Inspirations - Five Practices

Saturday, October 25, 2025

11am-5:30pm CT

Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment

Richardson Memorial Hall, Thomson Hall (Room 202)

New Orleans, LA 70118

Open to students, faculty, staff, and the public.

"Inspirations – Five Practices," is a symposium organized by Carol McMichael Reese, Emerita Professor, Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment. The symposium features invited speakers: Deborah Berke, Yale, TenBerke; Mary McLeod, Columbia; Amy Murphy, USC; Joan Ockman, UPenn; Diana Thater, Artist/Curator/Writer/Educator.

ABOUT THE EVENT

“Inspirations—Five Practices” is a one-day symposium that promotes the 2025-2026 Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment's Lecture Series and Public Programs theme “Common Good,” which is also the title and theme of the upcoming issue of The ReView. It brings together five women who have made outstanding contributions through their award-winning works of art, architecture, theory, and scholarship. Educating and inspiring thousands of university students, they have had wide-ranging influence in the academy and beyond. Over the course of the day, each will present perspectives on the ways in which she has endeavored to address issues of sustainability and equity in support of the common good.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided throughout the symposium. For questions, contact Ben Neal at bneal1@tulane.edu.

MEET THE PANELISTS

Deborah Berke, FAIA, LEED AP, is an architect, educator, and the founder of New York-based architecture firm TenBerke. Among the firm’s most significant works are the Residential Colleges at Princeton University, the Cummins Indy Distribution Headquarters, the Rockefeller Arts Center at SUNY Fredonia, the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, and the 21c Museum Hotels across the South and Midwest. In 2017, TenBerke was honored with a National Design Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Deborah is the J. M. Hoppin Professor and the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the first woman to hold theposition. She has been a Professor at Yale since 1987. She is the recipient of the 2025 AIA Gold Medal, the Institute’s highest honor recognizing individuals whose work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture. She was also the recipient of the 2022 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion, the highest honor for architectural education. In 2012, she was the inaugural designate of the Berkeley-Rupp Prize at the University of California at Berkeley, which is given to an architect who has advanced the position of women in the profession and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and the community. She is a board member of the James Howell Foundation, and an advisor to the Norman Foster Foundation. She serves on the jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the highest honor in the field. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Design. Deborah is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and The City University of New York. In 2005, she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Mary McLeod is a professor of architecture at Columbia University, where she teaches architecture history and theory. Her research and publications have focused on the history of the modern movement and on contemporary architecture theory, examining issues concerning the connections between architecture and politics. She is the editor of and contributor to the book Charlotte Perriand: An Art of Living, as well as the co-editor of Architecture, Criticism, Ideology and the website Pioneering Women of American Architecture (with Victoria Rosner). Her essays have appeared in journals such as AA Files, Journal of Architecture, Assemblage, JSAH, Casabella, and Oppositions and in books such as Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld, Architecture School, Modern Women, Feminism and Architecture, Building Systems, Architectural Theory since 1968, and Complexity and Contradiction at Fifty.

Amy Murphy is a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Architecture. She holds degrees in fine art (BFA, RISD, 1986), architecture (BArch, RISD, 1987), film production (MFA, USC Cinematic Arts, 1994), and media studies (Ph.D, USC Cinematic Arts, 2017). The majority of her written academic research focuses on the relationship between cinema and urban experience. In several of her publications, such as “The Future Tradition of Nature” (2009), “New Orleans, Nature, and the Apocalyptic Trope” (2010), and “Nothing Like New: Our Post-Apocalyptic Imagination as Utopian Desire” (2013), she examined how our post-apocalyptic imagination limits our desire to change our historic attitude towards nature. Her forthcoming book, The Divided City and Its New Cinemas 1920-1980 (University of Illinois Press, 2026), analyzes the policies and processes that produced the dispersed and segregated American city over the last century and explores the imprint they left on several genres of the independent cinema. She is currently co-curating an exhibition on Paul R. Williams’ housing at the USC Fisher Museum. This show will open in the fall of 2026 and is being funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Joan Ockman is an architectural historian, critic, and educator. She is Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and at Cooper Union School of Architecture. She recently completed a five-year appointment as Vincent Scully Visiting Professor of Architectural History at Yale School of Architecture. She previously taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation for over two decades and served as Director of Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture from 1994 to 2008. She began her career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, where she was an editor of Oppositions journal and was responsible for the Oppositions Books series. Among her many edited publications are the award-winning anthology Architecture Culture 1943–1968 (Rizzoli, 1993); The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things in the Making (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001); and Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (MIT Press, 2012). She was honored by the American Institute of Architects for collaborative achievement in 2003 and named a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2017.

Diana Thater is a Los Angeles–based artist known for her pioneering work in film, video, light, and sound. Since the early 1990s, she has pushed the boundaries of time-based media and installation art, exploring the interplay between the natural and man-made worlds. Her immersive works draw from disciplines such as literature, animal behavior, mathematics, and sociology, creating complex relationships between time, space, and perception. Born in San Francisco, Thater studied Art History at NYU and earned her MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where she now serves as Chair of Art and has taught for over 30 years. Thater’s work has been featured in major solo exhibitions worldwide, including LUMA Arles (2024), ICA Watershed Boston (2018), and Guggenheim Bilbao (2017). Her 2015 mid-career survey, The Sympathetic Imagination, was organized by LACMA and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Other notable venues include the Dia Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, Kunsthalle Basel, and Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen. She has received numerous awards, including the Anonymous Was a Woman Environmental Art Grant (2023), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1993). Thater’s work is held in the collections of major institutions suchas MoMA, LACMA, The Broad, Whitney Museum, Hirshhorn, and the Stedelijk Museum. In addition to her art practice, Thater is an active writer, curator, and educator.

Questions?  Contact Ben Neal at bneal1@tulane.edu.