Levin Residence, Designed by CAPLA’s Teresa Rosano and Luis Ibarra, Showcased in The Guardian
The Levin Residence by Ibarra Rosano Design Architects. Photo by Bill Timmerman.
The work of Ibarra Rosano Design Architects, the architecture firm established and led by College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture Assistant Professor of Practice Teresa Rosano and Luis Ibarra, was featured in The Guardian on May 2, 2020.
The article, which features two other homes in Arizona and a home in Granada, Spain, says that “these desert retreats are designed to help their inhabitants feel a sense of peace through connection to nature. Situation and design combine to turn the poetic idea of the idyll into reality.”
The 3,520-square-foot Levin Residence in Marana, Arizona, “cantilevers over a sloping terrain, providing shelter for desert animals beneath the house,” the article says.
“Emanating from the challenges of the site, an ethic of building with minimal disruption to the natural environment, and the client’s brief, the Levin Residence results in three simple volumes hovering quietly above the desert floor,” says Rosano. “The clients asked for a universally accessible home in which they could be fully immersed in the landscape, in constant engagement with the serenity and re-energizing power of the Sonoran Desert and its sky.”
The Levin Residence by Ibarra Rosano Design Architects. Photo by Bill Timmerman.
The home, which was completed in 2012, has won several awards, including the regional Sub-Zero/Wolf Kitchen Design Competition, the AIA Southern Arizona 2012 Home of the Year Award and an AIA Southern Arizona 2013 Design Honor Award.
Rosano and Ibarra, both CAPLA graduates, founded Ibarra Rosano Design Architects in 1999 after winning their first international design award. Since then, the duo has continued to earn international recognition for their unique desert modern architecture, receiving over 70 design awards and recognition in more than 300 publications. Rosano joined CAPLA in 2011 and teaches site planning and analysis, architectural programming and the architecture foundation studio and also coordinates the third-year design studio. Ibarra coordinated and taught the third-year design studio at CAPLA from 2011-2018.
