Deborah Berke

Recorded on September 10, 2024. Read a transcript of the episode below.

Deborah Berke founded Deborah Berke Partners in 1982 then formed a partnership with Maitland Jones and Marc Leff in 2002 which expanded in 2019 to become the creative collective TenBerke. Across the life of these offices, over 40 years of practice, Berke has produced important ground-up buildings as well as many transformations of existing ones. TenBerke’s recent portfolio includes work for many academic institutions, including residential colleges for Princeton, a meeting house at the University of Pennsylvania, the Women’s Building in New York a few years ago, along with a large portfolio of private homes, and residential and commercial buildings. All of these projects strive to constitute something Berke has termed an architecture of the greater good: architecture that is specific to its context; programmatically and functionally complex; and materially rich and geometrically effortless. In 2016, Berke became Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where she has been a professor since 1987. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the Pritzker Prize jury. Over the last two decades, she has served on boards of various important art and architectural institutions, especially in New York City. Berke received the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion in 2022, and that same year, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:19
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from. And yet, the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. My guest in this episode is Deborah Berke. Welcome Deborah.

Deborah Berke  01:24
Pleasure to be here.

Miljački 01:27
Deborah Berke founded the Deborah Berke partners in 1982 then formed a partnership with Maitland Jones and Marc Leff in 2002 which has expanded in 2019 to form the Creative Collective TenBurke. Across the life of these offices, over 40 years of practicing, Berke has produced important ground-up buildings as well as many transformations of existing ones. Recently TenBerke’s portfolio includes work for many academic institutions, including residential colleges for Princeton, a meeting house at the University of Pennsylvania, the Women’s Building in New York a few years ago, and a large portfolio of private homes, residential and commercial buildings, all of which strive to constitute something that the Berke has termed an architecture of the greater good, architecture that is specific to its context, that Is programmatically and functionally complex, materially rich and geometrically effortless. In 2016 Deborah Berke became Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where she has been a professor since 1987. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a member of the Pritzker Prize jury. Over the last two decades, she has served on boards of various important art and architectural institutions, especially in New York City. Berke received the AIAS Topaz award for her, quote, nimble harmonization of education and practice in 2022, and that same year, she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The current and very recent work of the practice includes a science and engineering hub at Yale University, housing and wellness center at the University of Washington, and many other projects. And as always, while we’re hopefully going to get to the work that is on the boards at the office, we will start with what is not on them. So Deborah, as you know, I have been opening these conversations with a question about the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, or if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening? And on what grounds?

Berke 03:41
I think this is a really great question, and I loved how you phrased your introduction, that this, these are the things in practice that go undocumented. There’s no record of these. But I think I’d like to start my answer to your question with talking about, actually, two projects that we walked away from after we said yes, because I think that’s a way, it’s not so much, Thank you, but I’d prefer not to, we’d prefer not to, but more, oh, yikes! We said we would prefer to, but now that we’ve gotten to know you, we have radically changed our minds. And I guess that comes from what I’ll call values alignment. So, in both of the instances, and I’m not going to name any names, that might disappoint you Ana, but certainly not going to do it.

Miljački 04:34
I’ll take it.  

Berke 04:36
These were not quick decisions, but in my practice, we have twice walked away from projects we had said yes to, had signed contracts on, had started working on, where the clients were acting abusively, would be a word. Rudely, for sure, to staff and colleagues and consultants. You know, where behavior in the conference room or around the table where the drawings and materials were spread out, was essentially unacceptable, that the client was in the room with the arrogance that they felt money granted them, as opposed to the sort of grace that privilege should give people to be generous. And it was not only insufferable for leadership, but unfair to staff and team members. So I guess I would say we have tried over the many years, and certainly for me now the many, many, many years, as you alluded to, that I have been practicing, to build a respectful and humane culture among ourselves, and we hold our clients to the same standard. I don’t think it’s a whole lot to ask, I guess, of people.

