 |
|
Leaving Her Blueprint by Charles Gandee By drawing her inspiration from traditional forms and materials, architect Deborah Berke makes an eloquent argument for simplicity and restraint. In the process she's not only making houses that are both refined and affordable, she's shaking up the guys in the architectural establishment, according to Charles Gandee. If Deborah Berke were a politician, she'd probably be a populist. If she were a fashion designer, she'd probably be Zoran or Armani or Calvin Klein, if Zoran, Armani and Calvin Klein weren't so expensive, or, since they are, maybe she'd be the Gap or J. Crew L.L. Bean. In her own field of architecture, however, there is no ready-made category for Berke to fit into, no established model or school of thought for her to align herself with. Call it the inevitable lonely fate of any contemporary architect who designs and builds houses that an analogy, but cost like IKEA. Although it will sound strange to the uninitiated, by bringing sophisticated design standards to affordable houses, Berke effectively thumbs her nose at conventional architectural wisdom, which says you can have it good or you can have it cheap. Not both? Not both. Berke also resists the long-standing architectural tradition of using the single-family house as a " design laboratory," as architects like to say, where, it goes without saying, aesthetic experiments are conducted at client expense. Not only does Berke's work refute this dubious practice, it argues, and eloquently, that shingles and gables and dormers and front porches are still the right architectural stuff providing they're employed with rigor and precision rather than saccharine sentimentality. As a woman under 40 who heads her own New York firm, Berke is in the minority of a minority. Even now, in the wake of the eighties, a decade in which the number of women architects grew at an unprecedented rate of 6 percent a year, women constitute an underwhelming 9.59 percent of the official American Institute of Architects' total. With regard to women who head their own firms, that number shrinks to 4.3 percent. More common, or at least more visible, are women who cohead firms with their more-often-than-not higher profile husbands: Denise Scott Brown (Robert Venturi), Lella Vignelli (Massimo Vignelli), Billie Tsien (Tod Williams), Margaret McCurry (Stanley Tigerman), Frances Halsband (Robert Kliment), Diana Agrest (Mario Gandelsonas), Laurie Hawkinson (Henry Smith-Miller). The list is so suspiciously long that for some women architects the question seems to be "Whom do I have to marry to get ahead in this business?" True to character, Berke answered the question: "Nobody in this business." Instead, in 1991, she married Peter McCann, an orthopedic surgeon she had met when they were children. "We have a used BMW, we have a dog and named Jack. We live on the top two floors of a funky 1812 row house in Little Italy. We're very happy. It's corny as hell." And then there's the matter of Berke's architectural perspective: "Capital-A Architecture, as we know it, is a wealthy white-male pursuit. Since time began it has been built by the conquerors, for the conquerors. What it speaks about is power and authority-from the columns and pediments of the Stock Exchange and every bank in this country that tries to look like the Stock Exchange to the glass phalluses that rise in Dallas." Not for nothing, notes Berke with a sly smile, are buildings, especially skyscrapers, routinely referred to as erections. Such architectural exhibitionism is anathema to Berke: "I think the hand of the architect should be subtle; it should be about the difference between placing things four inches apart and six inches apart. Architecture is about composition and juxtaposition, about the use of materials. It isn't about screaming ''Richard Meier made me!' 'Michael Graves made me!' [Or, for that matter, "Deborah Berke made me!"] It's far more sensitive and subtle than that." It's also far more accessible than that, according to Berke, who finds the three prevailing aesthetic directions-Modernism, Postmodernism, and Deconstructivism-elitist, alienating, and inappropriate. In short, the wrong directions. Berke's alternative is a deliberately low-profile tack, an antistyle style: "I am interested in aspects of the everyday, of the mundane, of the ordinary. I hesitate to use the world vernacular because people substitute it for nostalgic, quaint, cute. But by giving architectural form and authority to the genuine vernacular-the strip, the street, the neighborhoods people actually live in-by using it as Capital-A Architecture, architecture can give a voice to people for whom a voice has traditionally been denied-women, African-Americans, the lower middle class. It's inclusive. It's the difference between church Latin and street Italian. I'm interested in street Italian because there's no one to talk to anymore in church Latin-or no one I want to talk to." The ramifications of Berke's sociopolitical-cum-aesthetic agenda are manifold-not only in terms of what her buildings look like and how she refers to those buildings. For example: Whereas other architects tend to characterize their work by looking to some shameless hyperbolic scale that moves from good to great to fabulous with cheerleader speed, Berke says things about her work like " It was important that it look inevitable" and "You'd be hardpressed to see what I did." Berke also balks at the time-honored image of architect as hero. Unlike many of her male predecessors-from Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier ot Frank Lloyd Wright-she doesn't subscribe to the myth of the misunderstood visionary, most dramatically presented by Ayn Rand in The Foundation Head's Howard