PLATFORM: Architectural Education for the Future: A Conversation with Deborah Berke and Marta Gutman

Kishwar Rizvi: Thank you both for agreeing to meet virtually for this conversation. It’s the end of 2022 and we are in the midst of profound social, economic, and political changes. The climate emergency is more urgent than ever and we are still making our way through the restrictions brought about by a global pandemic. You are the deans of two very different universities and programs of architecture—the School of Architecture at Yale University and the Spitzer School of Architecture @ City College of New York | CUNY, yet united by a commitment to pedagogy and practice. I wanted to start off with hearing from you directly, what do you see as the main challenges facing the teaching and studying of architecture now?

Deborah Berke: I would say the first thing for me is to get away from architecture as being spelled with a capital A, and in that implying that buildings that are monuments deserve architects and buildings that are not don't. And to look more broadly at “small a” architecture, which is everything we build from the scale of nanotechnology to the scale of regional planning, as things that humans have control over and responsibility for. And at whichever school of architecture, private, public, large or small, in the United States or not in the United States, the goal is to educate our students as best as possible in the skills they have and the ways they can address the problems of the world, and then to launch them so that they can take on those problems.

Marta Gutman: Deborah, everything you said makes sense to me. I’ll add that issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion are paramount at the Spitzer School of Architecture, the flagship public school of architecture in New York City, with more than 70 percent BIPOC students, more than half of whom identify as women. This is the future of the profession, and I’m gratified that many architecture firms are recognizing the need to diversify their practices. There is more hard work to do. Spitzer students are intimately acquainted with racial and ethnic inequalities, and racism, and how they are intertwined with the climate emergency and environmental injustice.

Figure 1. Group photo of first-year M.Arch I students participating in the 2019 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Yale University. Photographs copyright Yale University.

KR: We recognize the need for accommodating the spectrum of students’ backgrounds, but also the need for diversity in the architecture curriculum. So, Marta, you mentioned environmental justice and racism, issues which require a rethinking of history. They require a breadth of knowledge, but also a sensitivity to how that knowledge is obtained. Is this also an opportunity to rethink the studio, including skills such as writing, for example, given the need to communicate effectively, whether you're a designer or a historian? There are also skills that our students need projecting into the future, such as computation. I'd love to know what you see changing within the field and within the institution. What are the students asking for more of?

DB: I think it's not only what students want, but what's our responsibility to give them. It’s not a department store. I think to a certain extent, it's not so much does studio reign predominant, but more what are you teaching in studio? What are the programs? What are the sites? Who are the critics who come in and talk about the work? What's the role of members of the community? So, it isn't like we should just be throwing things away willy-nilly, but we should be reshaping them to address both what Marta and I said at the beginning, which is how are we teaching, training, and exposing these students to the things that matter today. So that if you're going to design, you need to be taught in studio. But what you design, where you design it, who gets to comment on it, who shapes the program, who criticizes the design, how much of your time is spent at your desk? How much of your time is spent out in the community talking to the future users? These are all things that we should be doing through an architectural curriculum. Similarly, with what is offered in history, what is offered in theory, what do you need? What is offered in building systems?

To Marta’s point about the climate crisis, what do we teach? Not just how to heat and cool a building, how to build a building so that it can retain its heat or retain its coolness, depending on the climate or what materials you use. Where do materials come from? Who makes them? How do we make all these things function responsibly in the twenty-first century, which we are now three decades into, right? So, I would certainly not advocate for throwing out architecture school curriculum. I would advocate for saying yes to mechanical systems. But for the twenty-first century. Yes, to structures, for the twenty-first century. Yes, to history, for the twenty-first century. Then realizing, oh, there's a whole new way to teach architecture.

MG: I agree, Deborah, that design studio is the core of architectural education, and that there is a need to diversify and change curricula, having led that effort on the history side at Spitzer for over ten years. But I want to advance experiments not only in the content of studio, but in studio culture as well.

In design studios we should encourage students to recognize that all kinds of buildings are architecture and deserve the attention of designers, and also that studio culture needs to change. Some Spitzer students want the architecture building open 24/7, insisting they need unrestricted access to become bona fide designers after working at home during the pandemic. Staffing shortages make it impossible for me to accede to this request, but, regardless, it doesn’t make sense to me. The construction of architecture and the allied professions as ones that require non-stop work is a myth that requires rejiggering, rethinking, and challenging. It's important to sleep, right?

DB: And all of that makes you a better designer, not a worse one.

