Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images 9780226008721

Citation preview

d i l l e r s c o fi d i o + r e n fro

Edward Dimendberg

running h e a d re c to

scofidio +

Architecture after Images

diller

renfro

c h ic ago a nd lond on

u niv e rs ity o f ch ic ago p res s

iii

Edward Dimendberg is professor of film and media studies, visual studies, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, coeditor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, and the principal of Dimendberg Consulting LLC. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in China 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dimendberg, Edward.   Diller Scofidio + Renfro : architecture after images / Edward Dimendberg.     pages. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book) 1. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 2. Architecture—United States. I. Title.  na737.d56d56 2013   720.922—dc23 2012022899 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

frontispiece Diller Scofidio + Renfro, School of American Ballet practice rooms, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Fo r Ly n n e

I m i stru st a l l sy ste m ati z e rs a n d I av o i d th e m. Th e w i l l to a sy ste m i s a l a c k o f i nteg r ity.

friedrich nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Contents

Introduction 1

chapter one  1976–1989 13

chapter two  1990–1999 59

chapter three  2000–2008 127

Conclusion 199 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 209 Index 233

i.1 Diller + Scofidio, Blur, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002. Photograph © Massimo Vitali. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Introduction In the summer of 2002, visitors to the Swiss national exposition in the town of Yverdon-les-Bains donned plastic rain ponchos and groped their way through Blur, an artificial cloud by New York architects Diller + Scofidio. Jutting into a lake and connected to the shore by a walkway, the frame of the building resembled a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome shrouded in fog. Its walls were made of water vapor and breathable. I was as entranced as the fairgoers surrounding me by an experience that provided almost nothing to see and became the principal icon of the expo and a crowdpleaser. Continually shifting shape, Blur provoked that rarest of phenomena in contemporary life, an unclassifiable moment. How does a film scholar come to write a book about an architecture studio? What is its argument? Over the past nine years curious friends and colleagues frequently asked me these questions. Architectural historian Sigfried Giedion claimed in 1928 that “only film can make the new architecture intelligible.”1 As different as the twenty-first-century built environment is from the European modernism of the 1920s that sought to remake the world through mass-produced public housing, reinforced concrete construction, and the aesthetics of transparency and flowing spaces, Giedion’s assertion nonetheless provides a valuable point of entry into the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in which images no longer merely document

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buildings but investigate the visual and spatial realities of the present, as ambitious cinema always has. Like the atmosphere of Blur, these architects make contemporary space intelligible, playful, and unpredictable by controlling how and what we see and cannot see. Even before they produced any work, or perhaps as their first achievement, Elizabeth Diller (born 1954) and Ricardo Scofidio (born 1935) adopted a mode of activity that challenged conventional terminology to encapsulate exactly what they did. Few working in the arena of the built environment have more steadfastly resisted the temptations of embracing a single label than Diller, Scofidio, and, since 2004, their partner Charles Renfro (born 1964).2 Their alternation between distinct professional and cultural languages and media is their great strength and significant contribution as well as the subject of this book. Visiting their projects; looking at drawings, sketchbooks, models, videos, and notes in the archives of the architects; speaking with them and their collaborators, clients, friends, and colleagues; and reading critical commentaries on their work constituted my research for a project that involved inspecting a grove of moving trees in Liverpool, going through customs in reverse at New York’s Kennedy Airport, climbing steps in a public housing project in Japan, and sorting slides in a bathtub in a Manhattan warehouse. Neither a biography of the architects, a complete inventory of their projects, an exhibition catalog, a volume commissioned by the studio, nor a personal selection of my favorite works by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, this study is a critical chronological exploration of the status of images (both moving and still) in their architecture and the transformation of modernism it has brought about. Its narrative unfolds in three chapters treating four decades of activity by the architects, and begins in the 1970s and concludes in 2008, just as the studio received several large commissions that promise, once again, to alter its profile. The most recent projects I consider are their renovations of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts completed in 2011. Space limitations have prevented me from discussing others realized after 2008. Anyone interested in the current activities of DS+R would benefit from visiting the studio website (www. dsrny.com). I consider some achievements of DS+R more successful and significant than others and have written about them accordingly. Yet making qualitative judgments is challenging in the case of architects who work in multiple media. How should one compare a temporary video installation with a museum, a theatrical set with a book, a performance with an exhibition, or a housing project with a restaurant, given their vastly different audiences, materials, aspirations, clients, time frames, and budgets? To address this challenge, at the beginning of each chapter I indicate those accomplishments I regard as most crucial during that decade. This includes unbuilt work for which I have been able to view documentation. Revealing missteps also belong to this story. While recognizing the impossibility of history

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narrating itself and not shirking from criticism and evaluation, I have resisted

of Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro and to present the meaning of their attainments as conclusively settled. Thus, I do not believe that recently finished buildings, projects such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) or their renovations at Lincoln Center, are

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the temptation to draw more than provisional conclusions about the trajectories

the logical culmination of their activities. Fortuitous coincidences and accidents continue to shape their practice, as has a commitment to working on a small scale. If ever there were an architectural history irreducible to a single direction, it is theirs. Wary of imposing an ending on this continually unfolding story, I present it chronologically in the interests of efficiency and to facilitate its retelling by others. Attempting more (or less) when so much of the architecture of DS+R is still relatively new strikes me as premature. A narrative of growing commercialization and alleged abandonment of avantgarde roots (the “sell-out” hypothesis) strikes me as an implausible distortion of the history of the studio. Not only does it overlook the quality and technological innovation in their projects of the past decade, but it also overstates the autonomy of architects in design processes whose outcomes are shaped by collaborators, clients, budgets, sites, and zoning codes. Instead of tracking fidelity to or deviation from a core identity, I analyze the work Diller Scofidio + Renfro realize in different scales and contexts and its changing conceptual and cultural ambitions. Historians must identify turning points, defining actions, and substantial accomplishments, lest they burden readers with a mass of unconnected details. Richard Evans argues (and I concur) that they should puncture myths, demolish orthodoxies, and explode politically motivated narratives that advance spurious claims to objectivity.3 After having been ignored during the first decade of their activities, Diller and Scofidio slowly developed a reputation as architects who emphasized structural elements in Sentinel and explored video surveillance in Para-Site, despite the fact that they also realized conventional buildings. From their earliest projects, they have always worked in multiple architectural modes at the same time. Later, they became known as makers of highly conceptual installations about postmodern culture, a view that ignored their innovative investigations of materials and frequently conflated their scrupulously multivalent projects with advocating theoretical positions. Just as often, commentators have paid short shrift to designers, clients, materials, and budgetary constraints and romanticized Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro as geniuses, paradoxically neglecting their talents at the collaborations necessary to realize their ideas. Recent successes of the studio have also obscured the financial uncertainty and lost competitions that make designing in the cultural sector nerve-wracking and sometimes dispiriting, hardly the glamorous sinecure that media coverage of star architects suggests. I began hearing about Diller and Scofidio in 1990, fourteen years after their collaboration began. In 1994, I encountered Overexposed, a video of office workers filmed through the glass curtain wall of a Manhattan sky-

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scraper (recalling the 1967 film Play Time by French director Jacques Tati) and accompanied by voice-over narration recited by Diller, and found myself challenged and fascinated in equal measure. As I came to know later projects on which Diller + Scofidio worked, such as The American Lawn exhibition of 1998 with its skilful installations of maps, lawnmowers, and video clips from classic films, I began to appreciate the wit, rigor, and elegance of work by the studio. Five years later, I contributed an essay to the catalog of a retrospective held the following year at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first step toward writing this book. The capacity of the studio’s architecture to polarize critical reaction, especially among writers on the visual arts, also struck me. While perfectly acceptable for artist Sherrie Levine to acknowledge the art of Marcel Duchamp or for Cindy Sherman to engage in a dialogue with Hollywood cinema, many critics have begrudged Diller and Scofidio their dialogue with modern art.4 Producing work that freely acknowledges previous architecture and visual culture, yet never lapses into banal pastiche, they disrespect the academic pieties of both modernist and postmodernist cultural criticism, hit nerves, and provoke turf wars. A work such as Soft Sell (1993), a giant pair of talking lips installed in a Times Square movie house that solicits passers-by, seemed to me hilarious, more open to irony and less imbued with its own critical authority than most contemporaneous culture. Filming twenty-four hours of hotel room and office scenes on a set, designing a camera dolly, and displaying the footage on the exterior of a San Francisco convention center, as the studio did for Facsimile (1996–), Diller Scofidio + Renfro are creators of moving images as much as architects. Indeed, Diller has long expressed her desire to direct a feature-length film and has sometimes quipped that her ideal second career would involve relocating to Hollywood and working in the movie business. Alternately a metaphor for splicing, a system of notation, a temporal record, an instance of montage, and a conduit to mass culture, film in its multiple guises is omnipresent in the work of the studio. DS+R do not develop elaborate characters in their videos (the studio never has worked with celluloid) or utilize other films as explicit subject matter. Narrative elements function as props for spatial investigation, which seldom congeal into a full-fledged story and hover between recognizable cinematic genres and a coolly distanced modernism. Diller and Scofidio began to produce video during the 1980s when the VCR (introduced in 1977) was transforming film distribution and exhibition. Today, the DVD and the Internet enable films to be made with ever lower budgets, cable television creates new genres and audiences, and digital technologies allow images to be produced without cameras or objects. Throughout these transformations, the architects continue to produce research-oriented videos and to realize buildings that reveal their interest in moving images as framing devices or as systems of notation akin to architectural

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renderings.

expansive range of their engagement with audiovisual culture: They specialize in body-building, squash, car-racing, baseball, hygiene, androgyny, in the spread of paranoias and pathologies of every kind, American industrial design, demogra-

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An early biographical statement written by Diller and Scofidio suggests the

phy, uniforms, rules of etiquette, medical drawings and devices, medical instruments and probes for any scope. They enjoy eating disorders, day-time TV, commercials, robotics, electronics, computer viruses, automobile culture, airships, cartography, and “drawings unconsciously made by domestic objects.” .  .  . Films and performances of Cocteau, Resnais, Godard, Antonioni, Sergio Leone, Wim Wenders, Greenaway, Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Ruiz, