AIA Peconic Announces 2023 Design Awards Honorees

The East End’s chapter of the American Institute of Architects, AIA Peconic, presented 12 design awards, including its inaugural award for sustainable architecture, during the annual Daniel J. Rowen Memorial Design Awards on Saturday, April 22, at the Ross School in East Hampton.

The awards are for architecture projects on the East End, or for projects elsewhere designed by East End architects, as well as projects that were designed but not built.

Paul Masi of Bates Masi + Architects in East Hampton earned both an Honor Award and a Merit Award for architecture.

The Honor Award — the most prestigious tier in the awards contest — is for a project named Wainscott. The 11,445-square-foot residence on 2.68 acres with landscape architecture by Perry Guillot is close to a pond and the ocean with a high water table posing flood risk that had to be overcome. The owners had requested a residence that could become a family heirloom, with room for the couple’s adult children and future grandchildren, according to the project synopsis. It also had to take advantage of the sweeping views while at the same time limiting direct sunlight to the couple’s art collection.

The house is divided into three gables structures — one for the owner and one each for their children’s future families. The first floors connect, while each volume has a staircase to its own separate second floor space.

For durability, cedar boards are layered like shingles over the home’s weather-tight shell and held in place by stainless clips so the boards may expand and contract and can easily be replaced, the synopsis states.

The Merit Award is for Signal Hill, a 6,325-square-foot residence on 4.8 acres in Montauk with landscape architecture by LaGuardia Design Group. The owners of a mid-20th century cottage on a hill with nearly 360-degree views of the nearby lake, ocean, sound and nature preserve sought to maintain the home’s unpretentious appearance but create a house large enough for their family of five, according to the project synopsis.

The completed project has stone walls that carve into a sloping meadow and extend to the top of the first floor — a reference to traditional livestock pens in Montauk that were built from glacial rubble — and create a base for the second story. Sliding glass walls provide uninterrupted sight lines to the lake as well as sunrise and sunset. Atop the stone walls, the second story is designed as two separate “cottages” reminiscent of the original structure, the synopsis states.

Viola Rouhani of Stelle Lomont Rouhani Architects in Bridgehampton took home both a Merit Award and a Juror Award for Architecture.

The Merit Award is for Butter Lane, a Bridgehampton home built for a young couple — a builder starting his solo career and an interior curator with her own business — to replace their existing home, according to the project synopsis. As a nod to the area’s history of agriculture, which continues today, the site was planned from an agrarian perspective, “referencing early farm settlements that work in partnership with the land and intentionally cluster buildings in one area,” the synopsis states. Particular attention was paid to the movement of the sun throughout the day, and each building volume, with a minimal material palette, is designed with a distinct purpose in dialogue with each other and the property itself.

“A linear east-facing skylight at the ridge of the living room creates a dynamic light show on the walls below,” the synopsis states. “Window placements add to the appreciation of natural light, grounding the experience of the house in the time of day.”

The Juror Award is for Lighthouse, which was sited to take advantage of bay and harbor views from under an oak tree canopy. The house itself is clad in white cement plaster.

“Light, not only daylight and reflected light from the water, but light-driven art and sculpture, is the primary focus of the house,” the project synopsis states. “Equal parts art gallery and living quarters, the expansive communal spaces contrast with intentional minimal, more personal rooms in the private quarters.”

A sequence of white and black freestanding walls created a modulated entry sequence, “allowing the experience of the house to begin in the landscape,” according to the synopsis.

BMA Architects received a Merit Award in the architecture category for Jule Pond II in Water Mill. The firm explains that the project was inspired by a sculpture within the landscape and expresses two distinct identities: “At the entrance, a dark brise soleil spans two stories and presents a unified façade, visually connecting the three wings of the sprawling house, which were intentionally arranged to reduce the scale. The brise soleil opens and contracts the glazing in a rhythmic pattern, finally breaking free of the house itself antmarching into the landscape. At the rear elevation, it becomes apparent that the house is in fact a wood volume clad in sun-bleached cedar and the brise soleil a shroud that distinguishes the front from the rear.”

Christopher Jeffrey of Christopher Jeffrey Architects PLLC in Hampton Bays earned an Honor Award for sustainable architecture for Sheridan Green Residence in Hampton Bays. The new construction started on a 1-acre property down a private gravel road with limited infrastructure. The three-bedroom house is 1,966 square feet and built into the sloping site. Volumes clad in tongue-and-groove cedar sit on concrete walls that are set orthogonal with the cardinal axis on the property.

