Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary

Bernard Rudofsky's Lessons to Be Relearned

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Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects is the architecture book from my parents’ library I remember best. Modestly subtitled “A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture,” the name of the volume concealed his rather grand ambition to challenge Western architectural history and recast the study of the built environment. Historians, he believed, had constructed architecture’s chronology as if “dating the birth of music with the advent of the symphony orchestra.” Seeing the absurdity of this, Rudofsky set out to reset the clock and the canon.

Through his highly popular book and an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, he exposed alternative examples of architecture — remarkable expressions of human ingenuity — to a large public audience. Functioning as collector, curator, writer, and book and exhibition designer, Rudofsky literally expanded the historical frame of reference, using dramatically cropped, full-bleed, and often aerial photographs of hill towns, bridges, arcades, and subterranean dwellings to draw formal and visual connections that traversed continents and centuries.

Architecture Without Architects relates directly to the current conversation on the environment in that many of the buildings and structures it examines work in concert with natural systems and do not rely on external energy sources. But more importantly, Rudofsky’s pluralism — aesthetic, geographic, disciplinary — reflects the kind of thinking we as architects need to employ today. As he wrote in 1964, “the wisdom to be derived [from studying the wide-ranging work of anonymous builders] goes beyond economic and esthetic considerations, for it touches the far tougher and increasingly troublesome problem of how to live and let live, how to keep peace with one’s neighbors, both in the parochial and universal sense.”

- Deborah Berke

This essay is included in the book Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, a collection of essays at the intersection of architecture and climate change. The publication is a project by The Avery Review, a journal produced by the Office of Publications at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. © 2016 Lars Müller Publishers and the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Essays © the authors. All rights reserved.

Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary asks: "In what sites does a concept like the planetary inhere? Where might we locate the nebulousness of climatic thinking in the built world? The answers can be obvious, but more often than not they are surprising and may well be fanciful. Architecture is comprised by myriad imaginaries and multiform realities, always intersecting and messily overlapping. From arctic villages to Noah’s Ark, from log cabins to electric cars, from human waste to utopian landscapes, design is inspired by objects both fictional and real, millennia-old and still-unfinished, at the world scale and the microscopic.

The Avery Review asked a group of thinkers and designers to each propose a single precedent project—represented by an image and short text describing its significance—that has informed their understanding of “climate.” Taken together, the wide-ranging and incisive responses begin to offer something of a cognitive map of how designers might imagine climate anew."

On Top of the World: Skyscraper Living

Originally published in Monocle, Jul/Aug 2014

Though New York was a desolate and lonely place in 1976 when Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slapstick, his description of it – “Skyscraper National Park” – rings even more true now. Today, New York is a ravishingly alive and electric place. A stunning park full of beautiful and wondrous things.

Part of the magic of New York has always been its tall buildings. We didn’t have the first skyscraper and by century’s end we might not have the most but we are the world’s ultimate skyscraper city. In the late 19th century the physical limits of the island of Manhattan had already shaped buildings vertically since they couldn’t grow horizontally. And at various times in the 20th century, eight different New York towers hold the title of the world’s tallest building. But those spires were for offices, not for living. Sixty, 70, 80 storeys or more – these were the homes of successful, proud, booming businesses. Fine residences started to be built in taller buildings yet the classic grand apartment houses of the pre-war 20th century were 15, 18, or maybe 25 storeys tall.

But more recently the appeal of living high in the sky has become the must-do, must-have urban residential choice. It is happening around the world, in South Korea, Hong Kong, and throughout the UAE. All these buildings share an appeal: you wake up in the morning and you have the sky, the air and the staggering distances visible while still in your pyjamas. It is mesmerizing and addictive.

And in New York it is even better. Perhaps because the geography of Manhattan offers such clear, distinguishable views – from 432 Park Avenue [the Rafal Vinoly-designed tower, the interiors of which Berke designed] the view north is Central Park and the view south is the Empire State Building and the tower of Wall Street. There’s a wide river to the west and in the distance the hills of the countryside; another river, thinner, to the east, contains a Manhattan-shaped island within itself. The grid of the streets reinforces the geography and it is all so captivatingly present. You lose the immediate presence of Tarmac but you have a constantly active, foregrounded view of other skyscrapers.

Living in a skyscraper not only changes the life of those high up but also the life of those on the street. One can bemoan the shadows and the breezes but skyscraper life brings density and life to the city. It doesn’t so much change a city’s personality as it does fully enhance it.

-Deborah Berke

[Originally published in Monocle Magazine, July/August 2014, issue 75 volume 08.]