Roark (especially compelling as played by Gary Cooper in the 1949 film). "It's not lone genius sitting in a room waiting for inspiration to strike and then getting out there and changing the world. Essentially architecture is collaborative, more like producing a play than painting a painting." Although Berke now practices on her own, with three employees, she has had, over the years, two partners: Walter Chatham and Carey McWhorter, each of whom went on to open their own offices. No more tempting to Berke, it is worth noting, is the firly recent image of architect as heroine, a designation assigned to Italy's Gae Aulenti, London's Zaha Hadid, and Miami's Laurinda Spear (even though Spear si married to partner Bernardo Fort-Brescia). "As the world changes there are women who are getting on the last car of that train, of that tradition, and I wish them all the best," says Berke. "But I'm not a different train. I don't want to be a heroine." At least part of her you-take-the-high-profile-I'll take-the-low-profile position can be traced to Berke's childhood on the middle-class edge of New York City-in Douglaston, Queens. "My father is a Jew from Brooklyn. His grandfather owned a bakery on the Lower East Side. My mother is from a Daughter of the American Revolution, 1630-something family-not quite Mayflower, but proper, blue blood, blue eyes, white hair, a perfect-posture kind of family that started out in New Hampshire and ended up in New Jersey totally destroyed by the Depression." Berke's memories of growing up include a perennial sense of being different, of being, somehow, less than, a sense no doubt exacerbated by certain telling friendly neighbors from trying to join the local country club. No Jews allowed." To her parents, education was primary, and though Berke made good grades in public school, they knew how hard she didn't work. So in 1969 they saved up and packed her off to what was then the MacDuffie School for Girls in Springfield, Massachusetts. Although their blue-eyed, long-limed young daughter physically assimilated with her well-heeled preppie sisters-"I could pass" -she recalls feeling like may have had something to do with Berke's response to Miss Hall, her "virginal 65-year-old college adviser," Who suggested Mount Holyoke. The Seven Sisters were not for Berke, who countered with "What about the Rhode Island School of Design?" Miss Hall was horrified: "You can't go to RISD, only weirdos go to RISD-it's wild!" "Aha," Said Berke. "That's the place for me." (And was it? "It was wild compared to Mount Holyoke, perhaps, but it was not wild as promised.") Although during Berke's time at RISD the student population was a lively mix of creative talents that range from filmmaker Gus Van Sant and art dealer Mary Boone to fashion designer Nicole Miller and various members of the Talking heads, she grew restless after a year and hit the road for Arcosanti, architect-mystic Paolo Soleri's now-23-years-in-the-making utopian community in the Arizona desert, a favorite destination for dreamers, dropouts, drug takers, and draft dodgers. "I grew up physically," recalls Berke. "I used shovels and hammers and operated a cement mixer. I got my hands dirty. I learned how things get built, which is something women don't get to know firsthand in a traditional family where Dad has a shop in the basement and Mom has sewing room." (It is somewhat ironic, given Berke's feminist bent, that her traditional feminine charms came in handy later on, as she helped pay her way through college by modeling, a sideline she is quick to dismiss: "I wasn't Cybill Shepherd. I did a lot of Macy's ads for the Daily News.") After five months at Arcosanti, Berke returned to Providence, where she stayed until, in her fourth year, Peter Cook, a visiting critic from England, suggested she might do well to study at London's a horrible sublet apartment with three debutantes who wanted to marry the Prince of Wales." But not for long. Berke found more suitable accommodations in a Thames-side loft with two male friends, where her share of the monthly rent was $10. After 18 months in London, studying at the AA under Rem Koolhaas and alongside Zaha Hadid, whom Berke remembers as being "miles ahead of anybody else," Berke returned to the States, persuade RISD to give her a degree, then hit Manhattan, where a friend helped her get a gob as a graphic designer for an engineering firm. Her tenure was brief: "I felt there had to be more to life than designing slide shows to convince congressmen of dam projects." So Berke signed on at the highbrow Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, where, in the late seventies and early eighties, such intellectual highfliers as Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gandelsonas, and Anthony Vidler held sway. She stayed for six years, ultimately rising through the administrative ranks to head up the institute's educational programs. Rubbing shoulders with architecture's big guns-who treated her "politely, like a secretary, a pretty secretary"-wasn't altogether satisfying. "My memory of that place is exactly like my sense of how a lot of other institutions function," recalls Berke matter-of-factly. "Which is that three or four men get all the credit for the work at the institute caught the attention of architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who invited her to teach at the University of Miami for one semester. While Berke was in South Florida, the institute effectively dissolved, which left her at a loss for direction. Plater-Zyberk suggested she head north to the Florida panhandle, to Seaside, the new town Plater-Zyberk and her architect husband, Andres Duany, master-planned for develop Robert Davis. "There were a lot of architects hanging