Miljački 05:53
So what kind of deliberation is that? What are you measuring when you’re thinking of…

Berke 05:59
Well, I said, you know, is there that moment when you say, they’re going to pay us X and we’re going to walk away from the 99% of X we haven’t gotten yet, because it’s unacceptable behavior in a room. That gets mentioned, but it’s not the rule, and it’s not the guiding light, because I think when the air is poisoned, it’s very hard to ventilate the room. So the discussion is a deliberation among firm leadership in the two instances I’m thinking about to collectively get to the point, among leadership, not the team, people who are impacted so much, to say we don’t want this poison in our air. It debases who we are.

Miljački 06:57
I might keep coming back to some aspects of that, but you have done a lot of work. It is organized on the firm’s website in terms of client typologies, commercial, residential and institutional. But it, of course, involves also different kinds of architectural typologies and expertise. And we are always interested in, well, the relationship of that and the kind of mechanics of acquiring work, but also the criteria by which you engage projects, and conversely, criteria by which you do not engage projects, and how these might have changed with the growth and transformation of the office.

Berke 07:36
Really good question. I would say, when I was a very young architect with a very small practice, and most, not all, but most of the work was residential. I was doing small commercial things like a tiny little store in Seaside Florida, or the addition to a bar in Amagansett that belonged to a friend of mine. So the work was relatively diverse. The scale of the projects was small and for the most part, as is true for many young practices, I believe, I knew my clients. You know, the guy started a bar. He knew one architect. It was me, because we had grown up together, so he called me. But the fact that we had ties that predated and preceded him being a grown-up restaurant bar owner, and me being a grown-up architect, sort of allowed a personal knowledge. And I think it’s only as you move on in your career, when clients come to you, potential clients come to you and you don’t know them, and certainly in a pre-Google world when you couldn’t look them up to see, you know, their arrest record, or whatever it might be. You had to rely on a kind of gut sense of, does this person that I’m about to engage with over many years through a design and construction process, have an ethical core that I share? Doesn’t have to be identical, but that they have an ethical core. And I think by where I am personally and we are as TenBerke now as a practice, many of our clients, particularly our institutional clients, are mission driven, positive mission. Not make money mission, but educate, research, share, expand knowledge, protect knowledge, disseminate knowledge. Mission driven organizations, primarily universities, but not only. Foundations, museums, whatever. You can go in relatively confident in your first meeting that you’re going to share an ethical approach to life’s work.

Miljački 09:59
That’s great. I listened to your, in preparation, I listened to your lecture at Yale in 2020 which is the moment when the pandemic had arrived to all of our campuses. And in this lecture, you updated your position on the everyday architecture in ways that expanded that term and maybe replaced it with this idea of architecture for the greater good, which continues to have some qualities that are directed at the everyday. But you said architecture of the greater good is more than great architecture. And I’m interested in how this notion or this aspiration affects how you think about commissions, and also if you’re finding that you’re able to transmit these aspirations to relevant clients and agents.

Berke 10:46
Thank you for listening to that lecture. It was an incredibly emotional lecture for me to give after a lot of self-exam, critical self-examination, and it came after two things, not only had the end of the spring semester in universities across the United States been very difficult, because everybody had been closed down because the pandemic, and nobody knew what the fall was going to bring. And in fact, we kicked off the semester by not being present in school, right? But it was the summer of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and real, for anybody who cared or lives in the world in a morally based way, true examination about who we were as people, who we are as a country, who we are as a world, right? How do we treat people who are sick? How do we treat people who look differently than we do? So, when I went back and looked at what had been kind of a mission statement for me all those years ago, when I co-edited the book with Stephen Harris, Architecture of the Everyday, I was staking out pretty, what I thought was pretty strident ground about non-monumental architecture, non capital A architecture, architecture, a built environment that was for everybody. But I was younger, the world was a different place. I was indeed more more naive, and in my own examination then, I left a lot of people and a lot of issues out, and what I have come to both through practicing architecture and through being an educator and now a leader in education, I guess as a dean, was we fail as architects if we don’t include everybody, because there is not, there are certainly living things on the Planet not impacted by the built environment, but almost all humans are impacted by the built environment, and we, they need to know that it is not something that is done to them, but it is something done for them, and that’s how we have to conduct ourselves as architects.