Austerity Aesthetics

Originally published in Monocle, Jul/Aug 2009

The new era in architecture began last autumn, when the world’s financial markets imploded. The world of architecture as the US knew it – boisterous new buildings, cranes on every skyline, unlimited budgets – came screeching to a halt. An era of bombastic, willful and self-centered architecture has changed to a new sensibility that will characterize architecture from now on.

So what does architecture need to become? New projects must now embrace the aesthetics of austerity and make a virtue of economic necessity. Beauty must be a function of simplicity, composition, and quality rather than expensive materials or structural gymnastics. Architects must do more with less. The new architecture of austerity demands a redefinition of the sorts of projects we even consider worthy of the question, “Is it beautiful?” Promised improvements to our national infrastructure must have a vision for their physical presence.

While we should applaud the Obama administration’s commitment to spending on infrastructure, we should be made very nervous about the concept of “shovel-ready”. It can only mean no time went into thinking about what it looks like. To paraphrase Einstein, you can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it.

Infrastructure is important enough for us to care about its physical form. That requires a stunning shift. It means talking about museums and hospitals rather than access roads to green-field McMansions; schools rather than highways, and soaring bridges and train stations rather than mundane road repairs and widenings. It means including what is required by citizens of a civilized country: parks, schools, libraries and housing. The list of “what is infrastructure” must be expanded to enrich its aesthetic potential. Financial constraints can lead the masses to appreciate the beauty of projects that come under the prosaic rubric of “infrastructure”. Infrastructure deserves an aesthetic and one that exalts austerity. Think “back to basics” with a twist of social responsibility. Think about Utopia. —Deborah Berke

Architecture of the Everyday

Steven Harris and Deborah Berke, eds.

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Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian. These words are rarely used to praise architecture, but in fact they represent the interest of a growing number of architects looking to the everyday to escape the ever-quickening cycles of consumption and fashion that have reduced architecture to a series of stylistic fads. Architecture of the Everyday makes a plea for an architecture that is emphatically un-monumental, anti-heroic, and unconcerned with formal extravagance.

Edited by Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, this collection of writings, photo-essays, and projects describes an architecture that draws strength from its simplicity, use of common materials, and relationship to other fields of study. Topics range from a website that explores the politics of domesticity, to a transformation of the sidewalk in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, to a discussion of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Contributors include Margaret Crawford, Peggy Deamer, Deborah Fausch, Ben Gianni and Mark Robbins, Joan Ockman, Ernest Pascucci, Alan Plattus, and Mary-Ann Ray.

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press (1997)

Deborah Berke

by Tracy Myers; Forward by Amy Hempel

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This book is the first to explore Berke’s remarkable career as an architect, designer, teacher, and writer who has forged a strong and evolving aesthetic. As examined in a series of engaging essays, Berke’s architecture blends tectonic coherence, a keen sensitivity to the intrinsic qualities of materials, and meticulous attention to detail. While all of her work possesses these distinctive attributes, each project is subtly rooted in its context and ennobles the uses specific to that space.

Through newly commissioned photographs, twenty-one of Berke’s thought-provoking projects appear here, including the Irwin Union Bank, Yale School of Art, 21c Museum Hotel, and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Also featured are Berke’s reflections on her growing interest in the “here and now” – an approach to architecture intended to counteract the banal placelessness of much of our environment by designing buildings that are intensely bound to and grounded in their sites.

Tracy Myers is curator at the Heinz Architectural Center of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Amy Hempel is a fiction writer whose publications include Tumble Home (1997) and The Dog of the Marriage (2005).

Publisher: Yale University Press (November 3, 2008)
Dimensions: 11.3 × 10.1 × 1.1 inches
Hardcover: 240 pages, 46 b/w + 201 color illus.
ISBN-10: 0300134398
ISBN-13: 978-0300134391

Here and Now

originally published in Deborah Berke

Reviewing projects for inclusion in this book I could not help but think back on their creation, and the influences—internal and external—that helped shape them. The work featured here, twenty-one projects out of nearly 200 designed since I started practicing more than twenty years ago, reflects an evolution in my thinking over those twenty years, although the majority have been done in the last decade.

Taking a second look at projects, with the perspective offered by time and distance, is cause for me to consider what it is I think, or believe, about architecture. Ten years ago, I was deeply engaged in the concept of the everyday in architecture. This philosophy of embracing and learning from that which is not expressly constructed through high culture or self-conscious design was crucial to my development as an architect and as a teacher. The results are evident in my work of that period, as well as most explicitly in the book I co-edited with my dear friend and colleague Steven Harris, The Architecture of the Everyday. What I was trying to do through my buildings was see if it were possible to make an architecture of exceptional everydayness.

