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ARCHITECT DEBORAH BERKE AND HER SELF-STYLED ANTI-FASHION CREDO
HAVE BEEN EMBRACED BY THE TRENDY SET. CAN SHE FINESSE THE IRONIES?
CHIC SIMPLE
by Alexandra Lange
In a lecture last fall at the Yale School of Architecture, Professor
Emeritus Vincent Scully, the most revered figure in American architecture,
took a moment out of his survey to comment on the work of a fellow
professor, Deborah Berke. Perhaps swatting at the projection of
one of her Seaside, Florida, cottages, he grunted: "Taut and elegant,
much like herself."
Much like her simple, rough-edged building, Berke is striking, but
not at first. She is reedily tall, and her rings slip slightly on
her fingers. Her eyes are very large and blue, and she drops her
gaze demurely when I ask a question she doesn't want to answer.
Her apartment in Gracie Square has nothing on the walls and little
more than a child's plastic bus parked in the den. The daughter
and Upper East Side home are trapping of adulthood she's only recently
acquired at age 42. She and her husband, a doctor, had lived in
a funky Little Italy row house until the exigencies of New York
parenthood, she indicates, nudged them uptown. This move into the
land of the swells is something about which she evidently feels
some embarrassment. "The park is right there," she says by way of
explanation, then quickly adds, "but TriBeCa is bourgeois, too."
She sits sideways in one of her Le Corbusier chairs, knees up, shoes
paired on the floor in front of her. She wears black, of course,
a sweater with ribs, but nothing too obviously of the moment. She
says she can't afford Calvin-yet.
One of her clients told me: "I don't think of Deborah as being the
most fashionable person." Not in the sense of Anna Wintour and Blaine
Trump, perhaps. But Berke is the most fashionable person in a very
specific way. Let's call it the ordinary.
The ordinary, or a cleaned-up tricked- out ordinary, has become
the most fashionable thing set that least among a certain fortyish
set that likes its status objects ostentatiously utilitarian: Range
Rovers, Sub-Zero refrigerators and Viking stoves, Shaker sidechairs,
wooden boats, Prada everything (designer Miuccia Prada famously
said her designs were inspired by "the banal"). Among this crowed,
Deborah Berke has become the must-have architect. "She gets things
down to the core of what they are," says new client Emily Woods,
vice-chairman at J. Crew. "She goes at designing architecture the
same way I go at designing clothes."
The analogy is apt. J. Crew built its reputation as an urban version
of country-sportswear places like L.L. Bean; J. Crew muted the colors
and streamlined the designs to create an effect that is casual,
yet just so. Calvin Klein, another client, has made drabness the
essence of sophistication. Berke's work is the logical, architectural
extension of this exaltation of the everyday. In her work, bare
bulbs serve as gallery lighting; concrete floors take on a mellow
glow; thick metal door frames recall trial, or merely unremarkable,
is made perfectly beautiful.
Berke's following remains select, but business is growing. She has
a half-dozen projects under construction, and another ten in the
design stages. Her largest single effort to date, the$2 million
headquarters for the Battery Par City Parks Corporation, opened
a few weeks ago. Her potentially most lucrative contract, the prototype
for Klein's typically spare CK stores, has been realized in Tokyo,
Singapore, and now on the third floor of Bloomingdale's (many more
are in the works). She just moved her office to a double her workforce.
And she's designing lofts right around the corner for Emily Woods
and for William Wegman.
It would be easy to dismiss Berke as the architect equivalent of
an Upper East Side kid shopping at the Salvation Army. She and her
clients don't need to leave bare. But there's more going on here
than vernacular slumming. For one thing, Berke is from Queens (albeit
Douglaston), not Park Avenue. To make money to put herself through
the Rhode Island School of Design, she worked part-time as model
(a detail she would prefer not be highlighted). Her love of galvanized
metal, bare lightbulbs, and sliding glass doors is come by more
or less honestly."
One condition of the everyday that I enjoy and that can be enhanced
by the hand of the architect is repetition, a dumb repetition things,"
she says, offering up something of a credo. "Repetition destroys
the preciousness of things." This means: Expect not one grand gesture
but a series of small, exquisite refinements. A house with clipboards
and rows of standard windows provides the architectural equivalent
of a blank canvas, so the addition of a protruding stair tower,
or smoke stacks, stands out like a metallic thread in a plain fabric.