Miljački 13:00
I thought that this next question would come somehow, obviously, from the previous one, in part because I was wondering if you’re able to actually transmit these values to your clients. And I thought, I imagined that university might be an easier client in that sense, than some others. Plus, it’s the one of the sort of largest, let’s say, bodies of work in the portfolio that I could sort of identify, is at different universities or different higher ed, kind of, in different higher ed context. So I was going to ask you, and I’m going to ask you, how is University as a client and university campus as a context in which to build?

Berke 13:45
I would say for the most part, universities are great clients because they are, in fact, mission driven to educate and to do research, right? So they’re great clients, and on a much more practical level, they’re honestly great clients, because they work nine to five, Monday to Friday. They respect you as a human being and let you have your weekend to be with your family or to do a little bit of travel and relaxation and in building, designing a building for a university client, you work with the owner, that’s the university, right, the holder of the endowment, the Board of Trustees, but you work with the user. So you’re in a room with really smart people committed to what they do, whether they’re chemists or social scientists or English professors or whatever it might be that they do, they’re profoundly committed to that, and they know about their thing, and they also respect the fact that you know about your thing, right? So there is that sort of across the table, they understand discipline, area of expertise, rigor, accumulated knowledge. So universities, and particularly the teaching and research staff members of a university are fantastic clients. I mean, they’re fun people to talk to, and you learn something. 

Miljački 15:20
Yeah, I really appreciated in that same lecture, which I understood as very decanal, is that how you say that?

Berke 15:32
Decanal, yeah.

Miljački 15:34
How complex and intertwined a picture of architecture you were able to weave: politics, justice, climate crisis, memory, local knowledges, material, supply chains and buildings, as well as other modes of intervening in the built environment and discourse about it. But so I’m wondering, can you help us understand how these different concerns inform your collaborations with clients first, maybe, but also how you navigate, or do you have of prioritizing among these concerns as you produce buildings, and then also as you steward Yale School of Architecture? I realize these are different tasks, but they both…

Berke 16:16
You rolled a lot into one question. I’m not sure I can answer all those things in a succinct answer.

Miljački 16:22
How do you prioritize among these many concerns that are all alive in architecture?

Berke 16:29
They’re all alive in architecture, and they’re all competing to be priority number one, right? And if you pay more attention to X, are you therefore paying less attention to Y? And no building can do all those things. So I think some of that, it may even get back to the original question around which this whole podcast interview thing is based, is there will inevitably be a particular part of the program or mission of the user that will prioritize and, a component of that list. Is it more the environment? Is it more engaging with the community? Is it, so you won’t ignore elements B, C and D, but the user and the program are perhaps more focused on one so, for instance, I don’t think you could do a science building at a university and be flippant and cavalier about the climate crisis, because you are making a building for a bunch of scientists, and they were the first to draw our attention to the climate crisis. They continue to shout loud and clear about what we need to do. That has to be something you would forefront in a science building. But if you were doing a dormitory residential college on a university campus, you might say, look, sustainability matters. We need to make the students who sleep, live here and sleep here, aware and attuned to the climate crisis. But we also need to, particularly in this age of social media post COVID lifestyles, make it possible for them to build community and to connect to the community outside the university’s walls. So in that, in this instance, that’s going to be the top thing on our list, and then the next things will follow. So I don’t think you leave anything out, but you might orient your list with a with a different thing at the top. And I think that’s inevitable, and where I was going to go, because I’m surprised you haven’t asked this yet, is that in our, in the TenBerke portfolio, you see some, if I do say so myself, very beautiful houses for people who have the resources to build houses for themselves, and those are fortunate people. So to my story at the very beginning of this, who do we walk away from, people who think that that privilege entitles arrogance, as opposed to grace and gratitude, is somebody we say no to, and we expect of our private, high-end residential clients a commitment to truly investing in a sustainable approach to the building. Like, we have to get beyond what a basic building would do, because they have the ability to be able to do that, to a responsibility to context. That doesn’t mean they have to be contextual. We’re not building in, you know, historic Williamsburg, making it look like that, but to respect the place in which it is, both in terms of material and composition, say, and to approach how you engage with the people who build and maintain this house, a respect for their skills and knowledge at the top of the list. And if a residential client is not there or willing to go there, or willing to trust us that we’re going to bring them there, then we don’t want to work with them. And you know, designing a house is really fun, let’s be honest, right? It’s really fun, and you get to do sort of deep dives into details that you wouldn’t do in an institution, wouldn’t get the chance to do in an institutional building. But I think without the owner’s commitment to grace and generosity on this planet, it’s of zero interest.

