Deborah Berke

Stacy Shoemaker Rauen: Hi, I’m here with Deborah Berke. Deborah, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Deborah Berke: My pleasure.

SSR: It’s so good to see you.

DB: Good to see you too.

SSR: We always start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

DB: I was born in New York City and grew up in Queens, a neighborhood called Douglaston, where my mother lived for 55 years. She just died this year, not to bring on a sad note, but really it was a piece of my life from the fifth grade for the next 55 years.

SSR: Yes, for sure. Did you always have a love of design or architecture growing up? Were you a creative kid?

DB: I was a creative kid from putting murals on the walls of my bedrooms, much to my parent’s dismay, to very much being encouraged to be creative. My mother was a fashion designer and actually a professor at FIT for many, many years. So creativity was part of the house I grew up in. The dining table would be covered with drawing paper or with fabric or we would be making sculptures out of tin cans and pieces of cardboard boxes and stuff like that, yes, so everything we did was always creative.

SSR: That’s amazing. How did you then fall in love with architecture or find your path to architecture?

DB: That’s a great question and it really does relate to where I grew up. This neighborhood called Douglaston in the northeast corner of Queens, that’s the furthest edge of New York City, is a neighborhood of single family houses that are built very close together, but the houses are all different. I noticed this a child. Then in my early teens, I would walk around the neighborhood with a good friend who was a couple years older and he had already decided he was going to be an architect and we would spend those summer nights, you probably remember the magical summer nights of being a teenager right? Not the miserable ones, but the magical ones. We would walk around and we would look at the houses and we would try to figure how they were laid out on the inside from what they looked like on the outside and what lights were on and what the shape of the rooms might be.

We would talk for hours and it was the most exhilarating evenings of my teenage years. I remember after one of those walks, going home, I was maybe 14 years old. My parents said, “How was your night?” I said, “My night was fantastic and I’m going to be an architect.”

SSR: What was their reaction?

DB: Their reaction was typical parental reaction, which is, “That’s wonderful. We’ll support you and you really better keep doing well in school.”

SSR: How did you choose where you wanted to go to school? After that epiphany, what were your next steps and where did you end up going to school?

DB: In that era of my life, I went to New York City Public School, then I went to an all girls boarding school in western Massachusetts for high school. Perhaps in response to what an all girls boarding school was like in that particular era, I decided that I was going to go to RISD, that I wanted to study architecture at an arts school where ideally the student body was more crazy and more creative than I was. Maybe I was a little crazy and a lot creative, but I wanted people who were even more so. So straight from high school, I went to RISD where they have a five-year bachelor of architecture program, which was what I wanted to do. I knew I was going to be an architect and I just wanted to start that education right away.

I loved my time at RISD. I remain a loyal supporter of that institution. I think one of its great strengths is that no matter what you’re going to study, whether you’re going to be a fashion designer or a filmmaker or a photographer, a glass blower, a sculptor, an architect, a landscape architect, they offer many, many, many courses of study in the fine arts and the applied arts and the design and architectural professions that, as freshmen, you all study together. You learn two dimensional design, three dimensional design, life drawing, nature drawing, all that stuff, but what you really learn is that you make friends. And over the course of your time there, your friend who’s a sculptor is going to criticize your design work and you, as an architect might criticize somebody else’s painting, and you talk across creative disciplines and I found that to be one of the most valuable things I learned there was cross disciplinary exchange of ideas and criticism.

SSR: That’s cool. So you get different perspectives throughout your entire education.

DB: Exactly. And with Brown right up the block and being able to take courses there, I mean, it was a really rich and wonderful environment and Providence, Rhode Island is a pretty cool city. So, that was also good.

SSR: Exactly. Can I ask about boarding school? Did it instill anything to you going from New York city public schools to that? I mean, that must have been a big shift in your life.

