LEVENBETTS wins two 2018 NYAIA Awards

Square House: Honor Award in Architecture The Square House is a 43’ x 43’ house designed around a very simple concept: that architecture can completely engage landscape not just through its apertures but from its organizational basis and its approach to what it means to be inside and outside. There is no front door or back door, no formal entry. Rather the house is conceived as a series of rooms that can be accessed directly from outside creating a fluid relationship between interior and exterior. The house also has no windows, only doors. The square plan, reinforces a non-hierarchical informal organization while still allowing each face of the building to offer a different experience of the landscape and light.

Cornell University Rhodes Hall: Merit Award in Interiors The project for Rhodes Hall encompasses two renovated floors for the University’s School of Engineering; spaces for the Computer Systems Laboratory and for the Department of Operations Research and Information Engineering. Both spaces reset the relationship between university learning space and the larger communities of the academic building through transparency and a variety of open collaborative spaces. As a result, the renovated spaces critique the earlier architecture’s notions of discrete generic workspace in a learning facility and recast learning space as open and participatory. The new spaces also employ smart classroom and distance learning for academic colleagues to communicate with counterparts around the world and the new New York Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island.