Miljački 20:56
In this new book on TenBerke’s work, Transform, Thomas de Monchaux describes talking to you about beginnings, and he suggests that your architectural work starts in the middle as a kind of continuation, confirmation or modification of conditions that define a particular place in a particular moment, and then, somehow, between different media that I ingested for our conversation, there’s much talk about making, including your essay where you talk about your mom making in the same book, and then there’s some answers on the nature of your own early RISD education. And I’m wondering how making and maybe measuring of a given situation are related for you, but also, what are the key modes of making in the office?

Berke 21:48
Wow, you are particularly adept at weaving lots of questions into one question.

Miljački 21:54
You can start wherever, whatever part of this seems, you know, speaks to you.

Berke 22:02
So I would say in the office, we make in lots of different ways. I mean, people are, of course, drawing on computers and producing documents that way. But we make models. We have tons and tons and tons of material samples so making, in that instance, might be nothing more than piling a bunch of stuff together on a table and getting a sense of it coming together. And in the making of documents is an awareness that those documents aren’t a final product at all but are actually a series of instructions for how someone else will make something. Not unlike being a playwright, you know, where you’re composing something that somebody else will put together with their skill sets. So that’s how we make here in the office, I’m sitting in the office talking to you. I would say when I went to RISD a million years ago, and it was, I loved my time there, and I loved that institution, and it was very much a place of making, right? You could get your hands dirty, you could cut your finger off, but, I mean, you could blow glass, work with clay, make a film, sew a dress, whatever you made. But I arrived at that place from a house, a modest house in Queens, where I grew up, where, as the essay in transform talks about, my mom was a real maker. My mother could draw anything and make anything. And when I was growing up, she was a professor at FIT. She had trained as a fashion designer and ended up being an educator. And there, most nights in the house I grew up in, we didn’t have dinner at the dining table because there were bolts of fabric stretched across the dining table, and my mother was cutting out whatever next garment she was going to be making. And when she wasn’t making clothes, she was building extra shelves. And she would take, this is no exaggeration, she would save the cardboard tubes from the inside of rolls of paper towels, and she would cut half circles out of the middle of each and make trusses out of them that would hold shelves up that were made out of cardboard that she had cut from boxes. So two things. One, she wasted nothing. But two, she was always making things. So when I got to RISD, it wasn’t just that I got to take all these incredible classes with these creators who were makers, but that I kind of arrived with a large bag with scissors and knives and pens and clay and erasers and glue and tape and because that’s how I was raised, that you go through life, you know, with the stuff with you that allows you to make things.

Miljački 25:00
Do you agree with Thomas’ description of this starting not from a clean slate, but somehow in the middle of a given situation, and then how do you get to know that situation?

Berke 25:19
I guess I agree, because I see it as a as a way of saying, nothing occurs raw, from whole cloth right away, right? That you are always in the context of something, the time in which you live, the place in which you’re based, the person with whom you’re collaborating or creating for. So there is always the middle of something. I mean, I hope it isn’t middle of the road, but I do think it is the middle of existing at any given moment.

Miljački 26:05
Which leads us to your own essay Against Preservation in the same book Transform, where you advocate for transformative change or for working with existing or creative reuse, or works that are the right combination of reverent and irreverent. And I’m wondering if you can give us an example of the kind of effort that’s necessary to or efforts that are necessary for this way of producing?