DB: Well, this was a long time ago, so the world was a different place. I mean, I suppose there were protests, then we were protesting the war in Vietnam. I would say, I met very different kinds of people from very different backgrounds from places other than New York City. So, that was very valuable. But again, perhaps because of that time and because of what I was interested in being more in the creative fields, I was rebelling against the limitations that the school set up for us like you have to wear a skirt and your skirt has to touch your knees and you have to wear a bra, you can only wear jeans on Saturdays if you’re cleaning up after the dance and stuff that sounds so ridiculous today. But it was very good stuff to push up against and try to define what you really did believe in. I will say that my two closest friends in the world are two of my friends from boarding school. So, we were rebelling together and that allied us as friends for 50 years.

SSR: Amazing. Okay. So after architecture school, what was your first job?

DB: I came back to New York and got a job in an architecture firm. Actually, my very first job to be honest, was in an engineering firm because I couldn’t find a job in an architecture firm. So, I got a job at an engineering firm and I worked as an in-house graphic designer. The week before I got the job, one of my RISD friends who was a graphic designer taught me not how to be a graphic designer in a week that is not possible and I don’t mean to disrespect any graphic designers, it is a noble profession. But how do you use the blue pen and the wax to glue things down? This is how long ago it was. We weren’t doing anything on computers, press type and Pantone and that kind of stuff. And I went in and I worked as a graphic designer until I could get a job in an architecture office.

I started hanging out at a place called the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, Peter Eisenman’s think tank, because graphic design and an engineering firm was not intellectually rewarding enough or creatively rewarding enough for me. So I wanted lectures and a more stimulating environment and ended up with an architect by the name of Larry Nikki, proposing to the Institute that they needed a program for high school students, that they offered programs for college students and for the general public, but not for high school students. And so they agreed and we started this educational program for high school students, and that’s really what got me into teaching about design and architecture. And I guess eventually got me to where I am today as a Dean at Yale, but that started way back then.

SSR: That’s great. What was that like? I mean, getting to work with him and work with all these students?

DB: It was exhausting, exhilarating, exciting, just like teaching remains, exhausting, exhilarating and exciting. And I was young, I was in my early 20s when I got out of architecture school. So, talking to high school students didn’t feel like that much of a stretch. It was more like, boy, nobody was talking to me about this stuff when I was in high school and I so wish somebody had been that I found it meaningful and fulfilling to try to do that for others not that much younger than myself.

SSR: Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. So, how long did you do that and where did you go from there?

DB: Did that for a few years and ended up actually leaving the engineering firm and working at the institute full time as an administrator running all of their educational programs. I somewhat hung out my own shingle as an architect and had a tiny little practice that was me and then me and somebody else. Went back to school at City College to study urban planning because I love cities and I felt that much of what gets built in cities is not determined by the architect but actually determined by codes, decisions, banks, neighborhoods, a lot of decisions being made by others and I wanted to understand how that worked. And then after I did that, I opened a practice. I went to teach at the University of Maryland and I opened a practice in Washington DC and started doing houses at Seaside in Florida. Yeah. Long time ago. Are we going to go over the place now?

SSR: No. I love it. Before we go into seaside, I really love what you said about urban planning that there’s so many hands making decisions before even an architect. What did you take away from that experience and how has that helped or shaped how you work moving forward?

DB: Oh boy, I would say what I took away from studying urban planning was not that I was going to be a planner. I don’t have nearly the right personality, but what I understood was how long and complex the process is before the architect even gets called. From mapping streets and meeting with communities to the role of banks, the role of legislators, the role of highway builders and federal funds and state funds and local funds and environmental concerns. I mean, the list is very, very, very long before there’s a piece of property controlled by one organization that can in turn say, and now we’re going to do a building.

Now, do I think this is right? No. I think the architecture be involved in the conversation much earlier. And what is happening nowadays I think all of those steps in the process have gotten a bit more porous in a good way that more people can chime in and that is making, when I say our cities, I’m thinking primarily of cities of the Western world, how decisions get made in other cities and other and other cultures is a little harder, certainly for me to talk about. I don’t have enough knowledge or experience so I don’t want to be misquoted or misunderstood in what I’m talking about, but what I really got from it now looking back many decades is learning to listen to lots of different voices coming from lots of different backgrounds as part of a necessary decision making process.

