From ICA Boston to the High Line, he made an unforgettable impact on the art world.
Last week saw the passing of one of the leading lights of the field of architecture, New York native Ricardo Scofidio. He and Elizabeth Diller, his former student at the city's Cooper Union, opened the firm Diller + Scofidio in Manhattan's East Village in 1979. It expanded to Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or DS+R, with the 1997 addition of Charles Renfro.
In 1999, they were recognized with a MacArthur "genius" grant, the first architects accorded that honor. They also enjoyed a 2003 retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, "Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio." In 2009, Diller and Scofidio were named among TIME magazine's most influential people in the world.
Their firm grew to employ about 100 architects; its website indicates projects including a dozen museums, ranging from the unbuilt Eyebeam Museum, planned for Brooklyn in 2004, to Los Angeles's Broad in 2015, to a renovation of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2016, to the massive expansion of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The firm also designed many exhibitions, including the smash 2018 hit "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" at the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Here are eight key projects the firm executed over the years.
The Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002
Can architecture be about the formless? At a moment when screen manufacturers were jacking up their pixel density as high as possible and design expos were, in DS+R's view, overstuffed with immersive digital simulations, the firm conceived a 300-foot-wide "architecture of atmosphere" by using 35,000 high-pressure nozzles to create a watery cloud on Switzerland's Lake Neuchâtel for the 2002 Swiss National Exposition.
Lincoln Center Campus, New York, 2003-12
Five decades after the design by Gordon Bunshaft, Philip Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and others was unveiled, DS+R was called in to conduct a $1 billion renovation of its 16-acre campus, including public spaces, the Juilliard School, the 1,100-seat Alice Tully Hall, and the School of American Ballet. The overhaul created a new grand entrance, redesigned the main plaza and fountain and reflecting pool, a grass lawn as the rooftop of a film center, and a pedestrian bridge.
New York magazine's Justin Davidson praised their work, writing, "This renovation triumphs because at every juncture, it avoids architectural wowmanship and directs attention to the artistic labor going on inside."
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2006
The first museum to be erected in a museum-rich city in a century, the $41 million, 65,000-square-foot Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston was a new waterfront home for an institution long located in the Back Bay. Designed around a wide curve that travels up through the building and back on itself, the museum is bordered on two sides by the Harbor Walk, a 47-mile public walkway. It is dramatically cantilevered out over the Harbor Walk in an ingenious solution that allowed the museum much more space than its footprint would provide.
Architect magazine called the ICA "an expansive container for the display of contemporary art, a poetic waterfront gathering place, and a new harborside icon."
High Line, New York, 2009
The locale in New York's far west Chelsea neighborhood that has become a massively popular tourist destination started out in the 1930s as part of an elevated rail system that went out of use by the 1980s with the increasing use of trucks. For years it remained a wild landscape blocked away from the public. In 1999, DS+R's proposal for the High Line was picked from among 720 submissions from 36 countries, including, says the High Line, "ideas as wild as a giant roller coaster and a mile-long lap pool."
Now a continuous, nearly one-and-a-half-mile-long greenway with more than 500 species of plants and trees, it subtly incorporates original rails and other artifacts from its earlier life.
To describe the reaction to the High Line as rapturous would be to underplay it. As New York magazine's Adam Sternbergh wrote, it's been called everything from a "flying carpet" to "our generation's Central Park" and something akin to "Alice in Wonderland ... through the keyhole and you're in a magical place."
The Broad, Los Angeles, 2015
Instantly recognizable for the perforated facade that provides filtered daylight to the galleries, the $140 million museum built for mega collectors Eli and Edythe Broad in downtown Los Angeles took the form of "a veil and a vault," as the architects described it. Its third floor provides nearly an acre of column-free, 23-foot-high gallery space; as they travel through the institution's 120,000 square feet, visitors can get glimpses into the storage space, or "vault," from which the museum regularly lends artworks.
The museum is LEED Gold certified for its electric car charging stations, high-efficiency plumbing fixtures, and rooftop drains routed to street-level gardens that filter runoff.
In Architect, Joseph Giovannini described the facade as looking like "the conflation of the Titanic with an iceberg at the moment of impact," adding that "inside, the museum proves a Fabergé egg of interior worlds."
Zaryadye Park, Moscow, 2017
Just steps from Red Square and the Kremlin is a 35-acre park on a site whose previous lives include a 19th-century Jewish enclave, the site of an abandoned Stalinist skyscraper, and Europe's then-largest hotel.
Spanning over a quarter of downtown Moscow, the area was fenced off for five years as it awaited the construction of a commercial center before the city changed gears and opted to make it into a public park, Moscow's first large park in 50 years. It features terraces that exemplify four ecosystems found throughout Russia's vast territory -- tundra, steppe, forest, and wetland -- and a 225-foot cantilevered space that is elevated above the Moscow River. There are even microclimates inside that extend park season by channeling warm air upward to one of the park's landscaped hills, working against Moscow's notoriously cold winters.
If the Museum of Modern Art had, over its history since 1939, gone from experimental to canonical or even doctrinaire, it aimed to use the 47,000 square feet of additional exhibition space added by DS+R's 2019 renovation to display its collection in ways that would highlight the diversity of its collections, foregrounding, for example, women, non-Western practitioners, and artists of color. With more art forms being accepted into the canon, it also included a customizable space for media, performance, and film.
The new lobby design made possible clear views from 53rd to 54th Streets by sending the store downstairs and reconfiguring ticketing and coat check functions. The net gain in gallery space was almost a third, to about 165,000 square feet. The project is LEED Platinum certified.
Not everyone was entirely convinced. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, alliteratively, "It's smart, surgical, sprawling, and slightly soulless." According to Edwin Heathcote, in the Financial Times, "This is corporate space for big art, offering no resistance, no grain, no attitude, just endless white walls and tasteful space."
And it came at a cost. DS+R's expansion involved the demolition of Tod Williams Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum building, which had stood on the site since 2001, despite protests from architects and preservationists.
Dissona Live-Work Complex, Guangdong, China, 2021
Worker complexes for laborers in China are known more for sweatshop conditions and worker suicides than for enlightened design. Li Jing Zhou, owner of the handbag company Dissona, hoped to change that with a complex of nearly 1 million square feet that she commissioned to include space for design, management, and manufacturing, as well as housing, entertainment, and dining areas for some 3,000 workers. It aimed, says DS+R, to be "more akin to a college campus than a factory complex."
The facility remains only partly built. All the same, Renfro said in a 2021 interview with Architectural Record, "I'm very proud of it. I'd like to think it's a significant contribution to a building type that is pervasive but that Western architects rarely touch. Chances are you buy something from a factory in the Pearl River Delta every day. But a factory by a Western architect in China -- that has never happened before."