Berke 26:33
So when we save old buildings in this country, and I would say, when we save old buildings, I’ll say in the wealthy west right? Where we have that privilege of being able to save old buildings, we often do so with a reverence that I don’t think every old building deserves. There are masterpieces of old buildings that are either masterpieces because they’re extraordinary, a glorious cathedral, or, you know, a Pantheon, or Parthenon or so. So you preserve those absolutely intact, and you repair them as though damage never happened, and you treat them like a crown jewel, I guess, for an easy metaphor, but 99.9% of buildings are not that. And I think we can be much more experimental, expansive, extravagant, not in an expensive way, but in a scale of gesture way, of what we let ourselves do with existing buildings in order to allow them to grow with us as humans and to understand that they’ll be around for The next generation, and they should have the opportunity to grow it again, or expand not just its programmatic use. Like, this used to be a school, and now it’s housing, but the windows used to be this big, and now they’re bigger, or now they’re smaller. A lot of the work we did a number of years ago, particularly for the 21C museum hotels, was got historic tax credits, and that made those projects possible, and that was wonderful. And I really believe in what those hotels did to help revitalize downtowns and secondary, tertiary cities. But we would often come up against the SHPO people, the State Historic Preservation people, who did have very good intentions, but would lose sight of the big picture and get caught up on saving this one tile floor or this one piece of molding, and it was so short sighted in terms of transformative potential. I guess my Against Preservation essay in the book transformation is really about that, let’s allow ourselves to be a little bit more wild, a little bit more experimental, and test the limits of what an existing building will allow us to do, and not have that destruction be the only alternative or immaculate preservation, but all the places in between those two things that allow that building and our lives to go forward.

Miljački 29:50
I love the way that you talk about sort of radical, maybe, collaboration, or the way that you’ve described collaborating across time with architects like Louis Kahn, Saarinen, the other Kahn, Albert, and them as, in a way, engaged collaborators. You’ve also spoken about time as a collaborator. And can we talk about these collaborations, actually?

Berke 30:20
So the collaborations with long, dead, highly regarded architects or old buildings that have a rigor, even if you have no idea who designed them, I… This is more wubu wubu than I typically am, but I think you get inside those buildings, or outside those buildings, and you can hear and feel and experience what they were thinking. And so you know what parts need to remain for their narrative to be intact, and what parts can be removed for a new narrative to be added to it. And while the preservation people are perhaps more reverential about a Louis Kahn building or any other name brand building, I think the reverence balanced with a very healthy dose of irreverence is true in all buildings that have any rigor and you know it when you encounter it. And you know if you took that thing away, the essence of the building would be gone, like you can’t give a building a lobotomy. 

Miljački 31:42
You just set up my next question. I get a sense that a combination of reverent and irreverent is a larger topic or the mood of all of your work. And if you agree, would you say that this is a personal disposition, something that you learned, that the office embraces, something that can be taught? How do we get that combination and that reading? Where does it emerge?

Berke 32:11
I would like to imagine that all of us here at TenBerke have it. We might not have it identically. We’re not clones, right? But we do approach the making of architecture and the remaking of old buildings in very similar ways. That’s why we work together so well and collaborate internally so well as you described it. You know, we are a collective, a collaborative. We work together in that way. So we have that in our core, a word that came up earlier in this conversation. How do you teach it? I think what you have to teach students of architecture and maybe everybody is how to really look at a building, both inside and outside, to understand its materials, how it went together, its dimensions. I mean, I’m enormously dependent on the camera that’s inside my phone. And if you had told me 25 years ago that I’d have a phone in my pocket that had a camera, I’d say, Who the hell needs that? But the truth of the matter is, taking a picture of something is not the same as somehow ingesting it with your eyes and with all your senses, even your nose. You know, like a building smells a certain way. And so you might want to document a few things with your camera in your phone, take a few notes in your little oral memo book. But you want to put all that stuff away and just absorb it. And if you do that enough, I think when you start to work on an old building yourself, you will know what parts to respect and when to have a big old party.

Miljački 34:09
Here’s a slightly different question. Did you ever regret not taking a commission or vice versa?

Berke 34:27
No, never. Are there projects we’ve gone after that we haven’t gotten, of course. Do I wish there were, that we had gotten many of those? Absolutely, although who knows what the result would have been. But in my memory, which I think is candid and not absurdly selective, I can think of nothing that we said no to that we later regretted

Miljački 34:59
So we counted about 58 people on TenBerke’s website. 

Berke 35:05
Yeah, that’s about right. 

