UC Berkeley picks next architecture dean
The College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley will have a new dean next year — an academic who’s also a wellconnected designer schooled in the bigcity issues and politics of New York.
The newcomer is Vishaan Chakrabarti, 53, who will take the post in the summer of 2020. He also will open a Bay Area office of the firm he founded in New York in 2015, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism. His resume includes a threeyear stint as the top planner for Manhattan under New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Architecture, planning and landscape architecture really can address the most important issues of our time,” Chakrabarti said. “My job is to take what already are a lot of strong values at Berkeley and build around them.”
Chakrabarti will replace Jennifer Wolch, who is stepping down this spring after 10 years as dean. She led efforts to create programs that include a master’s degree in real estate development and design, while also adding such posts as the biannual BerkeleyRupp Professorship & Prize, which awards $100,000 to a female architect “whose work emphasizes sustainability and community.”
“I’m excited about the selection,” said Wolch, who will return to teaching after a sabbatical doing research in India. “He’s a very entrepreneurial person, creative and inventive, and having led Manhattan’s city planning office, he obviously comes here as an accomplished design practitioner.”
Though he made his mark in New York as a planner and architect and, since 2009, as an associate professor of professional practice at Columbia University, Chakrabarti has Bay Area ties. He graduated from Cal with a master’s degree in architecture in 1996 and has been on Wolch’s advisory board for several years. When he gave a lecture at Cal’s Wurster Hall in 2013 after the publication of his book “A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America,” students filled the auditorium.
In his new post, Chakrabarti said he wants to emphasize three areas of contemporary concern: climate change, social inequity and technological dislocation. The first two are straightforward. The third, he suggested, ranges from large issues such as humans losing their jobs to robots as well as the impact on public streets and spaces from allabsorbing gadgets of convenience.
“When everyone walking around is staring at their phones, how do you get them to look up and engage with each other?” he asked.
Renee Chow, a professor who also chairs the college’s architecture department, will serve as interim dean for the 201920 academic year.