Deborah Berke
New York, New York
Deborah Berke’s work is largely placed in the urban context, often involving adaptive reuse of existing buildings. Her works exhibit an acute sensitivity to the nuances and qualities of existing contexts, and the importance of light, sound, material, and scale in calibrating and choreographing daily urban life. Avoiding the too common tendency to formally express the presence of the new addition in the old context, her subtle insertions and transformations present modest exterior facades to the street. Emphasizing the importance of “the everyday” over the exceptional, Berke’s work can be said to exhibit a true democratic spirit. She is especially attentive to the concept of personal space—what each dweller calls “my place”—and the photographs of her buildings show them inhabited, rather than reduced to purely formal compositions. Not involved primarily in landscape place-making, Berke works in urban places, the cosmopolitan place of the city, where each site is at once both unique and generalized. Within the city her works achieve a quality of domesticity and interiority that are increasingly rare in today’s world.