Miljački 35:06
And I didn’t say that TenBerke you described somewhere else on that website as speaking about, or the Ten part speaking about a kind of multiplicity, or multiples or plurality of the office. But the question really is, do you have any procedures in place by which you both expose your office to the realities of running the office, and do you invite your team to think collectively about the commissions you will and will not take?

Berke 35:37
Wow, good question. We work together as a model. We’re not a lone wolf office. You know, the lone wolf model being where a job comes in and other than the owner or lead partner, only one person works on it. We’re much, we’re very much a team-based structure, which we find suits us. It’s the personality of the people here, and that the exchange of ideas is multi directional, not from top down by any means. Do we include people in a knowledge, in the knowledge of how the business of architecture works? Yes, to the extent that it doesn’t compromise or violate any agreements we have with our clients. But, one of the difficulties of being an architect, and it was Robert Gutman, the sociologist from Princeton, sadly, long dead, but really a brilliant man and a wonderful mentor. He studied how architects work, and he said to me a long time ago, there are three things about being an architect. You have to get the work, you have to do the work, and you have to run the business. And I’m saying this as a dean, but I think anybody who’s been to architecture school knows this. We tend to prioritize and glorify not do the work, but a very, very specific part of do the work, which is kind of to have the best review in your final jury, right? And do the work means a whole lot more than that. It means working collaboratively with the people on the design team, collaboratively with the consultants you bring in beyond your design team, landscape architects, graphic designers, whomever, engineers, whoever it might be, your client, and getting the documents done. And then there is the get the work, which is often being charming, well prepared, perhaps connected, but other things as well, like qualified, and then run the business. And where your question was going was run the business, but those three things really do all weave together. They are definitely a three-legged stool, and if each leg isn’t strong and of comparable length and strength, the stool won’t stand up. So I like to imagine that we, that everybody here understands that balance and complexity of practice

Miljački 38:31
You have on your website a set of beliefs. And I was wondering how you arrived at those and how you uphold them in the office. Is this a kind of conversation that’s part of the daily life of the office? So does it come up with different commissions in a particular way?

Berke 38:57
I would say it’s not. This isn’t a religion, and we don’t have a creed that we recite in the morning, but we do function as a community. We have lots of community events, whether they’re field trips or happy hours or guest speakers or art shows or birthday parties or days when people can bring their kids to work. You know, it’s all that sort of community beyond just doing the work, getting the work, and running the business, but all the other stuff about life. But I’d say it’s not just talk, the talk or print the words, it’s walk the walk, more. That you have to live it. Not just say it.

Miljački 39:47
Were you prompted by anything specific to articulate these?

Berke 39:56
When we became TenBerke we decided it was time to articulate them as a reflection of the collective approach, which was all those decades ago. When it was Deborah Berke, it was because it was me alone in my studio apartment with a Mayline rule and a fold out sofa. And as you grow, you maybe think you’re bringing all your values along with you, but you’re not aware enough or smart enough to know when and how to be explicit about them. But I think forming TenBerke and thinking about what the future means, meant it was time to be quite explicit.

Miljački 40:55
Can we talk about the conditions in which you or TenBerke does its best work, or would prefer to do its work?

Berke 41:03
I think this goes back to what we were talking about a little earlier, which is we do our best work for clients who are mission driven and about whose project you could write in a sentence or two or three, a value proposition like, Why? Why are we doing this? Not why, as in, it will make us money, or we’re going to make a beautiful building, but why does making this building matter? What is the value of this undertaking? Buildings take time, cost money, they last a long time. Ideally, they are really serious commitments. So what’s the value of this commitment, and when there is a value that can be stated and acted on and returned to, to test decisions against, then we do our best work.

Miljački 42:13
Are there a couple of buildings that when you’re saying these lines you’re thinking of?

