Deborah Berke was invited to give the annual Louise Bethune Lecture at the Buffalo School of Architecture, where she discussed her work giving historically significant buildings renewed purpose. Among the projects she discussed were the transformation of a 1916 Ford Assembly Plant designed by Albert Kahn into a 21C Museum Hotel, a number of reinvented studio and gallery spaces including a renovated horse stable dating back to 1909, and the new Yale Art School, which inhabits a restored Louis Kahn building originally designed as a Jewish Community Center.

“I think that alchemy involves memory and material and place: a memory that isn’t nostalgic but rather memory amended by imagination, which in a way is what all architecture is.”

The Bethune Lecture is an annual lecture made possible by the joint sponsorship of AIA Buffalo/Western New York and the UB School of Architecture and Planning. It celebrates the life and professional work of Louise Bethune, an architect who worked in Buffalo and the first woman to be elected as a member of the AIA.