Her Practice – the Architecture of Debora Reiser

A Celebration of Debora Reiser

Introduction: Quilian Riano, Alicia Imperiale, Lori Gibbs
Interlocutor: Sanford Kwinter

Speakers:
Jesse Reiser
Maya Reiser
Deborah Berke
Dana Cupkova
Laurie Hawkinson
Ted Mirvis
August Ventura

September 12, 2024

Higgins Hall Auditorium, 61 St. James Place, Brooklyn 11238

6:15 - 7:30 PM with reception

RSVP

Debora Reiser was an irrepressible, if somewhat obscure figure in the New York scene despite her 75-year long career, but known to a devoted circle of cognoscenti: clients, craftspeople, and especially the architects she taught with her characteristically New York frankness. She trained herself to see design in everything and everything as design, a project that included herself. Standing just short of five feet she nonetheless projected a commanding presence to clients and contractors especially necessary in the context of male-dominated mid-century America. As a woman architect in the early ‘50s she had to be relentless. “When they give you the back, just keep talking and they’ll turn around.” Aesthetics for her was not a luxury, but an essential of life – a way of being in the everyday and for everyone.

Reiser’s graduation from Pratt in 1948 threw her into the intellectual and cultural ferment of post-war New York city as it was birthing a new American Avant Garde integrating the new ideas and radical practices of left-leaning emigre artists and intellectuals escaping the desolation of war-torn Europe, along with their American fellow travelers – predominantly Jewish – who keenly sensed the dawning of a new culture and aesthetic consciousness. Reiser became part of a small, dedicated group of architects and like-minded, typically middle-class clients, who sensed the emancipatory promise of a new life that would flourish in a domestic Modernist architecture.