 I'm Kurt Anderson and this is an episode of Design Legends. Our legend today is Debra Burke, the architect, the dean of Yale Architecture School. Welcome. Pleasure to meet you. Good to see you again. So let's begin at the beginning. Okay. You grew up in New York City. I did, in Queens. I read that as a kid, I guess as a teenager, you started making renderings of your neighbors' houses in buildings in the neighborhood. Is that true? You started drawing buildings? That's part of the myth of Debra Burke? It's not a myth. The actual story is that when I was a young teenager, I was friends with a kid who was a couple of years older and he had just gotten into Cooper Union to study architecture. And he and I would sketch, but mostly what we would do is walk around our neighborhood at night in the summertime when it was really dark and really warm. People had their windows open and their lights on and we would try to guess how the house was laid out on the inside based on what we could see on the outside. And then sometimes we'd draw that as we were thinking about using it. So you were going for plan rather than... Sort of the relationship between plan and elevation. Yeah, that was it. And when I was 14. Wow. That's not only beautiful given what you've become, but a kind of beautiful memory of spending summer nights in the suburbs. Mark was a wonderful friend and a kind of early role model because of his going to Cooper. I ended up going to RISD. I thought a sort of art school environment was better suited to me. So yeah, it all goes back to those summer nights in Queens. Did living there, do you think shape your aesthetic, your architectural sensibility? Yes, but I have always been interested in the kind of ordinary in which I find the quirky beauty and I try to take that quirky beauty into my own work. So I remember as an even littler girl driving through the Jersey Meadowlands in the backseat of my parents car and looking out at the industrial buildings of the Jersey Meadowlands and thinking, God, those are so beautiful. As a kid. As a kid and everybody else thought, you know, ick. New Jersey's kind of smelled funny then. But no, I just love those buildings and the few that remain, I still do love. On a train ride, I'll look out the windows and there are a couple of exaggeratedly proportioned, I think early 20th century industrial buildings that I think are absolutely exquisite. And so that quirky proportion informs what I do. How about New York City? Being technically in New York City, even if you didn't live in the Chrysler Building, part of your shaping? Absolutely. Although then there again while I appreciate and I'm proud, certainly very proud of being a New Yorker and appreciate the monuments of New York City, you know, the profile of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and even the profile of the Brooklyn Bridge. I am more drawn to the bones of the Brooklyn Navy Yard or the bridges that go over the Gowanus Canal or some of the low slung, pretty funky industrial buildings in North Queens as you make your way to the 59th Street Bridge. That's the stuff I really like because I think there's beauty there. And it's unexpected and it's not commodified the way the monuments have been through not just postcards and television but at this point Instagram and every other possible media you could imagine. They're all the more special because they're in New York and in fact in the New York of today one worries that they're all going to disappear. You want to hang on to them a little bit but you have to be careful about that because if you make them too precious then they've actually lost their appeal as well. But you loved the monuments I read somewhere that Leverhouse is one of your favorites. It is. I really do love the compositional massing of that building. I think it's absolutely beautiful. I don't think you could have a whole street of them but one on that street is really slow. I share your love of Leverhouse more than say some of the other modernist masterpieces in that very neighborhood because it's small and jewel like and restrained it's not as bombastic as some others. Not as bombastic it has the slightly gutsy move of having a color. It has a more gutsy move of having a hole cut in it and being set on a plinth and pushed back a little bit and engaging the street in an unexpected way. It does a lot of moves that are atypical of New York which is what makes it special and why you can't have more than one of them. And it's an office building. It's a place people work but these other unknown, unmemorialized buildings you love, those are also workplaces. You like places where work is done. I do. I do like places where work is done and I think that might go back to both an art school history and even the house I grew up in. My mom was a fashion designer. She taught at FIT and often our dining table was covered with yards of fabric and she'd be cutting out clothes she was going to make. So making seems a part of life to me like getting your hands dirty seems like a good thing to do. So office work isn't quite that work. Being busy making something I think is fulfilling. And growing up in a home in the 1950s and 60s where your mother was this designer, let alone working and earning a living, was that a model for you? Of course I can do something like this. You know it was so much a part of my life I didn't really think about it. Once I became a practicing professional I realized wow my mom was way ahead of her time. But I never ever thought I wouldn't work. So you didn't have to get over some retrograde idea of what life is going to be. So you go to RISD with the idea of becoming an architect? Yes. So you're there and afterwards is the very moment when postmodernism is ascendant. Were you never on that bus or were you partly on that bus? How did that fact shape your practice? That's a really good question. I did not long after I got out of school go to Seaside, Florida. And I guess it depends where you slice your definition of what postmodernism is. So I guess to that extent I flirted with it but I thought of myself more drawing from the vernacular, again back to liking the unappreciated ugly buildings. Then the postmodern vein, the sort of the stew of history version. And you built some work at Seaside. 16 houses and two commercial buildings and it was a really important part of my early career. But even then and certainly now I considered my relationship to Seaside and what it represented. My position was out of the loyal opposition. I thought the planning goals were good. The design codes not as good and certainly not as critical to the success. And the results a little too saccharine and stylized, which is where it falls into the postmodernism bucket I think and of little interest to me. But again more generally it seems to me the enduring and valuable residue of the postmodern moment was urbanism. And what it did to re-envision planning, to make preservation a thing we took seriously. That both preservation and a belief in fabric. Like you can't have a place of only monuments that you actually need an urban fabric against which the monuments can be poised. I think it's in some broad, broad way a gift of that period. And you have built, built houses with pitched roofs and clavoured siding. You're not anti-history. Not at all. In fact I call some of those buildings pitched roof modernism. Because I think one can embrace the teachings of modernism in the design of a building and not insist that it be a white box with a flat roof. Your work is, I mean it's often talked about simplicity. But that seems to me to do you a disservice because yes it comes across as beautifully simple. But the complexity is as much there as the simplicity, don't you think, in your aesthetic? It does take a lot of work to make something simple. And underneath the apparent, let's say understatement is actually a fair amount of complex study, overlay, interweaving, solving, connecting. So that it looks that simple and elegant. And the other thing looking and thinking about, at your buildings and thinking about them is that why they are, they are restrained and all those things that they are renowned for being. You aren't against beauty. They're beautiful, right? Oh no, no, no. I'm definitely not against beauty. In fact I'm a huge fan of beauty. But I personally don't find beauty in ornamentation or unnecessary articulation. I don't find it in curly cues or pattern. I find it in materials. I find it in the figuring out of how things go together. Even if I'm doing the simplest bathroom, I like to make sure that no tile gets cut. So that's perfect. So whole tiles, right? You can use very inexpensive tiles and still have it look perfectly corrupted. Also this may be too grand. Tell me if you disagree. If historicism was the thesis and modernism was the antithesis, you are the synthesis. You don't have to deny or banish history, but you can also combine it with the beauties and lessons of modernism. That's a lovely compliment. Thank you. And I will say where I feel, I'm going to say we here, me and my firm, are particularly good at that is a lot of the work we do is changing old buildings where the combination of old and new is very real. And in fact it's collaborating with people who are dead, who made buildings in another time. That's a lovely work putting it. Collaborating with the dead. Bringing new program, new materials, new ideas, busting through the parts of old buildings that don't matter, but hanging on to the parts that resonate in some way. They're often the parts that hold it up. But more broadly and seriously speaking, we do, I think, what you just described, this sort of marriage of old and new, not only in the fully new ground up work we do, but actually very deliberately and kind of joyfully when we transform old buildings. Which you've done, I've seen one of these hotels that you've now done almost a dozen of around the country. Yeah, the 21 C Museum hotels. The first one in Louisville is the one I have been to, which is four or five old warehouses. Right. That you've turned into very not warehousie on the interior. They are these beautiful, essentially gallery spaces. Right, that's right. We cut big holes in that building to actually make it function as a hotel. And we have gone on to change Shreve Lamman Harman Bank in Durham, North Carolina. They're the architects of the Empire State Building. So a nice deco building in Durham into a hotel. McKim, Mead and White Bank in Lexington, Kentucky into a hotel. A Albert Kahn auto assembly plant in Oklahoma City into a hotel. Fantastic building. Oh my God, fantastic. So you're collaborating with dead geniuses to boot. That's the only kind I'll take on. You have talked repeatedly and written about the importance of a building being of its place, not just being, oh, it's the Deborah Burke thing I'll plop down here. Right. What does that mean? How do you make it about of that place? Well, eventually, of course, any new building becomes old like field buildings that are there in that place. So one wants that to feel as though it was absolutely inevitable. But I'll start to answer your question by giving the counter example, which is what I call spatula architecture where you can slide a spatula under a building in Dubai and plop it down in Shanghai and it doesn't make any difference or wherever the two cities might be. So I think the way you avoid that and make a building