June 30, 2018

ikon.5 architects Wins two 2018 American Architecture Awards

This week, the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies announced that ikon.5 architects won two American Architecture Awards, for the Learning Resource Center at Suffolk County Community College, and for the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education at Cornell University.

The Learning Resource Center, an innovative state-of-the-art library that provides a vibrant collection of study spaces organized around a dramatic social stair, takes its place at the center of the Suffolk County Community College campus at the confluence of major pedestrian pathways between the Caumsett Student Center and the Health / Sports / Education Center, and between the major parking lots for this commuter college. A simple mass of nine cubes arranged in a three-by-three grid accommodates the library program on two floors. Portions of the cubes are either removed or expanded to create an interplay between negative and positive space that allows the Learning Resource Center to act as a prism that casts sunlight deep into the Learning Resource Center throughout the day. A central lantern rises above the building to create an iconic expression on the campus skyline, a beacon visible from all corners of the campus.

Located in Collegetown, one block from the Cornell campus, the Breazzano Family Center for Business Education is a seven-story, 76,000-square-foot, twenty-first century teaching and learning environment. Distinctly modern in its approach, the building façade is a combination of clear and patterned glass with a rhythmic arrangement of angled and straight projecting mullion-fins, colored compatibly with the salmon-orange brick of its neighbors. The variegated patterns of the facades serve to reduce the scale of the building, and the setback upper floors along Linden Avenue are rendered in dark metal to differentiate upper from lower and facilitate a relationship with the smaller scale of adjacent buildings. State-of-the-art classrooms are supported by breakout rooms, faculty and student offices, social spaces, and a four-story atrium commons designed to accommodate a wide variety of events. The Breazzano Family Center’s top three floors provide enclosed offices for faculty and administrators, open office work stations, conference rooms and team rooms, and two broadcasting studios that transmit lectures and seminars to students in the Cornell Executive MBA Americas program.

Now in its 24th year, The American Architectural Awards are the nation’s highest and most prestigious distinguished building awards program that honor new and cutting-edge design in the United States and promotes American architecture and design to our public audience in the U.S. and abroad. Award winners will be recognized at The Chicago Athenaeum’s Awards Gala on June 20, 2018 at The Institute of International Education in New York City.

Our two buildings will be part of the exhibition New American Architecture, organized by The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban, at The Istanbul Design Biennale in Istanbul, Turkey, this September.