Deborah Berke, founder of Deborah Berke Partners in New York and architecture faculty member at Yale, has been named Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, to succeed current Dean Robert A.M. Stern effective July 1, 2016. She has taught at Yale for nearly thirty years, and began her now 60-person practice in 1982.
Berke's academic approach to architecture is enthusiastically interdisciplinary, encouraging students to “understand they are part of a larger cultural conversation.” She plans to bring this collaborative focus to the deanship to develop stronger partnerships between the School of Architecture and other university disciplines. She will also be the first woman to serve as the school's Dean.
In her practice, Berke is known for a diversity of projects, ranging from preservation and adaptation of historic buildings, to large-scale urban landscape work, residential and commercial developments, cultural institutions, and recently, the corporate headquarters of Cummins in downtown Indianapolis.
She has won multiple awards, including the Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Prize, and received an honorary doctorate in fine arts from The Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned both her BA and BArch. She holds a masters of urban planning from the City University of New York, and also studied at the Architectural Association in London. She has also served as faculty at the University of Maryland, University of Miami, RISD, and the University of California-Berkeley.
19 Comments
One of the best architects in the game. A good representative of the plain but warm modernism that doesn't get press coverage.
There goes any progress Stern made opening Yale up. Warm modernism...I'm guessing that's an acknowledgement that modernism tends to be cold? I guess that's progress!
Yay so excited about this! Deborah is great, I've loved her work for a long time but just coincidentally saw her speak about it again on Wednesday. So inspiring, so simply elegant, and she is truly an architect not just a personality: she speaks through her work, not her Twitter feed.
God Speed Deborah
I see a connection between Berke and Stern -- both have a keen sense of sense of history away from the trendy avant-garde-ism. I just hope the navel gazing Twitterati doesn't reduce her to a statistic in their mandatory think-piece.
All you critical people are just women-haters. Typical good old boys club.
Have had the chance to hear Deborah speak on two occasions and think that she is an incredible talented designer and a good fit for Yale.
Great news!!
Deborah has nice work, and I agree with Donna that she is an extremely eloquent speaker. But I'm not sure if that alone makes someone Dean material. Her academic resume seems thin (or non-existing.) Stern was an accomplished historian with his volumes on modern classicism and the history of NYC architecture. What about Deborah? What are her research pursuits besides making beautiful buildings? What is her pedagogical idea for Yale? I feel like there's a whole other side to what makes a Dean a Dean and that story seems missing at the moment.
hotelsphinx, assuming your statements are correct, I completely disagree. For architecture, especially school, an architect who actually practiced, moreover an architect who practiced non press hyped material, is far more needed than anyone with academic portfolio or accolades.........the disconnect between practice and academia is massive......her work includes preservation and adaptation of historic buildings, this indicates a whole section of practice that is glossed over and often ends up in other deparments in academia,but should be part of the architect's education.
Her work is also strictly modernist with no trace of ornament or history. At least Stern recognized the broad tastes of a public we are supposed to design for.
taste? taste? taste? 6 figure debt and licensure so we can talk about taste. bo.
or·na·ment
noun
ˈôrnəmənt/
1.
a thing used to make something look more attractive but usually having no practical purpose, especially a small object such as a figurine.
synonyms:knickknack, trinket, bauble, bibelot, gewgaw, gimcrack, furbelow;
trinketecture
Olaf - "assuming your statements are correct" - Huh? It's my opinion. No more "correct" than yours is.
I just strongly feel that a good practitioner does not necessarily make a good Dean. A Dean needs to set an academic vision for a school (in addition to managing curriculum and faculty, fundraising, etc), and it's impossible right now to know what hers is. I don't see eye-to-eye with Bob Stern on many things but at least he has a clear philosophical roadmap which informed his design practice and his research / writing. This is not the same thing as "press hyped material" at all - it's having a set of ideas of the direction architecture is moving and how that will inform your leadership of a school.
Also, it's nice that Deborah has experience in historic preservation, but look up Bob Stern's work - a Dean knowing adaptive reuse is not going to be anything new at Yale.
I'm sure she can come up with a vision after teaching at Yale for 30 years. Clown comment bro.
Yale knocks it out of the ballpark here. Perhaps the only serious arch program of the Ivies.
Um...I'm not a "bro," idiot, but your assumption that I am actually makes me think that perhaps Deborah's appointment is a great thing after all.
the academic vision should be professional. Nate you got it.
This seems like such a great choice for Yale. It is certainly a more grown up choice than the director choice SCI-Arc recently made. Deborah Berke makes real buildings, and good ones too, and real buildings that exist in the world are better than fancy renderings and flowery speak any day.
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