Berke 42:20
I do think that that was very much the case at Princeton for the residential colleges, where the university had a clear sense of why they wanted to slowly expand the size of their undergraduate student body, and how the shaping of those buildings could lead to a positive reinforcement of the ideas of community on a college campus, particularly at a competitive institution. So that was very much true, and the values that Princeton had and the value which they could state as a mission, as an institution of learning and research, and that we could embody through making buildings really meshed perfectly together, and it took a long time to design and then build those buildings. So we would both they, as the client and we as the architects, would go back again and again to, in a positive way, to make sure that what we were doing was consistent with the values and goals that were initially stated for the project. So yeah, Princeton comes to mind right away as an example of that, but another example, kind of at the opposite scale certainly is NXTHVN, which is an artist residency program in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven. So decidedly not part of Yale, although one of its founders, the great artist, Titus Kaphar, was educated, got an MFA from Yale. But the idea that the opportunity for an artist to have the time and space and support to do their work in an environment with other artists with whom ideas could be exchanged, and the nature of the art business could be understood… I think Titus’ mission for NXTHVN, Titus and Jonathan’s mission for NXTHVN was very much values-based that could then be manifest in both reusing old buildings and having spaces in those buildings reinforce and balance what it’s like to work, when you work alone as a painter or a sculptor or a curator with spaces where you do things together, whether it’s to offer COVID shots to the community, or to exhibit work, or to critique each other’s work, or to share experiences of what it’s like to get your work into a gallery or to preserve your work, or to educate the high school students who work there about the possibility of careers in the world of art. That balance of the individual working space and the communal spaces, that was, how do I say, that embodied Titus’ mission for what NXTHVN could do.

Miljački 45:39
Great. Maybe this is an extension of the previous question, are all commissions equally exciting, or are there ideal commissions?

Berke 45:55
You know, the honest answer as an architect is, when the projects are done, they’re like children. I’m the mother of an only child, and maybe that makes my life as a mother much easier. But I’ve heard friends say who have more than one child, that you love them all equally, even if one is good in math and the other is a brilliant athlete, or one gets along with their father and the other doesn’t or whatever it might be. So projects that are complete are like children. You love them equally, but you might want to adjust their tie or comb their hair, but you’re always most excited about the next project, because it’s a chance to make.

Miljački 46:42
Thank you. The next and, and last question is a slightly different one. It’s to Dean Berke. You’ve traversed some important academic contexts as a student and as a teacher and and I thought we should end with this question to Dean Berke: what do you think we must cultivate at architecture schools today, and is there any constraint in contemporary architectural education in the US that you think is hindering us in adapting to meet the moment?

Berke 47:13
Good questions. Yes, I’m going to answer the second question first, which is, the single most significant constraint is the cost of education. And that’s true at the most expensive schools, like the ones that you’re sitting at, and I work at and state schools, and I understand Cooper Union is going back to being free again, but the overall cost of education, the paying of tuition, what it costs to buy books, buy materials, print drawings and not work for a couple years while you’re in school, often prevents those who might bring the most to the future of architecture from even considering studying architecture. So first and foremost, architectural education has to be more affordable, and that has to be conveyed in a way that anyone who believes that they want to do it should have the opportunity to try. And I would expand that to say in the United States, and again, in the West and the wealthy West, we should expand how we teach visual arts and artisanal undertakings and an awareness of the built environment all the way down to kindergarten, so that you are aware from the get go that the world around you is something you contribute to, you can contribute to, and not just be the victim of. So that, broadly speaking, as an educator, is, is what I would do. Now, you had a first question too, which I blew off, and now I don’t think remember it!

Miljački 49:03
What we must cultivate at architecture schools today.

Berke 49:07
Generosity of spirit and respect across disciplinary borders that we can learn from others, both within our limited world and then beyond it. So people from public health or people from the social sciences or people from the visual arts and the performing arts, like we all make better work when we talk to each other, universities tend to be siloed environments. We talk about interdisciplinary, cross disciplinary, multi disciplinary stuff, but the structure of universities fights against that, so you have to overcome the structure in order to do that work, as opposed to the structure encouraging that work. Great.

Miljački 49:59
Great. Is there anything you would like to add and put on the record?

Berke 50:06
I don’t think so. I feel so profoundly fortunate to love what I do and genuinely love the people I do it with. I’m a lucky girl.

Miljački 50:19
Deborah, thank you very much for talking to me today and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To.

Berke 50:27
It was a great pleasure. Thank you.