be of its place is to look at a lot of things. Local materials, climate, solar orientation, character of the street, behavior, interest, destination. Landscape architecture is a big part of it. I think it's not one big idea that makes a thing of its place, but actually a whole collection of tools that the architect has that together make a thing of its place. So it's not, I'm doing this thing in Morocco, therefore I'll do some Moorish pattern necessarily. I don't think making a building of its place is about conforming. In fact, it's often about breaking stride with all the spatula buildings that are around it, the ones that could be moved and nobody would notice the difference. Perhaps when I refer to climate and local building materials, those are definitely older cues. That's how we used to build and then we kind of stopped building that way because we could bring things from anywhere and we could clad with glass everywhere because energy caused nothing and glass is a cheap way to clad a building. I think now when one pays more attention to climate, to the ability to walk and bike, to how you behave on a street, something I learned from planning school, how individuals behave on streets, you are both doing something that is transformative but actually not so different from what was done in the past. It just looks different. Are there architects' styles, approaches that you were fond of as a young person that you are less fond of now? I was not prepared for that question. My continuous true love, I'll start the answer that way, remains Aero Saranen. I fell in love with Saranen while a student at RISD, that was when I first learned about his work. I probably am with no slight intended because the man was a genius but I'm probably a little less in love with Louis Kahn now than I was 25 years ago. I think I learned a lot from his work and I respect its genius but it's not compelling me forward in the way it did once upon a time. Whereas Saranen, who died way too young, really I think was a deft creator, almost a dancer through his sights and understood this local condition and materiality and specifics of a place while making something new. That's why I can keep going back to those buildings. What about the opposite? Are there things you poo pooed or had no interest for you when you were young that you come to realize, wow, that person knew what he or she were doing or that school of work which I didn't appreciate before, now I kind of get? I would describe that as really both a lack of exposure and knowledge early in my career that I've expanded now, which is all the buildings between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, that sort of fat belt around the middle of the globe where I think people have been forced to deal with climate and nature and the mixture of those conditions with modernism. So classic Northern European modernism when brought to the tropics becomes exquisite. There are designers, architects, artists, writers, creative practitioners who teach because that's how they make their nut and they're the ones who love to do it. See, you've done it for a long time. I guess you like it. I do like it. I like it a lot. I did start doing it in order to earn my nut as you put it and my very, very, very first teaching was at a public school in Flatlands, Brooklyn and I taught fifth graders who were in the class for kids who were having a hard time with math and what we did once a week, I'd go out there for a day and we built scale models and that's how they learned fractions and we had the best time and I was maybe 22 years old. That's beautiful. When you were offered the deanship of Yale to follow Bob Stern, was there any hesitation or was that like, nope, got to do that? There was momentary hesitation thinking about my family, my work, the commitment it meant and then I thought, I have a lot I want to do in this job and I would never, ever stop questioning myself if I said no. I'd wake up every day and say, what if? So I said yes and I'm doing it. And you said when you took the job, I want to broaden the definition of the discipline of architecture. That's right. That meaning what? Well, I think for a long time, particularly at Auguste architecture schools of which Yale is one, architecture was defined with a capital A and meant monument buildings, mostly designed by white guys. Small A architecture which I think goes everything from jewelry and industrial design and perhaps nanotechnology and working at Pixar or Apple all the way to regional planning. That's all architecture as far as I'm concerned. Not in a we're going to take it kind of way, but more that a good architectural education prepares you to do any and all of those things. And within that, it's okay to still be a capital A architecture. You live more or less in this neighborhood. I do. Is the Cooper Hewitt a thing that you visit? How does the Cooper Hewitt figure in your life? I love this place and I find it's one of those museums of which there are only a few where you can just pop in for a minute, see one or two things and feel good, or you can come for an entire day and feel completely immersed in other people's great design ideas and get excited about it and feel good about it. And plus, and you didn't ask me to say this, they have a really good store. And the store has only gotten better. I do a lot of my Christmas shopping here. I have a huge Christmas list. I do a lot of my Christmas shopping here. Well, now that you're part of the Pantheon, the Cooper Hewitt Design Award winner, you'll just have to keep coming back even more. I think it will give you a bigger discount. Is that right? Yay! Get Carolyn in here. Thanks so much. My pleasure. You are really good at this.