designing a dense collective living space, to be located somewhere in the Mexico City neighborhood of Santa Maria la Ribera, with our critical understanding of image production, we will explore the use of photographic process as generative analytic, narrative, and compositional tools in the design process—both using photography as a way to see what is there, and inventing new techniques of image manipulation that may make possible the unlocking of alternative mode of space imagination and new ways of living.
The studio will include two intensive workshops with the photographer Iwan Baan.
Housing Connecticut: Developing Healthy and Sustainable Neighborhoods
In this inaugural interdisciplinary clinic taught between the School of Architecture, School of Law, and School of Management, and organized by the Yale Urban Design Workshop, students will gain hands-on, practical experience in architectural and urban design, development and social entrepreneurship while contributing novel solutions to the housing affordability crisis. Working in teams directly with local community-based non-profits, students will co-create detailed development proposals anchored by affordable housing, but which also engage with a range of community development issues including environmental justice, sustainability, resilience, social equity, identity, food scarcity, mobility, and health. Through seminars and workshops with Yale faculty and guest practitioners in the field, students will be introduced to the history, theory, issues, and contemporary practices in this field, and will get direct feedback on their work. Offered in partnership with the Connecticut Department of Housing (DOH) as part of the Connecticut Plan for Healthy Cities, proposals will have the opportunity to receive funding from the State both towards the implementation of rapidly deployed pilot projects during the course period, as well as towards predevelopment activities for larger projects, such as housing rehabilitation or new building construction. Students will interact with the Connecticut Commissioner of Housing and the Connecticut Green Bank.
Projected Enrollment: 12 Architecture, 6 Law, 6 Management
Advanced Design Studio: Coastal New England: History, Threat, and Adaptation
This studio will consider broadly the natural and human landscape of coastal New England, with a specific focus on the island of Nantucket and related coastal sites. We will consider the ongoing evolution of this unique region in light of the impacts of climate change and sea level rise along with changing environmental, economic, and cultural conditions. Projects in the studio will propose strategies that support coastal adaptation at the scale of the region, illustrated through specific architectural and landscape interventions on Nantucket and in other coastal cities and towns.
