Andy Vanags

Andris ("Andy") Vanags (August 24, 1942 - October 13, 2019) was a member of the Department of Architecture in the University of Washington College of Built Environments (formerly College of Architecture & Urban Planning) for forty years, 1969-2009. He was a key figure in the development of the department and college culture of craft and making.
Andris Vanags was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1942. In 1944, advancing Soviet troops forced his family to flee from Latvia. Andris, his brother, mother, and other relatives spent the remaining days of World War 2 as refugees in Displaced Persons camps in Germany. Meanwhile, his father and uncle were conscripted to the German army, captured by Russian troops, and spent the end of World War 2 as prisoners of war. After the end of the war, his family was reunited in Germany thanks to the efforts of the Red Cross. His family was then able to emigrate to the United States in 1949, and settled in Brooklyn.
As a teenager, Andris began working for his uncles as a carpenter, an experience that would profoundly shape his future. He graduated high school in Brooklyn in 1960. After one semester as a student at Pratt Institute, he came to Seattle and found employment as a member of the team working on the Dyna-Soar space plane at Boeing. He remained at Boeing through December 1964, then entered the University of Washington School of Art program in industrial design, graduating with a BFA in Industrial Design in 1968.
During his years as a college student, Vanags had used the shop facilities of the UW architecture program in several shared courses; he also befriended Professor Philip Thiel. When shop director Berner Kirkebo resigned due to illness in 1969, Vanags accepted the position of shop director beginning in April 1969. Initially he served as a staff member and taught just a single class on tools and materials. However, when Gould Hall, the new building of the College opened in the early 1970s with larger wood and metal shop spaces and a classroom, he began to develop a variety of courses included "Materials and Processes," "Wood Design," "Light Frame Assemblies," "Technological Foundations" (Arch 300 studio) and others. Under his leadership, the shops (since 2012 called "Fabrication Labs") became a center of pedagogy.
During this period he also became licensed as a contractor. Over the summer breaks he would exercise his carpentry skills, taking take on design-build projects for residential clients along with his UW colleague Barry Onouye .
In 1977, Vanags and Onouye brought this ethos into the School of Architecture, initiating the college's first design/build offering, "Playground Construction"; this course was offered during Spring quarter for the next decade. When the liability of playground building became an issue, Barry and Andy redirected the design-build studio to other kinds of projects. (After 1992, Steve Badanes took on this design-build studio and he continues to lead it today.)
In the late 1970s and 1980s Vanags began to make connections with the growing number of studio furniture makers in the Puget Sound region. In 1984, he offered the Architecture Department's first furniture design and fabrication class, initially for only three credits. In 1989 the furniture class became a six-credit studio which Vanags, assisted by newly appointed shop manager Penny Maulden, taught for the next twenty years. By 1991 the furniture studio was offered to graduate students one quarter, and to senior undergraduates another quarter -- the pattern that continues today.
The quality of the work in the furniture studio was recognized through the many awards received by furniture projects in professional furniture competitions in the region, and in a national competition in 2004. Five student projects were also included in the book 500 Chairs in 2008. The history, pedagogy, and influence of the furniture studio, along with examples of more than fifty projects, were the focus of Furniture Studio: Materials, Craft, & Architecture published in 2012.
Vanags fully retired from teaching in March 2009, after teaching his final furniture studio that Winter term. The furniture program continues under the leadership of Kimo Griggs and Penny Maulden. Although some of the classes that Vanags created have been discontinued, and others have changed with the introduction of digital tools and techniques, the culture of craft and making that Vanags developed in his forty years in the department and college remain a significant offering.
The first twenty years of the University of Washington Furniture Studios were showcased in "Furniture Fest," an exhibition in spring 2009. In 2018 Vanags was recognized with the College of Built Environments Distinguished Faculty Award for Lifetime Achievement.
During the years of his retirement, Vanags designed and built an island home for himself on Mystery Bay, near Port Townsend, Washington. He moved from Seattle to live there permanently in 2012. In 2019, he came down with a series of illnesses. Although he looked to be recovering from his most serious health issues, he could not overcome a secondary infection, and died in California in mid-October.
Vanags helped shape the careers of many of his students.

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