MG: The pandemic, the global crisis in public health, has changed all of us. It’s changed work life and home life and taken a profound toll on the mental health of students. This is what I hear: “Please no more Zoom studio.” We need to seize this moment and empower students with life-giving models for work, for personal and professional life in architecture. This knowledge—that you can be a fine designer and leave the office at 5:30—is particularly important for women who bear most responsibility for childcare in our society. The surest indicator that you'll be poor is to be a woman and have a child; this is so across the globe including in United States, the richest country in the world. It's important to question work habits that discourage women from persisting in practice and becoming licensed designers, especially women who want to have lives with kids, to say nothing of lives with partners.

At Spitzer, we are about to launch an experiment that involves community partners, enhances community engagement, diversifies the faculty, and integrates the humanities and the arts in design studio. We're applying for a grant to support this innovation—to enhance and enrich design by pairing engagement and diversity with dismantling disciplinary silos. A premise is that for anti-racism to flourish, humanities-based research, the arts, and writing need to be brought into design studio education.

KR: Deborah, the Yale School of Architecture has that community engagement from day one, since the early days of the Building Project. Could you talk a little bit about that?

DB: Well, the Building Project certainly speaks in some ways from our perspective to what Marta is talking about. And after being Dean for the past six years, we're about to change our focus. We worked with Columbus House, which is a local organization helping address issues of homelessness in New Haven (Figures 2 and 3). And students have been building houses for people who are formerly homeless. And it's a two-part thing, I would say. One is to talk to people who are homeless and understand the cultural conditions and societal conditions that push one into homelessness and how this can be addressed, because housing is part of it, but not the sole part of it. Although once you give somebody a place to live, they are no longer homeless, countering what has been a derogatory expression as opposed to a descriptive one. But the other is to talk to people in the neighborhood where you can build and understand their concerns, so they don't feel like they're the receivers of society's shortcomings, but rather that we're helping build the community. So, we have worked very carefully and closely with Columbus House and in getting into neighborhoods in New Haven and talking to people.

“We need to seize this moment and empower students with life-giving models for work, for personal and professional life in architecture.”

Figure 2. First-year M.Arch I students add exterior plywood sheathing to the deck area of the 2019 Jim Vlock First Year Building Project.

KR: Thank you. While you were speaking about socio-economic disparities in housing, I wanted to ask about how we may also prepare our students who may themselves be vulnerable. Relatedly, how do you see your institutions engaging with the vulnerabilities of those who teach? This has been a very important question in the university at large, with questions of adjuncts, questions of prejudice, and so on. And I think that's very important for us to also contend with when we're talking about modeling certain behaviors and responsibilities. What do you see within your department or school that is touching upon the question of equity?

MG: Well, Spitzer faculty are unionized. The Professional Staff Congress represents the faculty--full-time, part-time, and adjunct--the professional staff, and doctoral students who are instructors. (Different unions represent other workers). Thanks to the PSC, the tenure and promotion process for fulltime faculty is relatively transparent, adjuncts have contract protections, and benefits are generous (including health insurance for some adjuncts). I appreciate that I work in a unionized environment. The challenge at CUNY, a resource-starved public university, is funding for competitive salaries for faculty and staff, for student support, for research, and for a whole of host of other needs (operations and maintenance are high on my list). Undergraduate tuition is $7,000 a year.

DB: No one can complain about the cost, right?

MG: I don't like to use the word complain. The verb struggle is better. $7,000 is a lot of money for an undergrad to come up with each year on top of NYC living expenses. It’s more than twice that amount for a graduate student. Undergraduate students receive grants based on financial need, and both undergrads and graduate students win merit-based scholarships that are supported by generous alumni, community partners, and other donors. One wonderful program supports travel abroad along with underwriting the cost of tuition and materials. But I can't tell you how many students come me to saying, What am I going to do? My rent's gone up. I need to work. A family member is sick. How am I going to pay for my education? Their financial struggle is nothing short of criminal in my book. Higher education is the key to advancement—City College leads the nation in advancing social mobility—and still my students can’t pay their bills.

The Spitzer School is a small division, with about 475 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs. About 30 percent of the faculty are full-time, tenure-track or tenured, and new hires have advanced diversity and inclusion—since spring 2021, all full-time hires have been people who identify as BIPOC, queer, and/or women. We have more work to do to diversify faculty and staff. Every architecture school does. This is why we need our students to graduate, find jobs, get licensed, and work to change the profession.

DB: Exactly. Our situation is slightly different, obviously, at a private institution with significant means. Although, as I often say, Mother Yale is very well-off, though the School of Architecture, not so much. YSoA also has a long history of hiring people on one semester and one-year contracts, which is something I'm strongly opposed to. So, I have been trying methodically for people who have been here a long time to move them to senior critic, senior lecturer appointments, because in that capacity they can get longer contracts. But as you both know, in the university system, to get to tenure track and tenure is vastly more complicated and onerous even or maybe especially at a place like this. So, I am making what inroads I can make in order that people can have job protection, job security.

