Testimonials
The work of Zivkovic Connolly Architects, both modernist and traditional, has been consistently recognized by their peers and other notable commentators on architecture and design, in New York City and elsewhere.
The firm's New Carhart apartment building has been described, by Francis Morrone, historian and architectural critic of The New York Sun, as “… quite simply one of the best buildings in Manhattan in the last half century …” It is on NewYorkology.com’s “… Must-see list of NYC's newest important architecture …”, in a collection of “… Nine recent New York buildings the visiting architecture buff will not want to miss”. One of the first new classical buildings in New York in many years, it was awarded the prestigious Palladio Prize for excellence in traditional design. Francis & Kathleen Rooney Chair in Architecture at the University of Notre Dame, Steven W. Semes, calls it “... a model for how new traditional architecture, urbanism and historic preservation should work together to bring civility and continuity to the city.”
Local community groups, too, have expressed their support for the firm’s sensitive traditionalism. In urban New York, the Carnegie Hill Neighbors presented the firm with its Enrichment Award while, in regional New Hampshire, the Portsmouth Advocates awarded a commercial project, noting that “… this exemplary design sets the new standard for commercial storefronts in the historically sensitive business district.”
Meanwhile, in New York 2000, a survey of contemporary design of the last generation, the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern and his co-authors refer to the “art-inspired” commercial interiors of the firm, also suggesting “… the Panopticon-inspired arrangements Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto had devised …”, among other distinctive qualities. A critic for The Architectural Review of London emphasizes the firm’s “logic, invention and wit”, which the The New York Times says “... speaks of cutting edge design, of performance art, of downtown sharpness.” And Pritzker Prize juror and editor of Japan’s Architecture and Urbanism compares the product of their modernist design attitude with “… the vertiginous sensations of a Jackson Pollock painting.”
In their apartments, houses and country estates, moreover, the architects are equally comfortable and successful with both the modern and the traditional. A jury of the Society of American registered Architects commends their “… use of light and the play of volumes … skillfully woven together” and an American Institute of Architects design awards jury, comprising the curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Terence Riley, praises “… a beautifully simple volume of space, well proportioned and conscientiously executed”. At the same time, The New York Times includes the traditional work of the firm in an international piece on The Homes at the Top of the World and Period Homes observes that while “…the lavish interiors feature high-end traditionally styled components ...”, a new Palladian inspired house by Zivkovic Connolly “… is very much of its time and place …”.
For this firm, the question of style is secondary; the cornerstone of architecture is ultimately the making of beautiful places. And appropriateness is the key. In Architettura Intersezioni, the journal of the School of Architecture of the University of Venice, Dr Teresa Stoppani recognizes this in their work, explaining that: “Urban grid, city block, lot, building, back-yard, tree, temple, altar are composed in a system … where the place (locus) is revealed.”