Deborah Berke, the first woman dean of the Yale School of Architecture, agrees absolutely that the stereotype of primal male still rules the profession.

“It’s the image of the architect silhouetted against the sunset, cape blowing in the wind. It’s somewhere between Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Roark,” she says, naming the real architect who personified solitary genius and the fictional one of towering ego. ... “You’re going to ask why, and the answer is not easy,” she says. “It’s not solely to do with how demanding the profession is versus the difficulties of being a parent. It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s constant small-scale discouragement, frustration, unequal pay, ungenerous family leave. It’s a large pile of complex problems. It’s changing over time, but very slowly.”

Berke is speaking in the library conference room of her firm’s New York offices that occupy two floors of a building near Madison Square Park. She was looking forward to July 1, when she was to officially take possession of her new office at the architecture school, at the corner of Chapel and York.

Her overarching goal is to advance what she calls the “the history of pluralism” at the school, where she has taught for many years as an adjunct and which has an enrollment of about 220, mostly in a three-year master’s program.

...

“New York has taught me that a building can be an icon without being a monument,” Berke wrote in “Here and Now,” an essay that appeared in the first book on a contemporary architect, male or female, “Deborah Berke,” published by Yale University Press. She imagined that if she were writing a manifesto for architects, it would command:

“Make no buildings that are not anchored in their place. They can be made of anything you wish, in any way you wish, but once they are complete, you are gone and they must be more of the place and less of you.”