Deborah Berke

Posted on April 29, 2008

Deborah Berke is a designer and architect whose work bridges many worlds. She is a noted architect with her own firm (Deborah Berke & Partners Architects LLP) and a professor of architectural design at Yale University. Her work engages both the rigors of architecture plans and the creativity of interior design. In addition to her real-world and academic work, she co-edited with Steve Harris the influential anthology The Architecture of the Everyday, as well as contributing her time by serving as a juror for numerous awards and as a Founding Trustee of the Design Trust for Public Space in New York City.

We asked Ms. Berke to give us five films that have influenced her own very influential design style.

The Grifters
It contains some absolutely great silhouettes that are both suspenseful and spatial. It reinforced my interest in figure and profile, where design is less about the object and more about its shadow.

Married to the Mob
A film of comedic interiors of a kind of charm that borders on offensive. So much of what I do is about perfecting good taste that the spaces and places in this movie were just a hugely enjoyable belly-laugh of bad taste.

The Party
The Blake Edwards w/Peter Sellers one. I showed this movie to my daughter when she was very young. The architecture of the house may be the most dominant character in the movie, and is definitely the second funniest.

Stop Making Sense
This concert movie starts with an empty stage which fills with stuff over the course of the opening songs. The shadows, the platforms, the silly but brilliant giant suit; it is all so delightfully low-tech and simple. I love the music and find the film an enormous relief in this age of over-produced everything.

Wait Until Dark
A terrifying but fabulous reminder that space isn't always what you see and that light is not the only place-determining element.