Do I wish there were ways to speed it up? Yup. Do I wish there were ways to make it more inclusive? Absolutely. But I think the lesson for everybody should be to listen and be prone to action after listening.

SSR: So going back to seaside, what was it like building that? I mean, that was a really cool calm. I don’t want to call it complex, but like area of houses.

DB: So Seaside is a planned community. The first built example of the new urbanism. I guess I consider it was a great experience for me because I was building freestanding houses on relatively affordable budgets, such that I could learn about construction. I would consider my relationship to the new urbanism, and I’ve said this many times before, to be that of the loyal opposition. I mean, I believe that houses on streets close together is a better way to make a community than condominiums going higgledy, piggledy around the edges of golf courses, pretending to be nature. But that said, most of the new urban ism has resulted in communities have a fake oldness and that I don’t like. And maybe that even gets all the way back to my childhood in this neighborhood where the houses were all different instead of abiding by a design code. So, I buy into a code about massing, I buy into the making of a street, I buy into density and landscape, lots of trees are a good thing, but not to a dictatorial approach to style.

SSR: No, that makes so much sense. So, what do you think was so successful about the way you approached or the finished product that is Seaside?

DB: Well, I think the work that I did in the early years of my career down at Seaside was pretty reductive. So some of the houses at seaside had more curly cues on them or more articulated massing. And I think mine are quite distilled. I mean, they’re pitched roof buildings, so this isn’t to pretend that they are flat roof modernism, but they are a distillation of a regional architecture as opposed to a Baroque version of a regional architecture.

SSR: Got it. And do you think this helped put you as an architect on the map, or how did you start to evolve your practice from there?

DB: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about it that way and I worked for KPF briefly. I worked at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies, as I said, as a teaching job that helps subsidize my practice. I then got a job teaching at the University of Maryland, where I was in a tenure track position and doing houses at Seaside. So, teaching and building were always two parts of my life, but you’re taking the approach to what I did at seaside and asking whether it led to, or it was already part of how I thought about the world aesthetically. I would say something about my background. I was raised a congregationalist, that’s not a religious person. I’m not observant anyway, but I was raised going to a congregational church, which is churches with no stained glass windows that are painted all white. They’re really severe and austere.

I think that had a lot to do with my childhood aesthetic that I have brought forward with me. So, I like things that are beautifully made, but not flamboyant. I like things that fit into their surroundings and I always have in a way that is not cookie cutter and not slavish, I use the expression that the buildings that we designed here in the office need to be of this time. So reflecting how we do things today, our social responsibilities, our environmental responsibilities, the way we live, the way we function, but of this place, wherever the building site might be and I am not a believer in what I call a spatula architecture that would be a building that you could slide a spatula under, lift it up, plop it down somewhere else, and nothing would change. I mean, I’d like to believe that the buildings that we design, you can’t even move them 20 feet before they wouldn’t feel right, they’re so tied in to where they are.

SSR: Yeah. I love that spatula.

DB: It’s a criticism.

SSR: Yes. Got it 100 percent. You’re teaching at Maryland, you’ve worked in Seaside, where do you go from there, or how did you start to grow your practice?

DB: I was recruited to apply for a position at Yale and got that job, and that allowed me to move back to New York to be closer to my family, which meant something. So, I came back to New York in the very late ’80s and opened up a practice here. I still was doing the occasional house in Seaside, teaching at Yale and doing projects in and around the New York area, loft renovations and apartments and small houses in that chapter of my career. Yeah.

SSR: What do you think was your big break, really set your career in the way that it’s going now or to get to where you are today?

DB: Am I allowed to say I’m still waiting for my big break?

SSR: Sure!

DB: No, I would say in terms of expanding the kinds of projects that we did from just residential, small scale residential, among the things that happened was the 21c Museum Hotels, which didn’t happen in the early ’80s, but happened in the early 2000s. That was a change and starting to do non-residential work that related to schools and to education and to organizations. That was a change because a lot of different program type, but different conversation to be had. And as I said, since I care about listening, talking to larger and more diverse groups of people was satisfying, not so much change as just expansion of what we were doing.

SSR: Got it. Let’s talk about 21c Museum Hotels for a minute. How did you meet the founders, Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown? How did you get introduced to them or pulled into their world and what they were about to create?

DB: This is a good story. I tell this story to students actually with some frequency because there are many lessons in it. So as I was saying, we started doing more non-residential work, smaller projects that related to the arts. And we were invited to interview for a museum for Kentucky crafts in downtown Louisville. It was an adaptive reuse project and went and interviewed and didn’t get the job. Okay. That happens. One thing as you get more breaks, you realize that you compete against more people and it’s harder to get work actually. Maybe two years later, the phone rings and it’s Steve Wilson and he says, “You don’t know me, but we met. I was on the conference phone in the middle of the table, not in the room, when you interviewed for the craft museum. I’m sorry, you didn’t get the job, but I’d like to talk to you about designing a hotel.”

I said, “Wow, that’s fantastic, but I’ve never designed a hotel.” And he said, “That’s okay. I’ve never owned one.” So, we started a conversation about not a hotel, like the Waldorf Astoria, or like the Marriott, or like the Red Roof Inn, but actually a hotel that would be a place for Steve and Laura Lee to show their art, not as a marketing strategy, but as a genuine part of who they are as people and what they wanted to bring to help revitalize downtown Louisville. Originally, there was just going to be one because that was where they were from. And they owned these old, near 19th century brick warehouses on Main Street and they wanted to put them to use. So, we tackled how to turn those buildings into a hotel that also had appropriate space to really show art, not just to decorate the hallways but to actually be galleries, real museum quality galleries that would be open 24/7, 365, like a hotel.

It was so successful that other towns, other cities came knocking and be like, we want one of these. So that’s how it started through three passionate people, or more than that, a passionate firm, and two passionate collectors and their team, none of whom had done this before, but who were hell bent on doing it and doing it right.

SSR: You’ll figure it out together.

DB: Yeah.

SSR: I mean, for those that don’t know, Steve and Laura Lee, how would you describe them? They’re some of my most favorite humans.

DB: They are extraordinary people. They are Kentucky natives, Steve from a farming family and Laura Lee from a prominent Louisville family, who are passionate about preserving rural landscape; revitalizing dense cities, not sprawl; who collect challenging political, sexually provocative art of the 21st century, hence the name 21c Museum Hotels; they are fun, they are passionate, and they are generous visionaries, extraordinary people.

SSR: Okay, so you decided to go move forward and partner together. How did you approach your first hotel? That wasn’t just a hotel, I mean, there’s so many other things you had to think about in terms of the building of the function of the meaning. How did you approach it?

DB: So the 21c Museum Hotels actually were the perfect coming together of many things that I’m passionate about, and it has led to many other projects. One of them, of course, is art and art that is accessible to everybody. The other is adaptive reuse. So with the exception of the one in Bentonville, all of the 21c Museum Hotels that we have worked on our adaptive reuse of old buildings, I think there are eight of them. But adaptive reuse is a form of sustainability. There’s a lot of embedded energy in an old building. There’s also the character of an old building. That means something to a community. And as we were talking about before, there is this idea that you can bring a 21st century or a use of this time to a thing of another time.

So with Steven, Laura Lee on the 21c it was, how do we show the art? How do we make the hotel hospitable? A place where people want to come? And how do we build on the bones of an old building but make something entirely new?

SSR: Yeah. Is there one hotel in this collection that you’re most proud of hotels?

DB: We’ve done some other hotels.

SSR: 21c exactly, is there one that I don’t know, not that you’re most proud of, but you found as the most challenging success that turned out to be the biggest success, or maybe you do have a favorite. I know it’s like picking a child, but.

DB: It is a little bit like picking a child. It’s hard. I don’t want to insult any city because I’ve enjoyed getting to know all the cities that we’ve done them in, but I will say this for many of them, like Louisville, which was warehouses or Lexington, Kentucky, which was a McKim Mead and like bank, or Durham, which was a Shreve, Lamb and Harmon bank. Oklahoma City was a Ford assembly plant by Albert Kahn. And instead of being tight where you had to figure out how you’re going to squeeze in all the rooms, it was vast, just this enormous building, literally big enough to drive model T’s around inside of it, because that’s what they did there.

Model T’s would arrive sort of flat pack would be the word we would use today and be assembled in this plant for regional distribution that was owned by the same family who had many generations in. And what to do with this enormous building to make it hospitable and still celebrate its extraordinary, immense octagonal columns with tulip shape tops and long hallways and big, big, big industrial windows. That was truly exhilarating to work on that building. Have you been there?

SSR: I haven’t been there, I’ve seen the photos.

DB: You got to go.

SSR: Yes. I will. What’s it like creating something that is welcoming and warm but also can be a showcase for contemporary art? I mean, sometimes a lot of people don’t put those two things together. But somehow these hotels, I’ve stayed in many of them, and they just have this amazing feeling when you walk in. They’re a hotel, but there’s so much more, and they’re so intriguing everywhere you go, there’s something new and the buildings are so special.

DB: I think you touched on some of it there by saying the buildings are so special. They’re unexpected and I think that intrigues people, it grabs their curiosity. It makes them want to explore. And the exploration isn’t nervous making it’s actually, you’re encouraged to do it. Some of the hospitality, we as designers, can’t remotely take credit for the people are nice. Your reception is warm, the food is good. But I think from a design standpoint, it’s that the buildings encourage you to be curious. And whether it’s curious about the art or curious about the space or curious about the transformation, I think that’s what makes you feel welcome and like, ooh, I want to poke around and look around the back of that to see, maybe I’ll understand what that wants.

SSR: Yeah. I think too, you and your team have edited yourself so well that you let the building speak and you let the art speak, which is hard and sometimes in design, but here less is definitely more.

DB: Yeah. Well, I think it’s knowing what to celebrate of what you find, like 12 different layers of paint that you get to see all of them as they’re coming off and what to hide some of the ugliest tile patterns you’ve ever seen. It’s like, nobody should see this, so we’re going to cover it.

SSR: Exactly. Find the gems and the…

DB: Exactly. Celebrate the gems and hide the egg.

SSR: Yeah, exactly. I mean, another really interesting building that you got to work with too, that I love is the Richardson Olmsted campus.

DB: It was a Kirkbride hospital and in the 1870s and ’80s, the United States built, I think, hundreds of these hospitals in some ways I’m no historian but post-Civil War, there was a fair amount of post-traumatic stress disorders what we would call it today, but communities and individuals ruined by the carnage of the war against one’s fellow Americans. So it was complicated time. So these Kirkbride was a psychiatrist or a priest, psychiatrist, psychiatrist, who came up with a floor plan for how people should be brought back to good mental health and various different architects were hired to essentially take the floor plan and turn it into a building.

And in Buffalo, New York, the state asylum was designed by HH Richardson. And it was and is an absolutely extraordinary building. Enormously long with wings going block after block after block and a center building, which is where there was chapel and food and the center of the organization. The building was abandoned by the state of New York, not as long ago as you might imagine when you see this thing, but late middle 20th century after additions and transformations were made to it that weren’t very good. A few of the furthest bays of the longest wing were torn off, and a new hospital was built, a psychiatric hospital, and then the building was left to ruin.

