With a new award from the American Institute of Architects for housing leadership, the East Coast firm RKTB Architects is spreading a national message of rising to meet the current U.S. need for 6 million units of housing, the projected shortfall now causing record homelessness and barriers to affordability and homeownership. Known for their work across the full continuum of housing solutions — from shelters and navigation centers for the unhoused, to deeply affordable and low-cost permanent housing, to mixed-income and market-rate developments created for seniors, veterans and entire communities — RKTB has completed hundreds of projects over 60 years for thousands of diverse people of varied backgrounds, budgets and aspirations.
Reflecting their success, RKTB has announced a number of new commissions reflecting this track record of success across the full continuum of housing types. (See project details below.) They include: a 1,600-unit renovation campaign for New York’s housing authority; new infill and small-lot projects on 18 sites throughout several neighborhoods for nonprofit developer MHANY; a 130-bed men’s shelter created to blend in with its Riverdale, N.Y. context; rehabilitation of a three-building cluster in Upper Manhattan; and a new mixed-use housing and cultural complex in Astoria, Queens. Recently completed works include the 52-unit, cantilevered One Sullivan Place in Brooklyn for seniors and mixed-income tenants, as well as Phoenix Estates II in the Bronx for both families and senior citizens.
Adds Alex Brito, AIA, a partner with RKTB, “Our commitment to place, combined with our use of architecture as an instrument of human rights, contribute to the results that support the dignity of all citizens and their rights to live in a well-designed, inspiring place.”
Housing Leadership Honors
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter has validated and elevated RKTB Architects’ success in housing with a recent honor, the Leadership in Housing Award for 2024. “For over 60 years, RKTB has been a rare and indispensable resource to addressing New York’s affordable housing crisis,” according to AIA New York Chapter’s leaders, President Gregory Switzer and Executive Director Jesse Lazar. “RKTB is one of few architecture firms which centers its practice around providing housing to everyday New Yorkers — an example of what a mission-driven architecture firm can be and how to meaningfully help influence change.”
"We believe housing is a critical tool for improving our neighborhoods and cities,” says Peter Bafitis. “At RKTB, our design teams develop new architectural solutions with the spirit of the Ephebic oath from ancient Athens, striving for the ideals of our city and our sense of public duty, promising to bring to the neighborhoods where we work greater, better and more beautiful places than those we have found there.”
In addition, earlier this year the firm’s managing principal, Peter Bafitis, AIA, earned a distinction from the AIA New York Chapter for his and RKTB’s design leadership. The Citation of Design Excellence, given in 2023, recognizes nine consecutive years of Bafitis’s work heading the influential AIA chapter’s housing committee and for his commitment to “over a decade of activism on housing advocacy efforts” in the region through that work and his firm’s dedication. (Peter Bafitis AIA, in photo at far left, along with his colleagues Carmi Bee, FAIA, and Alex Brito, AIA; the award was conferred by Victor Body-Lawson, FAIA, at right.)
In addition, the firm’s widely hailed Affordable Infill Housing Prototype was featured in a prestigious mayoral report, Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing, published earlier this year. A collaboration of the New York City Public Design Commission, the Fine Arts Federation of New York, and the local chapter of the AIA. Since the concept was introduced, it has been applied in such New York City neighborhoods as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Crown Heights and East New York.
“Through decades of private and public initiatives and projects, RKTB has amassed a vast portfolio of housing work that provides dignity and respite for thousands of New Yorkers,” the AIA announced. “As a leader in the affordable housing conversation, RKTB shares its insights and knowledge openly … through policy discussions with housing advocates and elected officials in City Hall and Albany,” the state’s capital.
Since the 1970s, RKTB Architects has been synonymous with innovation in multifamily design and development in the New York Metro region and beyond. Other recent works include the Pope Francis Apartments at Loreto in Brooklyn, which leveraged inclusion of senior units to increase developable floor area — and 1425 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, which employs air rights in an entirely different way to increase height and developable size on a tight site. RKTB is currently involved in efforts to identify solutions for converting vacant commercial space into affordable housing, drawing on decades of successful adaptive reuse work across typologies.
“Our firm has been doing this a long time,” says Bafitis, “so we bring depth of knowledge to the table, especially with respect to navigating complex, labyrinthine zoning and building codes. We’re honored and excited to have been a part of making One Sullivan Place such a successful development.”