However, the irony of being the poster child for the anonymity associated with the everyday was not lost on me; nor were, as the 1990s unfolded into the new century, the limitations of a philosophy based on the status quo. The evolution of my thinking is less a case of no longer believing in the everyday and more a case of the everyday itself transforming under the impact of our hyper-accelerated, mass-mediated civilization. The world that has replaced the former everyday world is no less authentic (how can it be anything but authentically what it is?) than what I was initially inspired by and drawn to, but it is no longer everyday in the way that I once used the word. We, the world of architecture, and it, the everyday, have become too deeply self-aware, imitative, global. Everyday architecture may still be anonymous in its making—maybe even more so as culture becomes ever more placeless and production ever more "offshore"—but it is no longer local in its references. It has specific and identifiable attributes, but they are now not specific to a place or a people. Today I am more inspired by the contradictions of this new everyday than moved to emulate it.

That an architecture of the everyday is no longer my primary concern is also the result of changes in the world of architecture. Architecture’s full ascendancy to celebrity status, which began a decade ago or more, has reached a level previously unimaginable, I would suppose, even to those who are now at the pinnacle of this phenomenon. How the individual architect is treated, regarded, respected is of little relevance to my thoughts, though the celebrity of a few has most definitely improved the conditions for all architects. However, the way architecture itself continues to be produced and experienced is of enormous interest, and concern, within the context of this phenomenon. I find many of the buildings born of this condition to be bombastically present yet sadly disengaged from their physical situation. My instinct is to suggest that these signature pieces of celebrity architecture each require much more local distortion and a much less legible signature. What I am proposing is an architecture of a far more nuanced signature shaped, above all, by local conditions.

As I have continued to make architecture during the process of making this book, I have recognized an evolving tendency in my work, the philosophical underpinnings of which have grown out of the proposal put forth the above. I will call this position “local knowledge,” or the “here and now.” This philosophy suggests that architecture must strive to be both of its place and of its time. By “of its place” I do not mean that the architect must be local, but rather that the architecture itself must be, foremost in all of its creative criteria, bound to and grounded in its site. I am interested in an architecture so grounded in its site that it can be nowhere else.

Site-specificity emphasizes the importance of particulars of place and denies interchangeability even in today’s global context. “Interchangeable” so often means a dumbing-down, a one-size- fits-all approach. If something can work everywhere/anywhere, this is only because it has reduced places to their most common elements at the expense of their unique ones.

While the notion of things being of a place was once called “vernacular,” that word has come to convey—at least in architecture—quaint, old-fashioned, or nostalgic. My desire for buildings to be of a place is not that they be quaint, old-fashioned, or nostalgic, but that they be anchored. This quality is the antidote to so many places being placeless, interchangeable, and unrecognizable while also being completely familiar. In other words, it is, paradoxically, placelessness that has become all too familiar today. I believe that architecture still has the capacity to challenge this, through its own qualities.

My philosophical position no doubt stems in part from my love of New York City. I love all cities, but New York City above all confirms my belief in the power of the everyday place to be absolutely unique. I love the New York City of grime and confusion, of trestles and bridges and streets and streets of anonymous buildings, just as I exult in the new New York City of glass and more glass. New York has taught me that a building can be an icon without being a monument. I do not at all long for it to be as it was, but I do not want it to lose the bits that remind us daily that it is a working city. I strongly object to the obliteration of the things, old or new, that make this place this place alone, that distinguish it as a place from any other. It is not that I am nostalgic for the New York City of a certain era. I simply like the feeling New York City inevitably gives me of knowing where I am. And that desire applies to everywhere.

I believe in the power of architecture not to transform but to underscore, highlight, and direct. We need not only to build of a place, but to build in an effort to enhance and underscore the nature of that place. We need do so because this is the most resistant, dig-your-heels-in response to banal, uncaring placelessness and the obliteration of the here and now. Reasserting the here and now, which is the antidote to placelessness and homogeneity, demands absolutely that one avoid predictability. To bring out the here, something might have to be quite unexpected, jarring us into the moment, asserting the now. Today I believe in both the here and the now, the here being someplace very deeply specific, the now being an architecture of today, totally responsible in its making. A building that can say what here is will also imply what there is, and it can do so without rhetorical posturing.

If this were a manifesto written for architects, it would start boldly and stridently. Make no buildings that are not anchored in their place. They can be made of anything you wish, and in any way you wish, but once they are complete, you are gone and they must be more of the place and less of you. This does not mean they cannot be totally recognizable as yours, it just means that they would not be complete if they were anywhere else.

This is local knowledge; this is what I am calling the “here and now.”