To what we were talking about much earlier in our conversation, members of the community fought for 20 years to save this architectural monument that also tells a lot of different pieces and parts of history that I was just describing briefly and without historical expertise to you and they succeeded and eventually New York state offered additional funding to give it a new use. So we only restored a part of it, the center building, and one wing to each side to be a conference center and hotel, and with SUNY campus University of Buffalo nearby there was a reason to have a conference center. There were plenty of guest speakers, visiting faculty and others coming.

Buffalo is a wonderful city with a lot of great architecture. So, it made sense, the program actually made sense. But when we first went into the building, you could feel the generations of not always happy history and lives that were there, but the majesty of the building. So you wanted to offer peace somehow but still celebrate the majesty of the Richardson building.

SSR: Were there any interesting finds when you started uncovering that?

DB: Very thick walls, very, very load bearing building, very thick walls, the rooms were teeny, what had been patient rooms. We had to break down the walls in between them, but we couldn’t take down too many walls because of the buildings structural simplicity. It just was load bearing and the hallways were enormously wide, much wider than the rooms. But that was part of cure the hallways face South, and they were single loaded. And the idea was that the sun would come in and you would sit in the hallways during the day and sleep in your hospital room at night. So, we kept the hallways. It’s the least efficient hotel plan you could ever imagine, but it’s important to tell the history of the building,

SSR: You work across so many different design disciplines. What attracts you, or what do you love about hotel design?

DB: This may go back to my childhood. Like the beginning of our conversation did my father for a while, ran the New York city hotel association. And even though I had a modest childhood, we stayed in a lot of hotels and I loved the excitement of staying in a hotel and seeing how the bedrooms were different in each one. How the lobby is different in each one, how the restaurant was decorated differently in each one. What was the lighting like? How many windows did your bedroom have? Did your bathroom have a window? Was the carpet fluffy or flat? I noticed everything about these hotels as a child than I didn’t do much with hotels.

But when we started with Steven, Laura Lee, when we did the work for the James, when we did hotel Henry up in Buffalo and we’re now doing a hotel on the University of Virginia campus. And we just did a guest house for the University of Pennsylvania. So that’s also an hour happy overlap of the relationship between higher education and hospitality. I feel and of course with the extraordinary creativity of my partners and design team here at the office, that there’s both a connection to my childhood and then a big look forward in the 21st century of how are we staying in these places today.

SSR: So many questions off of that. So was there one, a hotel that you remember the most staying in, in New York with your dad?

DB: The one that I remember the most clearly was not actually in New York, it was in old Atlantic City, not as old as Boardwalk Empire, I’m old but I’m not that old. But when the grand old hotels were still there and it was a place called Chalfonte-Haddon Hall and I just remember that and I don’t even know if this is accurate. It’s what I remember, whether it’s accurate or not is that in this enormous bathtub in this hotel room that my brother and I had to share, we were little, really little is that you could have either salt water or fresh water in your bathtub and I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.

SSR: It is cool, somebody has to bring that back.

DB: We should bring that back. Exactly.

SSR: And then talking about this new project where you’re melding your love of teaching with your love of hotels and architecture, what are you trying to create for this campus? How are you rethinking what it should be or just celebrating what the campus is?

DB: I think when we think about education, particularly college education, we tend, and I say, we very broadly think about students and faculty, but what university campuses really are, are multigenerational and multicultural. So, multigenerational in that you have elderly alumni population and you have not just the 18 year olds who are starting college, but their younger siblings who come along to drop off and pick up and homecoming. You have faculty, post-docs graduate students. So, you have the cross of generations and of memories, particularly of the older generations. And then you have thanks to, I think, all of the wonderful aspects of a university education in the United States, which is something I think we do really, really well. You have first-generation students, someone who’s never been to college before. You have somebody whose great grandparents went to the university and they come with the memories, not just their own, but of what their grandparents are told them.

You have people from around the world coming to American universities, maybe never been to the States before, never been on a college campus before, overlapping with people who maybe went to a prep school somewhere. So that mixture, that huge opportunity for interaction I think is what makes universities great. But interestingly enough, it’s also what makes hotels great, Which is you never know who’s going to be in the lobby. So, to do those things together I think is really to make a place hospitable to as many people as possible in the most welcoming way, design and content.

SSR: Makes sense. You mentioned your partners and your firm. Can you tell us a little bit about who and what Deborah Burke and Partners is today?

DB: So, I have 10 partners in addition to myself, which sounds like a lot for a medium sized firm. We have different areas of expertise, but we are very good at collaborating with each other. And that includes criticizing each others creative work, because I think that makes it better. So, some people here do primarily high-end residential, other people do university work and arts-related work, and then others do hospitality. And that isn’t to say that people are narrowly slotted, in fact, I often tell people that the work we do in different areas informs across building types. So, if you’re doing, a private house for somebody, and they’re interested in this finish or this sink that makes it sound very detailed and small, or this size window or this way of looking, you can bring that to a hospitality work, or you can bring what you’ve learned in doing a hotel to how you might tackle contemporary problems of a dormitory or residential college. So, the cross-program type exchange of knowledge is really useful for us inside the firm.

SSR: Yeah. And it brings you back to what you did at RISD in a way where you learn from other…

DB: Yeah. You’re so good at this. Yeah, exactly.

SSR: You’re now the dean of architecture at Yale. I mean, what does that mean to you? How are you trying to evolve what is taught in architecture and propelling the industry or the discipline forward?

DB: Well, it’s an honor to have the job. I’m the first woman to have the job. There are a number of other women, deans at Yale, also the first women to hold those positions. And it’s been a pleasure to work with all my colleagues, but particularly with my female colleagues, we are supportive of each other. Yale is a strong design school, it has been for a long time. I do not want to upend that, I want to add to that. And I think have been Dean for five years now, went very quickly.

It’s been for a while now. Add to that a greater and deeper study of the relationship between sustainability because the climate crisis and the built environment, and greater focus on and connection to urban design and urban planning and the role of the building in the city. And to make it possible and hopefully ways that an institution like Yale can for people from very diverse backgrounds to become architects, to give them the opportunity to enter the profession. And that’s primarily through financial aid.

SSR: Yeah. Okay. As the first woman to hold this title and the other deans that you are collaborating with, how are you thinking about helping more women get into this field of architecture and get to the higher levels of architecture?

DB: I don’t have an easy ready answer for that. To listen, provide support, be a mentor, not be the only mentor, actually encourage others to be mentors and to be available to provide advice, insight. Yeah, give it forward, I guess, because people gave it forward to me. So, to keep doing that.

SSR: Speaking of which, did you have any mentors along the way?

DB: Well, Judy Woolen, when I was at RISD, was certainly a wonderful teacher and advisor. Tom Beebe, who was the Dean at Yale who hired me and who really was an example of how to be a humanist Dean. Bob Stern, who has given me advice about office structure. Our architecture is very different, but he is a good friend and a good person and he was a very good Dean, although we do things very differently and my mom and who is like, you can be creative and you can be a generous person at the same time.

SSR: Okay. So sorry about your loss this past year.

DB: Thanks. She had a good long life.

SSR: So, looking back, what has been one of your most memorable experiences of architecture, something that you saw or changed you either growing up or recently, or?

DB: It’s funny because much of my talk in the beginning of our conversation was about the ordinary and the everyday life, modest houses in a neighborhood in Queens. But often when people talk about architecture, they talk about monumental buildings, cathedrals and libraries and museums. I think maybe that building for me in my many younger years was the first time I went to the Exeter library I didn’t know what to expect. I think it opened in ’71. So this is a long time ago. I was jaw droppingly overwhelmed by the power of the space inside that building. And it’s funny, I grew up in New York, so Grand Central Terminal or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or whatever big spaces that move people. But I went there and knew that I wanted to find the balance in my own creative work between the monument and the everyday and to know that they’re not interchangeable and not every building should be a monument, but some buildings must be monuments as works of architecture.

