David Leven is a partner at LEVENBETTS, an award winning New York City based architecture practice. The office was founded by David with Stella Betts in 1997 and focuses on projects at all scales of urban design, public buildings, houses and housing, workspaces, exhibitions and furniture. The office employs a variety of methods to arrive at innovative solutions that involve incisive observation, interrogate programmatic and site givens and approach building systems as creative opportunities. The projects, whether built, un-built or theoretical, are all based in research and speculation ranging from the particulars of a project to larger questions of architecture and cities. Through this process-based work, our design production is inherently social, necessarily sustainable and devoted to the experience of a public that may encounter the work at any given time.

LEVENBETTS has won several NYC AIA awards (2011, 2008, 2005, 2004, 2003), the Architectural League’s Young Architects Forum and Emerging Voices Awards (2009), Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard (2007) award, I.D. Annual Design Review Award (2004) and been exhibited widely. The firm has been invited to produce an installation at the Chengdu Biennial in western China in the fall of 2011 and has been submitted on a short list for the Venice Biennial for Fall 2012. The work of LEVENBETTS has been published in various design magazines and books, and Princeton Architectural Press published a monograph on the firm’s work in 2008.

David and Stella together and separately have lectured widely and been invited jurors at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania. David has served on advisory panels at the Architectural League of New York, committees at the New School, and holds architectural registration in New York and New Jersey. David is currently an Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Architecture program at Parsons School of Constructed Environments. David holds a Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University, a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University and attended the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies.