About

Andrew Wheat is a Cornell B.Arch student and designer working across public architecture, materiality, civic infrastructure, housing, and environmental design.

Studying architecture at Cornell has taught me that materiality is deeply embedded in the daily experiences of public life. It is felt in the tempering of light, the weight of a threshold, the grain of a surface, and the atmosphere of a room where people gather, wait, celebrate, recover, or claim a place as their own. My work often begins with ordinary civic routines: food, water, care, learning, rest, and assembly. I ask how architecture can give those routines greater dignity, clarity, and atmosphere through the careful relationship between construction, use, and experience.

I study materials for what they do and for what they suggest. Plywood, timber, masonry, translucency, water, soil, and planted surfaces each carry associations of labor, permanence, repair, warmth, exposure, and care. They shape how a building is understood before it is explained. They determine whether a space feels institutional or domestic, temporary or lasting, civic or private, ordinary or ceremonial. In that sense, materiality becomes one of the ways architecture makes its values visible.

At Cornell, my projects and research have focused on spaces where construction, environment, and social use are deeply entangled, and where those forces are allowed to remain complex. I am drawn to buildings that are materially direct and spatially generous, where the logic of assembly remains legible and everyday life is made more vivid by light, texture, structure, and atmosphere. Across my work, I am trying to make architecture that gives collective life a stronger presence: room to gather, room to change, and room to become meaningful over time.