So that was life-changing and I vividly remember taking my daughter there, she’s now grown up, but then taking her there when she was in a stroller and going right to the center of that space and watching her as a little girl, so still in a stroller, go from being fussy and cranky to, “Ooh,” maybe just experiencing mommies “Ooh” but also I hope finding in that space, that kind of “Ooh” of her own.

SSR: Exactly. Did she follow in your footsteps?

DB: She is going into planning so somewhat.

SSR: I love it. Is there a part of the process that you love the most, is it the initial beginnings of a building? Is it the end result? Is it somewhere in between?

DB: It is very much in the beginning, the first conceptual visioning of it and it is near the end as it comes together. We’re doing two big residential colleges at Princeton now. They are well up out of the ground and being clad and their bricks. Figuring out with a big team we have working on this project. It’s a big project, it’s 1000 beds, how it would integrate with the site, how would it would accommodate this very complex program of residential colleges was a fabulous, engaging challenge. And then to go there and see it out of the ground and engaging the ground at the same time was exhilarating. So, I think there are many people who do the middle phases of the process better than I do. But the moments that give me joy are at the beginning and at the end. Creative joy, I should say. I appreciate the skills of others in other aspects of it.

SSR: Do these buildings also have a lot of communal space as well as the thousand room, I mean, how’s that changing? How have you seen that evolve?

DB: Well, I think a residential college is different than a dormitory because it has more communal and shared spaces and it is about a kind of form of residential life. But I think the way colleges and universities now are thinking student life as they look forward is less about proscriptive places that tell you what to do and more about spaces that allow a variety of activities and exchanges and interactions to be possible. So you don’t want the prefect who has the key to the locker with the ping pong paddle. None of that, you more want a table that can be put to a bunch of different uses because that will really allow different activities to flourish.

SSR: Got it. And what else are you thinking about coming off of this year, this pandemic?

DB: Hugging everybody I see, even people I don’t know. What am I thinking about? It’s interesting, I’ve had a lot of questions over the past year about how’s life going to be changed. What have we learned? Once we get over our enormous enthusiasm for being out and about again for seeing each other in person, for being able to hug, for going into a restaurant, for all of that, I’m a little worried we’re going to forget how precious meaningful human interaction is as we start to take it for granted again.

So, I’m not a public health expert and a lot of people are talking about the work from home and what happens to office space and buying clothing without going into a store. And all of that’s somewhat interesting, but those changes were happening anyhow and they were accelerated by the pandemic. I think what I am much more interested in now is making sure that the things we realized we missed so much, human interaction, sharing a meal, exchanging ideas, giving a desk crit, speaking as an architect and an educator that we don’t forget how precious those things are and how important they are.

SSR: No, I think that’s very true not to take it for granted again.

DB: Yeah. Not to take it for granted again. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

SSR: Tell us one thing that most people don’t know about you?

DB: That I meditate by swimming laps.

SSR: That’s great.

DB: Yeah, because when you swim, I’m not the world’s best swimmer, but I can swim slowly for a really long time, and you can’t look at your phone, you can’t look at your computer, you can’t talk to anybody. And so you just either think or think about nothing and I find it the greatest way to disengage from all the different pressures of my life.

SSR: I love that. That’s amazing and hopefully you have a pool that you can use.

DB: Yes. Or one to borrow.

SSR: Well, I hate to end this, but keeping in mind time, we always end this podcast with the title of the podcast. So what has been, or what is your greatest lesson or lessons learned along the way?

DB: Wow. Greatest lesson learned is that one’s life should be the pursuit of the balance between generosity and fulfillment. Self-fulfillment and extroverted generosity. And you’re never going to find the answer, but if you keep looking for it, both you and others will benefit.

SSR: Very true. Well, thank you. This was such an honor and a pleasure to get to spend the last hour with you. So thank you for taking time to be with us today.

DB: It was so much fun. Thank you. Real pleasure.

SSR: Hopefully, we’ll see each other in real life soon.

DB: For a hug. I look forward to it.