Berke and Steve Harris, a RISD classmate and Yale colleague, are
editing a book for the Princeton Architectural press about the everyday
due out next year. "The majority of the things you see in the [architecture]
magazines are formal fashion," he says. "One season it's one thing;
one season it's something else. Architecture is disintegrating into
consumed fashion." Harris, like Berke, uses a lot of architect-speak
to say he wants architecture to stop recycling styles so rapidly,
to stop tarting itself up in some new drag every half-decade. The
everyday ought to cleanse the palate, like lemon sorbet. It should
allow us to start from closer to scratch.
Except Berke isn't really in opposition to he fashion industry,
or even the concept of fashionableness-the rag trade, after all,
is currently her highest-profile client. In fact, shortly after
she approached to be in a Gap ad. She declined because as one student
recalls, she "didn't want to be associated with selling something
else." Her philosophy sits uneasily, paradoxically on her shoulders:
What is "everyday" about her work now that she's designing vacation
homes for zillionaires? Berke is not unaware of the ironies, which
is why her statement of purpose- composed in list form for the Princeton
book- is more hedged then that of her colleague. Some excerpts:
"The generic does not reveal its maker, it is pointedly neutral";
"Good taste is the mechanism by which the consumption of approved
objects is encouraged"; " An architecture of the everyday may currently
be fashionable, but as fashion it is continually consumed and continually
replaced"; last, and perhaps most important, " An architect cannot
pretend to be naïve."
BERKE IS AT THAT PIVOTAL POINT in an architect's career where she
is well known and well regarded but not so much so that she can
bulldoze her clients. She can push an aesthetic of simplicity, but
she must also accommodate retrograde desires for a pool, a boxing
gym, a marble bathroom. At the same time, she can't concede too
much to the clients, or her work will stop being distinctive.
Berke owes much of her initial reputation to the more than a dozen
houses she designed in Seaside, Florida, the widely publicized "new
urbanist" prototype town. Working there in the late eighties, Berke
perfected her just slightly, strange version of the picket-fenced,
white-gabled cottage, playing with porches and shutters while adhering
to Seaside's strict premodern architectural zoning codes.
"In an age of design extremes, her designs were always very elegant
and discrete," says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Who designed and has
helped oversee the Seaside codes with husband Andres Duany. " It's
like in theater, when you play a role and don't overplay it- [her
houses] play a kind of collective role."
But Berke grew disillusioned with the PBS preciousness of Seaside,
where the few tiny still-vacant lots are fought over by young architects
looking to make their bones. "My stiff in Florida is tainted by
the Seaside code, " she says bluntly. She's more excited about a
house she built in the late eighties in nearby Sea Grove " It has
aluminum siding glass doors, " she says with delight. That project
gets her ultimate self-accolade: "It was really dumb, " she says.
Dumb? "Ordinary in the most flattering sense," she explicates. In
1991, she designed a manufactured-house prototype for the National
Association of Home builders: a prefab house for people who would
never hire an architect-dumbness heaven.
She's not foisting the cheap on the elite as a revolutionary gesture,
she insists: she really believes it is beautiful. " None of what
any of us do, " she says, " is supported by the underclasses."
And in any case, she's not a Philip Johnson manqué, flirting with
every new style as it pops up. "In the late eighties," she says
calmly, "when the fashion sensibility was pouf gowns, it wasn't
exactly where the minds of people with money were. They've arrived
at where I've been."
A client and friend, the eighties art star and practiced manifesto-monger
Peter Halley, makes a similar point in a forth coming essay for
Perpecta, the irregularly published Yale School of Architecture
"annual." "Here we have an architecture," he writes of Berke's ouvre,
" for a class that does not want to announce its own empowerment
or prestige, but wants to blend in banally (the architectural equivalent
of William Burroughs's banker's suit)."
Halley clearly is on of these people. The studio/guesthouse Berke
built for him and his wife, Caroline Stewart, positively screams
with unobtrusiveness.
"Rather than create a revolutionary architecture, she is trying
to create an invisible one, " Halley says. We are sitting in his
Chelsea studio, surrounded by his neo-geo canvases. The jumpy, fluorescent,
wall-size works appear to have no more affinity with Berke's still,
neutral-toned spaces than the paint-spattered Halley would with
a banker's suit. And yet his barnlike country studio in Columbia
County is often mentioned as favorite by past and present clients
of Berke's. It complements but does not imitate the eighteenth-century
farmhouse already on the property.
"We left [Berke and her then-partner Carey McWhorter] there one
day, and they came up with this incredible sit choice, " Halley
says. He enjoyed the creation of the drawings for the house, but
the violence of the actual building came as a shock. "We designed
this thing, and it was lots of fun, and all of a sudden these bulldozers
came [to dig the foundation]. I thought, 'Oh my God. What an act
of hubris.' And six months later," he adds making an oblique connection,
"Deborah ends up marrying a surgeon. " He laughs. An orthopedic
surgeon, to be precise, a childhood friend from Queens named Peter
McCann. When they married in 1991, their first child was their dog,
Jack, a weimareiner-Lab mix and a cousin of one of Wegman's weimareiners.