out, smoking dope, and drawing designs in the sand, so I decided, 'What the hell. This is nice-drinking beer, playing volleyball, hanging out-I'll stay here,' And within three days I got a commission to design a house-for which I was paid $500, which I lived on all summer." Before the summer was over, Berke snared three additional commissions for three more houses in Seaside. Now, 10 years later, Berke's Seaside portfolio includes 17houses, the local food market, and a beachside shopping arcade comprised of 10 stall-like pavilions surrounding an open-air courtyard. It's a remarkable body of work for a 39-year-old architect, all the more so because it was done over a decade in which Berke also picked up a master's degree in urban planning at New York's City University, taught at University of Maryland, then at Yale (where her office, first in Washington, D.C., then in New York City. And yet Berke has reservations about her work in the Florida panhandle. It is not, as it world be to so many, her pride and joy. "I'm ambivalent about Seaside because the larger context is second homes for upper-middle-class people. I'm not opposed to that perse-that's primarily the kind of work that architects get. But in the end they are beach houses in a planned residential community, and I don't want to pretend that they are more than that. And because the image of that community is a little more sticky sweet than I'm comfortable with, and a lot more quaint…. Let's just say my relationship to Seaside is that of the loyal opposition." Berke's reservations grow ever more grave as other architects interpret the community of simple, affordable, seemingly indigenous houses. With success, Seaside's houses have grown every year a bit larger, every year a bit fancier, every year a bit more costly. Perhaps in response, Berke recently completed a commission to design a speculative house in the neighboring unplanned community of Sea Grove, Florida, for $80,000, which, nowadays, is approximately half the cost of a Seaside lot. It's a simple two-bedroom, two-story house, painted yellow and white, with aluminum-and-glass sliding doors, asphalt shingles, and a carport. If you call it dumb and ordinary, the architect will smile at what she regards as a compliment. Building a house for $80,000 appeals to Berke, not because it puts her on the architectural map-which it doesn't-but because it puts certain of her theories to the test. "It's about an economy of means, about how much can you say with how little. It files in the face of customizing everything, which I think has to do with end-of-twentieth-century abhorrence of greed and waste. It's about being able to speak to people for whom custom anything is not only not a likelihood but not even recognizable. This is recognizable, not alien. Somehow, it's not invented from whole cloth. Berke's transformation of a down-at-the-heels Greenwich Village Rolls-Royce repair garage into a professional photography studio for Milanese client Fabrizio Ferri is another test of the same theory. Although at first glance the Industria Superstudio is as distant form Berke's work in Florida-where clapboard and picket fences are the aesthetic rule of thumb-as anything could be. There's a lower than low-tech attitude about the place, an unabashedly rough-around-the-edges feel that's more about light and space than finish and polish. "What's there is very, very subtle," offers Berke. "It's about the proportion of the doors and how the staircase comes down. It's about opening up and revealing he guts of the building." With its concrete floors, cinder-block walls, rough-hewn wood doors, and pipe railing, a sense of inevitability, a sense that nothing has been imposed for stylistic reasons. That sense of inevitability also laces through the three-bedroom house Berke recently completed for painter Peter Halley and his wife, Caroline Stewart, in upstate New York. There's something reassuring. Equal parts little red schoolhouse and Quaker meeting hall? "The Halley-Stew-art house says that composition and detail can be the voice of architecture, rather than the read-it-from-a-mile-away billboard statement of 'signature' architecture. It says that in the way a shingle turns a corner, architecture can evidence itself." Although Berke's lean hand is apparent in the taut, disciplined rigor of the house, there's a certain generosity of accommodation, a scale of the windows and the width of the stair, in walls surfaced with tongue and groove rather than plasterboard. In the eighties, architects became celebrities-starchitects, they were dubbed-based not only on the bravado of their work but also on the bravado of their personalities. Then, Berke's position garnered her a quiet place among the rank and file. After all, quiet restraint is hardly the stuff of which stop-the-presses news is made in a period of unabashed flamboyance. Now that we're in the throes of the repentant nineties, however, how does Berke feel about being so all-of-sudden timely? "It's almost a misfortune, because it will have the possibility of dating the work. Architecture inevitably is a product of its time, a response to its time. But I think my work has as much to do with older values instilled in my generation-not so much about greed and flamboyance as about economy and modesty. Not quite hippie virtues, but about taking responsibility. It's ironic that the work has become somewhat high profile. That was not ever the interest or the intention. There's a level of modesty about the whole operation that's absolutely sincere. I think taking care at the end of the twentieth century may be the most powerful weapon, being understated in a world of such grotesque overstatement that the louder you shout, the less you're heard." |