Leven Betts - Pattern Recognition

Powers of observation may be an architect's most underrated skill. For New York City-based Leven Betts Studio, the design of meaningful spaces that bring people into an active relationship with architecture requires finding and inscribing in space the physical marks and temporal patterns of our daily lives. Above all, their work is focused on an individual's experience of a space with particular attention to how we navigate our surroundings. Their intense scrutiny of site and program a process related to author William Gibson's notion of 'pattern recognition' allows them to take advantage of certain site-specific cues. It inspired, for example, their decision to allow the direction of crop lines in the landscape to guide the design of a 2,000-square-foot upstate New York weekend home. It is visible in the Mixed Greens art gallery in Chelsea, New York, where five irregularly placed beam-and-column structures inspired their design of a zigzagging suspended ceiling that glows.