Jack looks just like Berke and McCann, in fact: tall, sleek, brown.
Now they have an actual child, Tess, who is small, blonde, adorable.
The only shoes she likes to play with are Mommy's Manolo Blahniks.
ANOTHER WAY BERKE SEEMS To keep herself anchored is by teaching
at Yale. Several of her employees have been students at the architecture
school, and she regretted the just-ended eighteen-month hiatus she
took from New Haven to work and be a mother. Her huge new Chelsea
offices even more than the old SoHo studio, reflect her affinity
for the atelier. It resembles nothing so much as an idealized version
of an architecture-school studio- big windows, big desks, and few
partitions, but a lot more personal space. At the Lafayette Street
office, the table in Berke's section of the room served as combination
dining table, display area, and conference room. The day I visited,
the whole office ordered " Burmese" together- and lunchtime chat
ranged from getting babies off the bottle to Susan Sontag to Roman
honeymoons. Everything is collegial, but it's clear that Deborah
Berke Architect is experiencing growing pains. Several people inside
and outside the firm suggest she needs to let a few experienced
architects run jobs on their own, and delegate business responsibilities
completely.
As in school, each of the project architects is given an assignment,
and Berke checks back in periodically, going over sketches, plans,
sections in progress. Today, she's holding one of her sporadic review
sessions, in which she goes over the plans for all the projects.
She's wearing deck shoes and a T-shirt with Wegman drawings of dogs,
and the office is quiet but for the sound of pencils on paper. She
massages pieces of industrial felt and looks at window-frame sections
with great pleasure, but the most excited I see her is when she's
asked to pass judgment on some kitchen cabinets. "I see this almost
as being in the spirit of the 1920s pharmacy, where they had magic
medicines but wooden drawers, "she says, almost giddy. "Or the hardware
store in East Hampton with nails in drawers. No plastic, but these
beautiful zinc fittings."
She's talking about the apartment of a client to fabulous to be
named, but her visual references hark back to the days of pre-fabulousness,
albeit the East Hampton version. "I'm longing for a sense of style
based more on collage than on name brands," she says on another
occasion. "So much of what's around tries so hard."
PLANS AND SAMPLES ARE ONE THING, but in architecture, the proof
is in, as they say, "the built environment. " How beautiful can
the everyday be?
Take a cab from the train station in Greenwich, Connecticut, carefully
observing the favorable ratio of Range Rovers to Mercedes Benzes,
of comparatively simple clapboards to pseudo Norman chateaux, low
stone walls to English hedges- the Berke sensibility suddenly seems
pervasive, even here. At a surpassingly luxe development called
Conyers Farm, where Berke built a house for Guy and Renee Leibler
last year, the lots are so big each house announces its presence
only by the choice of gate hardware, and there are no addresses.
Radio in from the front gate for directions.
When you get to the New Englandy house with the Range Rover and
a BMW parked on the street, you've arrived.
The Leiblers walk up the slate steps from the pool to greet me,
he natty in polo shirt and with cellular phone, she swathed in a
white towel, as if I've come unexpectedly. They take me on a tour
of the house, just painted white to their satisfaction. A Warhol
of James Dean leans against the fireplace; a photograph of Marilyn
Monroe hangs in a passageway. It's the first time I've heard a five-bedroom,
four and a half bath house with custom-made doors, soapstone sinks,
and an underground gym described as "small" and "informal." And
yet it is.
The French doors in the living room give onto the bluestone patio.
A screened porch allows the Leiblers a private view of their meadow
from the master bedroom. Ridges of stone put the house in parentheses,
a barnlike bulk slipped into the landscape. Berkes's gift is to
make the ostentation discreet by smoothing out the walls and adding
industrial touches: those light bulbs again. I don't realize there's
a baby in the house until I enter her blue sanctuary, briefly blinded
by a hit of color amid all the carefully nuanced whites. Her parents
gaze at 13-month-old Isabelle proudly, then show me the custom-designed
baby gates leading to the maid's stairs.
Berke designed those baby gates. She's willing to be accommodating.
"She'll tell you when she doesn't like your ideas," says Laurie
Weltz, who's having Berke do a three-floor Manhattan loft as well
as a house in Anguilla. " Even sometimes she'll say 'I don't think
it'll work, ' and then she'll incorporate it."
"She's a good listener, a good thinker," Guy Leibler, a private
investor, says, putting down the cell phone for a minute. "She puts
function and comfort above her own design. Some of her ideas were
a little stark for us, and she made them less so."
