From large-scale initiatives to community-focused projects, Andrew Leung is dedicated to designing for climate resilience. An architect and urban designer at SOM, Andrew is currently working to bring one of New York’s most ambitious climate projects to life: the New York Climate Exchange. On the neighborhood level, he developed a plan for community climate literacy hubs with his Rewire working group in 2024.
We sat down this summer to discuss projects of all sizes, what inspires his work today, and how a better public realm can strengthen our climate resilience.
–Hadley Stack
HS: Hi, Andrew, thank you so much for sitting down with me. Can you kick us off by just telling us what you do for a living?
Andrew Leung: I’m a trained architect, and I practice urban design at SOM as part of the City Design Practice. Broadly, I work at the intersection of architecture, landscapes, and the imperatives of climate impacts — and how all of that ties together in creating meaningful public realm experiences.
I’m a New York native. I grew up here and my father is an architect in New York, so I have always been really grounded in the city, and really passionate about how to communicate about architecture to a broader audience.
Let’s talk a little bit about the climate imperatives. How do you see urban design, and particularly the work you do with the City Design practice, as being a tool to address those issues?
AL: There’s a strong ethos in our practice that climate action is urgent and necessary. We work across many scales — from site-specific projects to district master plans to regional city strategies for energy, mobility, and resilience. The goal is always to create a more sustainable and resilient future. I see it as our responsibility to find paths forward and set examples that others can build upon.
I’d be interested to learn more about the Climate Exchange and Climate Campus project that you’re working on.
AL: The Climate Exchange is a collaborative effort led by Stony Brook University, and their corporate and institutional partners. SOM is leading architecture, structures, and planning. It includes development partners, stakeholders, and the Trust for Governor’s Island, a major stakeholder in the project.
The design is built around a Climate Campus for research and educational hub, set in the unique context of Governor’s Island, this amazing island in the harbor. The initial phase of the project will encompass academic research and a large convening building to house large climate events. We’re really thinking more broadly about a hub for the city, where people come to discuss, to research, and learn about climate action and advance the pressing research and climate solutions.
There’s going to be outdoor demonstration labs, job training programs, and educational outreach with K through 12 programs.
The headline of the new construction is the new mass timber building. How do we build more sustainably and more consciously with our materials? This project is going to be one of the most ambitious mass-timber projects in the city, which has been a major goal and aspiration. We are also restoring existing buildings as an adaptive reuse project. A lot of historical existing buildings on Governor’s Island, which have a long history of military use and will now be repurposed as dormitories and other places to learn, gather, and research.
The other key component is landscape and the open space. One of the major draws to the island is this amazing park, which now provides the setting for the Climate Campus. We are proposing new landscapes that are adaptive to climate change, examining the resiliency of the water’s edge, and activating a waterfront using natural solutions. Hard edges, like a sea wall, have tended to be a more default solution in the past, but we’re trying to open it up and make the waterfront edge a great public space with green infrastructure, wetlands, and a resilient waterfront that can deal with flood storms.
Because of sea level rise and flood risk, part of the goal is to build the campus above the Design Flood Elevation. The challenge is, how do you get people to move around it and up to it? How do you get people to feel like it’s a great inviting space, and not feel like they’re crossing through barriers?
I do want to mention the iconic solar canopy that is part of the roof of the buildings. The roof design meanders in a sinuous and sculptural way to become part of the landscape. A really iconic structure that is, in a sense, completely performative: it will generate and store the energy for the buildings. Coupled with other systems like geothermal fields, the solar roof will help reduce the energy of the campus-wide system.
What is something that you are most excited about seeing realized from this project?
AL: The most rewarding part is seeing the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructure come together into a cohesive, inviting public realm that engages people in climate issues. Projects like this demand major commitments — financial, environmental, and cultural — but the real opportunity is in creating a model that can inspire others and be scaled across the city.
Can I ask you about the challenges of building something this ambitious on an island? What does that look like?
AL: Building on an island is part of our expertise at SOM. We’ve built on an island before, with our project at Cornell Tech. That campus was built on Roosevelt Island, where there are challenges and advantages to barge in materials.
Governors Island is special because it’s car-free and already considered a place of respite. We wanted to maintain that character even as we introduce this major new Climate Campus.
What lessons can the city take from this project at Governors Island, and how can that be scaled across the five boroughs, particularly with projects that might have smaller budgets?
AL: Scaling climate action is a great opportunity for key institutions to play a major role in leading the climate solution effort. That was actually a huge part of the Connected Anchors project I did with my Rewire cohort. How can institutions champion and, in some ways, lead the efforts for communities and neighborhoods to participate, to learn and to take action themselves?
Everyone can have a contribution. The Climate Campus is super ambitious, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. In some ways, it’s important to set that example, and be a model to replicate. But other institutions in the city can also play roles in their neighborhoods. Maybe there’s a hidden potential or untapped resource that could be amplified here. A library in Elmhurst or a school somewhere in the Bronx, or any one of the untapped community anchor institutions — what kind of network do these smaller institutions have and can we leverage those institutions and those networks to build climate corridors? We proposed these climate corridors: areas connected community anchor institutions like schools or libraries that could be reworked to host outdoor programs, green job training, educational programs for residential retrofits and climate literacy events.
It doesn’t require a huge upgrade — we can achieve a lot by making these public spaces more shaded, more green, to really address the urban heat island effect.
I believe that even smaller institutions have real capacity and potential when connected to a broader network. In New York, we’ve seen academic, healthcare, and other institutions shape their surrounding communities and urban environments — and that collective momentum is powerful.
Any last thoughts you’d like to share?
Coming full circle, I’ve always been fascinated by how design can shape the life of a city. Projects like the Climate Exchange and Connected Anchors may operate at different scales, but they are part of the same effort: to create places, from major campuses to neighborhood libraries, that bring people together, strengthen communities, and demonstrate that climate solutions are not only possible, but within reach.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
All images courtesy of Andrew Leung
Andrew Leung is an urban designer and Associate Principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s City Design Practice in New York. He works domestically and internationally on a broad range of projects with a particular focus on the intersection of architecture and landscape, the imperatives of climate impact, and the tremendous promise of open space and the public realm. As a native New Yorker, his recent work has also included civic engagement in the city.