Winnie Au, courtesy Deborah Berke Partners
Yale’s School of Architecture may just be the best graduate program in its field, and it’s getting a new dean.
Deborah Berke is a natural choice, brought in by former Yale Dean Tom Beeby in 1987 and teaching at Yale in some form for almost all the last 28 years. She’s attention-getting because she will be Yale architecture’s first woman dean. But gender is not why Berke is making a difference in the history of the School of Architecture. “Diversity” has become a code word, a dog whistle that presumes existing prejudice. The bluntly obvious reality of Deborah Berke’s gender is not the most meaningful evidence of obtaining diversity in Yale’s School of Architecture; its her backstory.
Deborah Berke is assuming one of the most prestigious positions in architecture, never having attended an Ivy League School. She grew up outside the Ivory Towers of the ivies and Manhattan culture, a product of Queens, a small design school in Rhode Island and City University who created a 60-person office from nothing, while having a family.
Unlike other deans in some other schools Berke was fully successful on many levels other than academic architecture before she was given the Deanship at Yale’s School of Architecture. And that is clear in her steely resolve to make a great place better.
That’s the subject of the latest “Design Czar” commentary onWNHH radio’s “Design Czar.” To listen to the full episode, click on or download the above audio.