The sustainable design concepts implemented on the property include passive and active solar, a ground-sourced geothermal/heat pump forced air system and energy recovery ventilation. South-facing windows expose the concrete surfaces to absorb the winter sun and radiate cooling using the ground’s thermal effects seasonally, according to the project synopsis, and open-loop geothermal wells run a three-zone heat-pump HVAC system. An 8 kilowatt photovoltaic array provides most of the electricity for the house.

The property also includes an elevated yoga studio that sits on two concrete walls and has four 1,000-watt infrared heating panels to warm the space to 120 degrees.

The lawn is made up of drought-tolerant fescue with micro-clover. A vegetable garden is located on the carport roof, the courtyard contains herb/flower gardens, and three espalier pear trees are trellised off the concrete ties. Sedum grows on the roofs on the yoga studio and bedroom porch.

Bridgehampton House by Stuart Basseches and Konstantinos Spiropoulos of Stuart Basseches Architect in Sag Harbor earned a Juror Award for architecture. The home was originally built in the early 2000s and is now 8,000 square feet with seven bedrooms. The owners wanted to increase the number of bedrooms and separate the house into two distinct areas, one for the family and one for guests, according to the project synopsis. A grade-level basement was built into the sloping property, adding two bedrooms, and the existing side structure was transformed into a guest wing. On the central building, a two-story addition, which created ocean views, contains a garage and family spaces on the first floor and bedrooms above. The blackened cedar of the exterior allows the house to be integrated more fully into the surrounding forest, the synopsis states.

The building envelope exceeds energy codes in insulation and glazing values, and the house is outfitted with geothermal heating/cooling, a photovoltaic array and a battery storage system.

Nilay Oza of Oza Sabbeth Architects in Bridgehampton received two Jurors Awards for “projects unbuilt.”

The first, Shelter is Place, was a casualty of the COVID pandemic that turned into a design exercise for the firm.

“The design exercise stopped being about a particular house designed for a specific place and time,” the project synopsis states. “It became a stand-in for the quintessential beach house and a story of how it changes over time in a blight-altered world.”

The team studied what the effects of weathering, aging, neglect and deterioration would be on the materials, and that influenced material choices. The main volume had started out as wood but became a “concrete shroud that peels off the ground floating the house above the horizon,” the synopsis states.

The second, Shore House, is a proposed beach house in Amagansett. The split-level residence is designed to work in tandem with the site’s topography, maximize the view of the ocean and use the substructure as a means of reducing the coastal erosion of the dunescape.

Architect Robert Dean of New Haven, Connecticut, earned a Merit Award for a renovation of a midcentury East Hampton home.

“We find this project exemplary in the respectful way that it undertook each aspect of its renovation,” the jury said. “It learned from, and recharged, the original design to great effect, extending the life of the work and serving as a relevant demonstration for taking inspiration to preserve an existing structure.”

Architect Steven Harris of his eponymous New York City firm picked up a Juror Award for Bridgehampton Beach House, which was featured in Architectural Digest. Rees Robert + Partners was responsible for the landscape as well as the interiors. The property features a sculptural canopy that shades the seating area beside a knife-edge pool.

Ramona Albert won the Merit Award for Emerging Architects for her project Hybrid Urban House in the Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

The design jury included Carlos Jimenez, Matthew Krissel and Andrea Lamberti and the sustainable architecture jury included Julie Janiski, Shivani Shah and Matt Wallace.

The Honor Award is for projects that demonstrate excellence in innovative design and the highest level of design and performance, followed in prestige by the Merit Award, for exemplary execution of design principles and presentation, according to AIA Peconic. The Juror Award is given for any project, in any category, as the jury sees fit, to recognize excellence in “resolving specific programmatic desires through interpretation of style, technologies, sustainability, materials and/or vernacular influences.”

The awards ceremony also included the presentation of the inaugural AIA Peconic Community Award, given to State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.

“The quality of our built environment is critical to reduce inequity, protect our natural resources and make housing more affordable,” Thiele said in a statement last week. “Architecture, design and planning excellence are integral components of the East End economy and way of life. I am grateful for this recognition and will continue to work in the State Assembly to support investments and initiatives to improve our built environment.”