KR: How do we ask our students to find work-life balances if we're not able to model that ourselves, especially women? Childcare in itself can be a burden when it shouldn't be. I wonder what you see at a place such as the School of Architecture, how do you become the models, perhaps also at the university level? How can the borders within institutions be more porous and collaborative?

DB: We offer a major for Yale College, but it's not a professional program. But our graduate students are out in the university, and I've worked very hard to encourage that. We have a joint course with the Yale School of Law. We have a joint course with the School of Public Health. We are doing things across the university, I guess, in some way. Kishwar, my response to your question would be both Marta and I, in our very different institutions, still have more work than we can possibly do. And so, to worry about our stature or our visibility within the university, it might be on my to do list, but it's way down there because I want to raise money for financial aid. I want to expand the number of courses we are able to offer. There are things that I think my time is better spent on. If there were 48 hours in a day, maybe I’d add things to the list.

MG: I have a slightly different perspective. Architecture schools tend to look inward, as Deborah's just explained. When I taught architecture history at Spitzer (before becoming the dean), I worked with school leaders who did not conceptualize the architecture school as a place with porous walls. They valued autonomy, the culture of architecture. This attitude came with a beleaguered sense that Spitzer had to defend itself, against all. I don't believe that architecture is strengthened by looking inward. Spitzer is a professional school in a public university with constrained resources. We need to do our share to contribute to the rich intellectual community at City College even though our professional programs are tightly orchestrated with very little room for curricular flexibility.

Practically speaking, this means we are offering more and more general-education courses for undergraduates. This started with architectural history and has grown to include four new, non-design courses: Introduction to Architecture, Introduction to Landscape Architecture, Introduction to Urban Studies, and the City in History. These courses are popular. They serve the school, serve the college, and make it possible for design students to meet and interact with other students (the people with whom they'll be working as professionals).

DB: At some point, we do that too. Good for you for doing it. It's very important.

MG: We're starting a new undergraduate major, a BA in Urban Studies and the Built Environment—the first non-design major at Spitzer. I started this initiative as a faculty member, and it faced push-back from some design faculty at first, but now there is broad support for the program.

DB: I'm waving my hands around on this Zoom call because I'm going to interrupt you because I just did the same thing here. Right before COVID started, we started an undergraduate major in Urban Studies. I was told by the President and the Provost it's never going to happen. Turned out it was approved with unanimous support from the Faculty Senate. And it is for people who are interested and passionate about the built environment, who are themselves not designers, but that's okay. They're going to run for office. They're going to be lawyers. They're going to run planning boards; they're going to run banks, they’re going to be community activists and organizers, they’re going to be knowledgeable members of their communities. Who knows what they're going to do? But they're going to know about how cities get built, and that will help all of us. So, this is a good thing to do.

Figure 3. Dean Marta Gutman, 2022. Photograph courtesy of City College Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications, & External Relations.

“The more we can create forums for dialogue between people who have a passion or an interest or a conviction about the importance of the built environment, and who come at it from different perspectives, the better off we’re all going to be.”

MG: At Spitzer, we want to serve students who, like Deborah just described, love the built environment but don't want to be architects. I want them in Spitzer. I want them to stay and enrich our school community. The more we can create forums for dialogue between people who have a passion or an interest or a conviction about the importance of the built environment, and who come at it from different perspectives, the better off we're all going to be. With this kind of interaction, we not only model collaboration, but we create it in our schools. And I think that has huge potential for change. So, I don't believe Urban Studies should be offered only in social science programs; it should also be located in architecture schools.

KR: All these points are really fantastic. And so, the last question, on a brighter note: you're both deans of two very important schools and you have good company. Turns out this is a good time to be a woman dean. How do you think your being the dean is changing the culture of your institution?

DB: That is not a trivial question at all. It's impossible to answer without sounding self-serving or self-important. Maybe it was just the right time for all of us, in our profession and at our institutions for there to be women.

Figure 4. Dean Deborah Berke, 2019. Photograph copyright Yale University.

MG: I really like that, Deborah. It is remarkable that so many women are running architecture schools at this point. This will grow and will have an impact on higher education and on the profession because students are seeing women in leadership and learning to work with us. Students are aware, faculty are aware, and staff are too: they come into my office and say (confide) they are thrilled a woman is running the show.

KR: I would say that having women deans really changes the culture of the school in very tangible ways, from the consideration of what times you have meetings to the intangible ones of helping somebody envision a different path. Noting just how you both described the experiences of the pandemic says a lot, from the need for empathy and public spaces to designing “architecture with a small A.” I think it creates a more holistic and inclusive space.

DB: I want to add one thing that really matters to me. I'm enormously happy and thrilled for Spitzer to have Marta; I'm a graduate of that school, and so one of the things you can do with a degree from the City University of New York is become a dean at Yale.