A+ Juror Spotlight: Deborah Berke On View—Literally!—In Berkeley Exhibition

Architizer News

A+ Juror Spotlight: Deborah Berke On View—Literally!—In Berkeley Exhibition

January 16, 2013

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Between January 28 and April 26, the prizewinning architect (and A+ Awards juror!) Deborah Berke will be on view in the Wurster Gallery at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design. That wasn’t a typo: As a part of her career retrospective at Wurster, Berke will actually be on display in an in-gallery “office” based on her real office in New York. Visitors who stroll through exhibits laying out the chronology of her work will eventually come upon the architect herself in her natural habitat of Saarinen chairs, an Eames table, and furnishings designed by her firm, Deborah Berke Partners. Read more!

Cerulean Estate, Anguilla, British West Indies, 1996

The exhibition, aptly titled “Deborah Berke Partners,” coincides with the architect’s semester-long residency at CED. Last fall, the college awarded Berke the inaugural Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize, and this spring she will teach a graduate design studio at CED that focuses on an urban honey-production facility. The gallery show will kick off with a public lecture by Berke January 28 at 6:30 p.m.

Museum for African Art

All meta bait aside, Berke’s residency within a residency reflects her interest in designing spaces where people create things, where a process unfolds and makes a chain of demands on a space. She has designed schools, factories, studios, and boatyards; last year at Yale (where she is an adjunct professor of architectural design) Berke taught a class about a Kentucky bourbon distillery. Now, with the apiary studio on deck, we’re detecting a trend here, and it can only be a delicious one.