by: Lisa Delgado
Event: Emerging Voices Lecture Series
Location: Urban Center, 03.26.09
Speakers: Andrew Berman, AIA — Principal, Andrew Berman Architect; Stella Betts, David Leven — Partners, LevenBetts
Organizer: The Architectural League of New York
Sponsors: New York State Council on the Arts; NYC Department of Cultural Affairs
Catskills House by LevenBetts (left); Center for Architecture by Andrew Berman Architect.
Michael Moran (left); Peter Aaron/Esto (right)
David Leven and Stella Betts are like a pair of shoes. Not because they cover a lot of ground (though they certainly did in their rapid-fire presentation), but because they work best as a duo. Opening their lecture with a slide of a set of sneakers, Leven said, “We’re a pair, we work in a pair, we think as a pair, and we’re interested in the ideas of similarities and differences that pairings bring up,” and then he and Betts presented a series of several projects grouped (naturally) in sets of two.
The vertical layers or horizontal patterns of landscapes inspired one pair of designs. A Catskills hillside house represents a layered topography, with an upper volume that seems to be slipping off the lower one. Echoing the surface patterns of farmland, a Columbia County house and garage consists of three volumes arranged in formations reminiscent of crop lines.
A couple of local projects explored the pairing of illumination and infrastructure. The Mixed Greens gallery features a luminous ceiling that resembles a “glowing lightbox,” Betts said. It contains mechanical and sprinkler systems, along with lights, and its gently zigzagging form reflects the configuration of the existing beams and columns, she added. Similarly, the EMR printing plant features a brightly lit stairwell or “vertical slot” that’s a locus for both infrastructure and illumination, Leven said.
Emerging Voices lectures typically consist of pairs of firms, which naturally leads to comparisons of their own. Like the partners of LevenBetts, Andrew Berman, AIA, is a local architect with a knack for weaving old materials into new interventions, remarked juror Joel Sanders, AIA, of Joel Sanders Architect, adding that they also share “a similar clean, spare design sensibility.” Berman’s sensibility emerged when he founded his firm during a recession in the mid-1990s, a time when “it seemed very natural to me to work with a kind of an economy and a modesty,” Berman explained. In many of his firm’s projects, the design is “a catalyst to reinvigorate and redefine the old [space], which has lost its relevancy or utility,” he added.
For a Californian client who craved a sensation of unlimited space, the firm transformed a tar roof on Grant Street into sprawling gardens and a penthouse, with a loft below. Windows frame views of Midtown, the Financial District, and the Police Building dome, and a lightwell brings natural light to a greenhouse and other spaces on the lower level.
The firm’s competition-winning design for the Center for Architecture transformed subterranean spaces that were once dark, dirty, and damp into light-filled places for exhibitions and events. The transformation necessitated a “violent excavation,” cutting away portions of the building’s concrete slabs on the street level and mezzanine to allow sunlight and sightlines to easily penetrate from the front window down two floors to the lecture hall. In the future, keep an eye out for the Andrew Berman Architect–designed entry kiosk at P.S.1, which will help that familiar local institution enhance its street presence too.
Lisa Delgado is a freelance journalist who has written for OCULUS, The Architect’s Newspaper, Blueprint, and Wired, among other publications.