MoMA. Lincoln Center. The High Line. Hudson Yards. Ricardo Scofidio, the renowned architect who died on March 6 at the age of 89, put his mark on New York’s most important cultural icons, past, present and future. For almost 45 years, Scofidio led the firm today known as with his spouse, Elizabeth Diller (Charles Renfro became partner in 2004). In that time, the firm changed how we think about the intersection of art, architecture and public space. A truly trans-disciplinary practice, DS+R describes its breadth as spanning “the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print.”
A soft-spoken man, Scofidio was born to a jazz musician father. Both of his parents were Black, but his father insisted that they were Italian. Scofidio, who told , “I was continually told as a child to be invisible,” credits this personal history with his reticent nature. He met Elizabeth Diller when she was his student at Cooper Union – they began dating and working together after she completed his course. Theirs would be his second marriage, and provided a much-needed second wind to his career.
The firm began with experimental projects: It designed a tension-supported bridge inside the brick vaults of the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage for performances of the commedia dell’arte Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo; its Soft Sell video installation projected sensually speaking lips onto the entrance to the Rialto Theatre on notorious 42nd Street; Bad Press explored new architectures for the ironed white shirt. In 1999, Diller and Scofidio won the MacArthur Genius grant, the first architects to achieve the accolade. But they remained mostly under the radar. Then they captured the public imagination with a commission for the Swiss National Exposition in 2002: The Blur Building, “conceived to be out of focus,” comprised a barely-there tensegrity structure shrouded in a mist of fresh water pumped from Lake Neuchatel and dispersed through 35,000 nozzles.
The ephemeral project put the firm on the map, and in 2006 it completed its first significant permanent building: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. With this triumphant project, the first museum to be built in Boston in a century, DS+R broke the rules. The ICA’s directors wanted the gallery space to be on a single floor, but the site couldn’t accommodate a large enough footprint. So the firm – defying a code requiring a 25-foot water’s edge clearance – projected a cantilevered volume big enough to contain the entire collection over the harbour. A wedge-shaped protrusion on the volume’s underside filled its Mediatheque with the twinkling blue of the water below. Writing about the just-completed project in Azure, David Sokol commented, “It’s fair to say that the ICA represents a pivotal moment for both the institution and the architects. So far, the world has treated DS+R kindly, not only permitting it to build its law-breaking protrusion but also pumping up the firm with huge commissions for New York’s Lincoln Center and High Line elevated park.”
The High Line, of course, would transform Manhattan’s West Side and inspire the world – dozens of similar schemes that spun abandoned infrastructure into new public space would pop up in cities in the years after its first phase was unveiled. Scofidio, working with James Corner Field Operations and Piet Oudolf, led the project for DS+R for 12 years. He told Robert Hammond, a chief executive of the High Line, In the , Scofidio explained that the elevated park shouldn’t have “too many entry points.” He went on to say, “We have a rhythm that looks like a musical composition — a rhythm like a bass drum on every block. Then we try to find places where we can open up views.” In what can now only be read with ironic hindsight, he also described his hope that “it doesn’t become engulfed by developers.”
DS+R, for its part, went on to bigger and more prestigious cultural commissions. They designed the Broad in Los Angeles and retrofitted Lincoln Center and MoMA in New York. The Broad occupies a downtown site near Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. , “The concert hall is a formidable neighbour. We wanted to make something that was more absorptive, perhaps more brittle feeling, that would not compete but would be an interesting counterpoint.” Conceptualized as “the veil and the vault,” DS+R’s building became an instant attraction in its own right.
The firm also went on to design significant buildings for Columbia University, most notably the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. The tower of stacked classrooms and offices makes the internal circulation completely transparent. , Diller explained that by cantilevering the facility’s stairwell outward so that it seems to emerge through the southern facade, “We created an opportunity to encourage students’ movement, and to make that an event for the public to see.” As David Sokol writes, the DS+R team “’pushed and pulled’ at the stair and its oversized landings — known collectively as the ‘study cascade’ — to change their size, shape and orientation from floor to floor.”
Then came Hudson Yards, and DS+R returned to its roots of making magic with performance spaces. While the development has been controversial, the firm’s hallmark there – – is a marvel. Its pillowy ETFE shell, which rolls away from the building to create covered outdoor space for events, exemplifies the practice’s dynamism. It’s a high-tech callback to the first projects – dynamic, ironic, curious and exciting – that consumed Diller and Scofidio’s unparalleled imagination. For Scofidio, the firm’s evolution would come as a surprise. As he told Architectural Digest in 2019, “I’m always a little shocked when people try to make me realize we’re a big firm doing big projects.”
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