RKTB Architects’ New Design Leadership

Welcoming a new generation of firm visionaries, RKTB Architects also honors the 60-plus-year career of award-winning founding principal Carmi Bee, who steps back from day-to-day duties.

Sharing an uplifting message of housing crisis solutions while concurrently expanding the reach of their innovation in design of school facilities, RKTB Architects has unveiled a forward-looking leadership transition including the naming of three principals to lead the firm ahead. At the same time, RKTB has also announced that design principal and co-founder Carmi Bee, FAIA, who helped build the firm’s reputation as an innovator in architecture, will step away from his role as firm president and from day-to-day activities and devote his time to select pursuits.

This evolution of RKTB’s leadership is the beginning of a new chapter, with three of the firm’s most established and widely recognized architects coming to the fore: Peter Bafitis, AIA, who has held the role of managing principal since 2004, now serves as president of the firm, along with the seasoned principals Albert Aronov, AIA and Alex Brito, AIA, who respectively lead RKTB Architects’ successful studios in K-12 academic architecture and multifamily housing design. Bee, meanwhile, takes on the role of principal emeritus, says Bafitis.

Forged and strengthened over more than a half-century of responsiveness to changing needs in varied market sectors, RKTB’s core philosophy is to bring design innovation to help achieve their clients’ goals while also aligning with the broader imperatives of civic responsibility. This mission, articulated first in 1963 when the firm was established as Bernard Rothzeid Partners, has earned the firm a reputation for being a trusted and recognized leader among East Coast design professionals and the entire building community, yielding 60-plus years of groundbreaking work.

“Our architects and designers strive to uphold our ideals and guiding principles, undergirded with a sense of public duty,” says Bafitis, who has served as co-chair of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter’s Housing Committee since 2014. “This has helped bring better and more beautiful architectural solutions where it is needed—as we say, making the places where we work better than those we have found there.”

A Pioneering Legacy

At the same time, the triumvirate of Bafitis, Aronov and Brito jointly announced Carmi Bee’s transition to principal emeritus, noting that the widely respected architect, still active and designing, started with the firm in 1965 as a student intern.

“We have been inspired to bring design innovation and an unparalleled depth of knowledge to our clients in education, housing development, civic leadership and more, and this is the legacy that Carmi Bee helped build, and now entrusts to us,” says Alex Brito, who heads RKTB’s housing studio. “We look forward to meeting that challenge, and to carrying that legacy forward as we grow beyond the New York metro region.”

According to RKTB, in the 1970s Carmi Bee collaborated with firm co-founder Bernard Rothzeid on the design of a pioneering transformation of a Manhattan office and light-industrial building into an iconic multifamily residence, Turtle Bay Towers. With its attractive apartments enclosed by glass-walled terraces, the project heralded a boom in adaptive reuse throughout the region, with lessons informing office-to-residential conversions worldwide to this day. Bee rose to become a partner with the firm in 1981, and later he was enlisted by the National Endowment for the Arts to study the emergence of artist live-work spaces in converted structures.

In the following years, RKTB would become synonymous in professional circles with both multifamily design and historic adaptive reuse. Led by Bee, the firm won projects including 455 Central Park West and West Coast in Manhattan, as well as Brooklyn’s Eagle Warehouse. Over the years, the firm also designed new buildings such as the Memphis Downtown apartments in New York City’s Greenwich Village and the iconic South Orange Performing Arts Center in New Jersey. Most recently, Carmi Bee led RKTB’s collaboration with friend and colleague Lance Jay Brown FAIA to design a memorable new synagogue. On his own, Bee designed the celebrated expansion of an architecturally significant house in Truro, Massachusetts originally designed by revered Cape Cod modernist Charles Zehnder.

With multifamily residential work as one of RKTB’s primary focus areas, Bee and his protégés Bafitis, and Brito led efforts to expand the firm’s range across the “continuum of housing”—from affordable and supportive residences to market-rate and luxury properties. RKTB has also built a strong portfolio in directing upgrades and renovations to public apartment buildings and shelters for unhoused people. With his RKTB colleagues, Bee also conceived of the award-winning Affordable Infill Prototype—a healthy, sustainable and neighborhood-friendly affordable housing solution ideal for vacant city lots in medium-density neighborhoods—and collaborated on its development and implementation. A national success story, the prototype resulted in hundreds of new housing units.