SelgasCano and LEVENBETTS Among the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s 2024 Architecture Awards Honorees

East Flatbush Library in Brooklyn by LEVENBETTS, featured in the October 2023 issue of RECORD. Photo © Naho Kubota

Architects & Firms

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced that a total of five recipients have been honored with 2024 Architecture Awards, including the New York–based honor society’s flagship architecture award, the $20,000 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and four Arts and Letters Awards worth $10,000 each.

Winning the Brunner Prize, which recognizes architects of any nationality who have made a significant contribution to architecture as an art, is SelgasCano. Established in 1998 by José Selgas and Lucía Cano, the Madrid-based studio’s work has been featured several times in RECORD, including the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion and, more recently, a colorful promenade and café in Rizhao, China’s Bailuwan Town development.

SelgasCano’s café pavilion and covered walkway in Bailuwan Town, China, is featured in the March 2024 issue of RECORD. Photo © Iwan Baan

Receiving Arts and Letters Awards for work that is “characterized by a strong personal direction,” is LEVENBETTS, a 2007 Design Vanguard led by David Leven and Stella Betts, both of whom presented their ongoing work with New York City’s public library systems including the East Flatbush Library at RECORD’s 2023 Innovation Conference. Also honored with the same award is Oberlander Prize–winning landscape architect Julie Bargmann, founder of Charlottesville, Virginia–based D.I.R.T. studio. Both Betts and Bargmann are also past Women in Architecture Design Leadership Award honorees.

Also recognized with Arts and Letters Awards for “exploring ideas in architecture through any medium or expression” are Beatriz Colomina, a Spanish-born architectural historian, theorist, and curator who serves as founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, a Polish visual artist and professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain, Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The 2024 Architecture Awards recipients were chosen from a group of individuals and practices nominated by the members of Arts and Letters. Comprising the selection committee were chair Toshiko Mori, Deborah Berke, Marlon Blackwell, Merrill Elam, Steven Holl, Michael Maltzan, Nader Tehrani, and Billie Tsien.

The architecture awards will be presented alongside the art, literature, and music awards at a ceremony held in May. Last year’s awardees included, among others, Sean Canty, founder of Studio Sean Canty; Roberto de Leon and Ross Primmer, founding principals of 2010 Design Vanguard de Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop, and Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, co-founders of 2004 Design Vanguard WORKac.

Matt Hickman is Senior News/Digital Editor at Architectural Record. Previously, he served as Senior Editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and has over a decade of experience as a freelance writer and editor specializing in historic preservation, public space, and the intersection of the natural world and built environment. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Matt holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from The New School.