So another client's 7-year-old son has a blue-and-yellow room, an
assertive statement in a predominantly beige apartment. And Laurie
Weltz may get to have a fountain in the front hall of her New York
loft and a domed bedroom in Anguilla. "She's really easy to talk
to- she understands right away," Weltz says.
"I've showed her pictures of painted walls… I like to do bathrooms
with tiles and stuff."
BERKE IDENTIFIES TWO PIVOTAL moments in her architecture career.
Seaside was the first. The Vogue profile was the second. Calvin
Klein's decision to hire her to design his CK store prototype may
be the third. But it is Industria, the most rugged., the most technical
of her projects to date, that brought her to where she is now. Designer
Fabrizio Ferri hired her in 1993 to transform- but not too much-a
Washington Street garage into a fashion photography superstudio.
Harper's Bazaar art director Fabien Baron then hired her to do his
apartment, and to design new offices for Bazaar (the project was
later scotched after it was deemed too expensive by Hearst). He
also hired her to design the offices of his separate commercial-design
firm, Baron and Baron Advertising, and to do two more of his apartments.
But he's since moved out and he wants Berke to design his next home.
Baron and Baron inhabits a deceptively nondescript building near
Columbus Circle. Take the elevator to the top floor turn the corner,
go up the service stairs. When you see the distressed-metal door
with a discreet plaque, you have arrived.
Inside, all is light and cal. Employees in navy and black pop out
of broad openings off a long, gallery-like room. Black Breuer chairs
form a square reception area; the conference table is a three-quarter-inch
sheet of glass, bolted onto the walls or designed to slide. The
rooms flow into one another because the apertures are unusually
large; vaguely Japanese-looking black-framed sliding doors stand
waiting, should you need privacy. Baron takes me to the conference
room, placing a small ceramic ashtray to his left and his windbreaker
over a chair. He leaves no ashes on the table. He may be Berke's
ideal client.
"It's very easy to work in a space like this for the kind of work
we do," he says. "The light is amazing. There's a nice flow about
it - the design, the understatement, the clarity." He waves his
hand over the table, up at the steeply slanted silver skylights.
He wouldn't change a thing.
"You get this type of feeling, like in a church," he adds. "I remember
when I was younger,. Going to Notre Dame. The feeling of the space
swallows you."
Baron, who has art-directed much of Calvin Klein's advertising,
is the one who put Berke on the short list for the Klein stores.
"By knowing Calvin and by knowing Deborah, " Baron says, "I said
to Calvin, You have to meet Deborah."
"People get where they are because they are prepared to be where
they are," Baron says, when asked about Berke's nascent success.
"It's very much like a Nike ad: JUST DO IT."
HOPE, INDIANA, IS INDEED "A Surprising Little Town," as the sign
says when you drive in. In hope, a hamlet just outside of Columbus,
and other parts of Bartholomew County, the churches are by Elel
Saarinen and Gunnar Birkerts and the fire stations by Robert Venturi
and Susana Torre. The main Columbus library is by I.M. Pei Much
of this was made possible by a foundation set up by the local Cummins
Engine Company. The foundation has, among other things, brought
the people of Bartholomew County an astonishing array of modern
architecture.
If Deborah Berke has in mind the master plan Baron suggests, making
a statement here is the next logical step in her climb up architecture's
greasy pole. For the past year and a half, Berke has been designing
the Hope branch of Pei's Columbus library, and my guess is she is
eager for the opportunity to show that her populist leanings are
more than an overclass affectation. Pei, among other architects,
angered the townspeople with his high-handedness when he built his
Columbus building, and there's been a conscious attempt since not
to hire architects angling for the Pritzker Prize- better to snag
them before their egos get that big. Berke and … one of her architects
fly out once a month to meet with the library board and go over
the plans, and they are careful to listen to local opinion and all
the local concerns.
At a meeting with the library board, Berke jokes at one point during
a highly technical discussion of the thickness of the floor slab,
"I'll come back as an old lady and say, 'Move those bookshelves!'"
"We kept wanting Mr. Pei to do that, but he never came back," says
Steve Sucow, who directs the Columbus-area library system. "He was
tired of us…."
But Berke is part of the next generation of architects making the
pilgrimage to Columbus- like her onetime new urbanist colleagues
Plater-Zyberk and Duany, she is empathetic about the importance
of listening to locals. "In talking to her, it seemed to me the
sensitivity she displayed toward the needs of the client, and the
surrounding buildings and community, would recommend her for a project
where there were particular sensitivities on those issues," says
Will Miller, a native son and Cummins foundation board member whose
father ran the company. "Hope is a very small town, " he says.
