Deborah Gans, FAIA
Deborah Gans is the founder and principal architect of Gans and Company in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her firm's projects include architecture, industrial design, and community-based urban planning, where she frequently tackles extreme sites and programs. Through writing, design research and inventive public advocacy, Deborah has spearheaded the revitalization of socially responsible architecture for a new generation.
Educated at Princeton at a moment of withdrawal from the social realm into post-modern autonomy, Gans has spent her career seeking new forms for architecture’s social participation and engagement. From her masters’ thesis for a workers’ club in a shrinking post-industrial town to her current involvement in coastal resiliency, she has had tremendous impact on the contemporary community-based design movement. Much of Gans’ design work focuses on the challenges of housing, especially in relation to the underserved, where she has used her design speculation as a platform for policy change and the revitalization of communities.
Caleb Crawford, RA
Caleb Crawford is a managing project architect at Gans & Company and Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute. He is a LEED accredited architect and certified passive house designer. He is deeply involved in environmental issues serving on the board of New York Passive House and AIA Committee on the Environment.
With Coggan + Crawford he completed the first Energy Star rated, LEED Platinum Building in Brooklyn. Caleb has experience in the field of landscape architecture having worked for both M. Paul Friedberg and Signe Nielsen. He is a recipient numerous design awards for his independent work that has included a tent for The Celebrate Brooklyn Performing Arts Festival. Caleb was educated in fine arts at University of Michigan and in architecture at Pratt Institute and Sci-Arc.
Ashley Katz, Assoc. AIA
Ashley Katz is an architectural designer at Gans and Company. She is working on the renovation of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s backyard and has also worked on designing Gans and Company’s modular housing for Build it Back.
She studied at the Cooper Union before graduating from Pratt Institute with a Bachelors in Architecture and minor in Sustainability. During her time at Pratt, she served as the Co-Editor in Chief of the Pratt Journal of Architecture, presented work at the Museum of Modern Art, and received special honors for her work in sustainability.
Ashley is an adept problem solver with experience in digital fabrication and the arts. Her education and interests give her a unique insight into modern building technologies and hands-on, community oriented design.
Adam Achrati, RA
Adam is a licensed architect with experience in large scale, multi-family housing, with both affordable and market rate components.
He was the project manager for the construction of twenty-three houses in Sheepshead Bay for the City of New York’s Build It Back post-Sandy Reconstruction. Adam oversaw the complex coordination of the drainage and utility infrastructure on the mews in relation to the other landscape and urban design aspirations of the project. He managed communication with engineers, construction manager, city agencies, contractors, and homeowners, and was the project architect for several houses.
Adam is also the project architect for the design development of The Cottages, an enclave of urban workforce housing for the Sag Harbor Community Housing Trust, where he has worked on urban design, environmental and architectural aspects of the project in order that they perform holistically on this ecologically delicate site.
Adam has personal, as well as professional, interests and experience in hands-on metal and wood fabrication. As part of his self-apprenticeship, he worked for metal fabricator Dash 7 and with the CO+Lab PennDesign Student Group, an interdisciplinary team focused on the designing and building of small-scale installations at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jared Rice, NOMA
Jared Rice is an architectural designer at Gans & Company and holds a B.Arch from Pratt Institute. During his time at Pratt, he was involved in the creation and continuance of Pratt’s NOMAS chapter, led and curated the student lecture and exhibition series Pratt Futures, and co-created the Peer to Peer Mentorship program, centering BIPOC student needs. He also won the Pratt Social Justice Award for his thesis Encoded Cities of Co-Existing Histories, which looked at reimagining social infrastructures in tulsa to disentangle, decode, and begin to heal intergenerational communal traumas of Black and Native communities.
He has also participated on research into Weeksville and oral archival practices, worked with BQLT, Green Guerillas, and local groups to design and construct a community garden, and partnered with CCI, NSI, an interdisciplinary team of professionals, and young harlem residents to create the RE:Play Reclaiming the Commons through Play exhibition at the Center for Architecture, which continued into the VIBE program where he designed pop up exhibitions within a block party. He focuses on using his skillsets to create accessible and engaging designs.
Jared at gansandco dot com
Corey Arena, Assoc. AIA
Corey Arena is a junior designer at Gans & Company, where his work engages public architecture and community-focused design. He received his B.Arch from Pratt Institute, where he was co-founder and president of Pratt Student Action for Inclusive Design (SAID), an organization which seeks to highlight the ways disciplinary and pedagogical practices systematically disadvantage individuals. His thesis critiqued the single-family home as a cultural, economic, and spatial project in the shadow of the 2008 recession, and reimagined communal ways of living.
He is a member of the AIANY Diversity and Inclusion Committee and The Architecture Lobby New York City Chapter, where he is currently a chapter Co-Steward. His current projects include post-Sandy housing through the NYC Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations Build it Back program and a garden courtyard renovation for the Brooklyn Children’s Museum.
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Fabrizio Ungaro
Fabrizio Ungaro is an architectural designer with a master’s degree in Architecture and Building Engineering attained at the University of Bologna.
His interest focuses on the intersection among energy, matter, information, agency, space and aesthetics, and how that ultimately leads to the emergence of the architectural form. He is skilled in computational design with a propension towards energy efficiency design.
Fabrizio collaborated with ABRACADABRA, an European Community project focused on strategies for reducing the carbon footprint of existing buildings, with his master thesis project of retrofitting through add-ons in Red Hook, Brooklyn.