The Deans’ Table | Compassionate Leadership: Facing crisis with heart ft. Dr. Robert Kirkbride

We will remember this period in time for the rest of our lives. We witnessed a global pandemic, national calls for racial reckoning and social justice, and a significant presidential election within a divisive political environment. To encapsulate everything that happened at the schools this year requires thoughtfulness and honesty from the leaders who guided huge populations of staff, administration, faculty and students through drastic change and uncertainty.

Please join them at The Deans’ Table and gain insight into their challenging roles at the leading NYC design schools, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, and School of Visual Arts.

See event here.

Robert Kirkbride is Dean of Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments and Professor of Architecture and Product Design. Dr. Kirkbride has directed studio ‘patafisico since 1991, and is also Spokesperson and a founding Trustee for PreservationWorks, a non-profit organization for the adaptive reuse of Kirkbride Plan Psychiatric Hospitals. Robert’s work integrates scholarship and practice, exploring forms of knowledge and know-how that don’t quite fit; things that have been lost or overlooked, including the impressions of memory and habits on the built environment. Robert designed the Morbid Anatomy Museum, in Brooklyn, NY, with collaborator Anthony Cohn, and authored the award-winning multimedia online book, Architecture and Memory, which focuses on two Renaissance memory chambers. Dean Kirkbride has been a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and architect-in-residence at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy. At Parsons/The New School, where he received the University Distinguished Teaching Award, Dr. Kirkbride established the Giuseppe Zambonini Archive at the Kellen Design Archives, and is an ongoing contributor to the Memory Studies Group. Robert received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University, and a Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Arts in Design of the Environment from the University of Pennsylvania.