Berke's project in Battery Park City has a similar (and, given the
context, more surprising) small- town feel. "what was extremely
impressive was that she had designed for storage," says Battery
Park City Authority design director Stephanie Gelb. "There was a
place for everything so that storage itself became a design element.
[At Baron and Baron] there were little drawers for tapes, little
drawers for the pencils." At Battery Park, the compartments may
be for the paint buckets or leaf rakes, but the principle is the
same. The Parks Corporation- which is responsible for the 90 acres
of parkland in Battery Park City- needs a wood shop and equipment
storage, a place to park bikes and eat lunch. As in Hope- and Greenwich-
Berke is willing to oblige.
The drawing of her Hope library ground-breaking is imminent, and
the project is scheduled to be completed in eight months- don't
look like her New York work. She's taken cues from the listing clapboard
storefronts to one side,, not the high-modernist, multi-pyramid-roofed
1958 bank to the order. The library will have a roof made of standing
seam metal, one of Berke's favorite materials, and walls with factory-style
window grids. But the board members here are interested less in
atmosphere that in the position of the book slot, in the gallons-per-flush
of the toilets, in making sure that the back steps don't attract
skateboarders. In some ways, they have their priorities straight,
but you can see how another architect might take the long discussions
abo0ut steps versus ramps as tacit permission to wreak stylish havoc
with the rest.
Cummins's man Miller raised the only major design objection. An
early drawing of a gently slanted roof reminded him too much of
a New York architect's sentimental view of the slope of an Indiana
barn gable. Berke changed it immediately. "When Susana Torre was
building the fire station, the firemen hated it, but they weren't
getting through to her," Berke says. "People here get slightly abashed
by these big-name architects, and when that happens, the plan isn't
working." The roof now has a gentle curve, like the bottom of a
ship, and will not be mistaken for anything but an architect's whimsy.
IT OUGHT TO BE a good sign that amid all the fashion business, Berke
was still attracted to the modest Battery Park offices. More than
any of her work since she was designing modular housing in the early
eighties, the Battery Park project addresses the outsider-insider
issues she has struggled with since Douglaston. She's taking the
side of the underdogs here, park workers who literally were given
the basement of a high-rise condo to use as their headquarters.
Battery Park suggests that she is apparently sincere in her desire
to continue to work both for the people she beginning to resemble-
the overdesigned overclass- and on the messier public projects.
There's not much difference, it turns out, between moving book slots
and installing baby gates.
"She sells it well. She's not selling it as her mission or as her
calling but because it's a nice way to live," says Guy Leibler.
"It" is the combination of style and lifestyle that is distinctly
hers but also just happens to be in demand right now. Which is a
good thing because Berke is beginning to develop expensive tastes.
Before a trip to California last year, she was wavering over moving
her offices into the Chelsea loft. Then, she says, "I went to visit
these offices in a big airplane hanger, and it was a mess, all derelict,
but I thought, "No one has this much space in New York. I have to
rent that big space.'" So she did.
The look she is selling is a perfectly stylized environment, every
object, or lack thereof, in place-a next-generation Martha Stewart,
though perhaps without Stewart's will to power. Less-well-healed
clients are a bit taken aback by all those barren surfaces. "I looked
at [Baron and Baron] and I thought. We don't live that way," says
Parks Corporation head Tess Huxley. "I literally said to her, 'Take
a look at my office here as reality check. Don't think that I'm
not going to tack drawings up on the wall.'" She sighs. "I thing
that she's tried to deal with that. I think that we will disappoint
her."
But Berke is trying. She says her husband is teaching her not to
get so hung up on aesthetics, especially when it comes to their
own Hamptons weekend place. Berke has accepted it unstylishness-
" Ten years ago I would have been mortified," she says- but clearly
its clutter and clash have prompted the couple to devote more than
a little psychic energy to the gap between knowingly Ordinary and
merely ordinary ordinary.
"Our current house is a shack that suits our need for shelter, "
McCann says. "I don't think she really wants to make her own statement
about herself. Probably doing it for yourself is extremely revealing.
Usually you can always blame the client."
One morning about a month ago shortly after she finally moved her
offices to Chelsea, the architect arrived early and was struck by
the fact that she was now, finally, in her forties, operating out
of a real, major-league, adult work space. "What have I done?" she
recalls thinking as she looked around at the floor, the walls, the
empty chairs. About the responsibility, she adds: "It's scary."
But now she's decided she's delighted with all the new vastness
she occupies. "My husband says he'll buy us a pool table," she says.
And some employees have already taken to riding their bikes around
the perimeter.
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