Publisher: Yale University Press (2008)

Urban Intersections: São Paolo

Edited by Nina Rappaport, Noah Biklen

Urban Intersections: São Paolo documents the collaboration of Edward P. Bass Fellow Katherine Farley, senior managing director of the international real estate developer Tishman-Speyer, and Yale adjunct professor Deborah Berke, assisted by Noah Biklen, at the Yale School of Architecture. The book features ways to examine the process of urban design and development in São Paolo, Brazil, a rapidly growing global mega-city, with all its attendant vitality and contradictions. The work engages both the development issues of schedule, phasing, risk, sustainability, value, and density along with the architectural issues of scale, formal clarity, envelope articulation, use of color and texture, and the relationship of building to landscape. An essay by Vanessa Grossman analyzes and critiques development in Sao Pãolo.

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co. (2011)

How to Be Amazing with Michael Ian Black

PRX Public Radio Exchange

Deborah joined comedian, author and actor Michael Ian Black for a wide-ranging discussion about the role of architecture in everyday life. She shared her views on urban planning and offered sound advice for anyone who wants to follow their passion.

How to Be Amazing is an in-depth interview show, hosted by comedian, author and actor Michael Ian Black. Black sits down with some of today’s most provocative writers, entertainers, artists, innovative thinkers and politicians for humorous, thought-provoking conversations that dive into the creative process and the intricate minds of some of the most influential voices of our time.

Archinect One-to-One

Archinect

After her keynote speech at the inaugural Exhibit Columbus symposium, Deborah joined Archinect One-to-One to reflect on the local and regional influences of Columbus, Indiana, and the impact they’ve had on her career.

The New Museum: IDEAS CITY

What Do We Do With Our Land?

Our collaboration with 596 Acres What do we do with our land? was included in the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Festival on Saturday, May 30, 2015. Visitors to our booth were given an annotated map of the Lower East Side and the Bowery and encouraged to partake in a set of self-guided audio tours, which tell stories of community organizing and activism. Four sites were featured as case studies: Elizabeth Street Garden, El Jardin del Paraiso, Siempre Verde Community Garden, and the Cooper Square Committee.

Architecture & Design Network of Arkansas

In her March 3, 2015 lecture to Little Rock’s design community, Deborah Berke talked about her process of designing in the context of place to create buildings that are “inevitable though not predictable.” The lecture was made possible through the collaborative effort of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Architecture & Design Network. Special thanks to ADN Chair June Freeman and to Jennifer Herron for her welcoming introduction.

What's Next

ARCHITECT Magazine

Deborah Berke, FAIA, says it’s no single building that has had the greatest impression on her — but rather the industrial landscape of the Northeast that influenced her.

What’s Next is an ongoing discussion about the ways technology, the economy and other factors are transforming architects’ relationships with their jobs. Weekly, different thought leaders in and around the profession will share their insights about the future of the architecture workplace.

Spotlight on Design

The National Building Museum

Deborah Berke talks about what inspired her to become an architect, the broad diversity of the firm’s work, and how this work relies on a creative process that carefully “distills” materials, form, and ideas. Clip provided courtesy of the National Building Museum.

Towards the "Here and Now"

The National Building Museum

In the introduction to her June 2009 lecture, Deborah Berke shares her thoughts on the “Architecture of the Everyday” and how her thinking has evolved to the “Here and Now”. Clip provided courtesy of the National Building Museum.

Between Visibility and Invisibility

The National Building Museum

In the conclusion to her June 2009 lecture, Deborah Berke suggests “what architecture needs to become,” and she proposes that an “Architecture of Austerity” can be a good thing. Clip provided courtesy of the National Building Museum.

An Architecture of Austerity

The National Building Museum

In the conclusion to her June 2009 lecture, Deborah Berke suggests “what architecture needs to become,” and she proposes that an “Architecture of Austerity” can be a good thing. Clip provided courtesy of the National Building Museum.

Taking Questions

The National Building Museum

In this final excerpt from her lecture at the National Building Museum, Deborah Berke takes questions from the audience, giving her views on why the 21c Museum Hotel has been so successful and her optimism for the future. Clip provided courtesy of the National Building Museum.

The Monocle Weekly

Interview

In this excerpt from a March 2009 edition of The Monocle Weekly, anchored by Tyler Brûlé, Deborah Berke discusses the state of architecture and design. Clip provided courtesy of Monocle.

The Faith Middleton Show

Interview

Deborah Berke appears on WNPR’s Faith Middleton Show to talk about the firm’s recently published monograph from Yale University Press, as well as her philosophy of architecture. The podcast is also available on iTunes. Clip provided courtesy of WNPR.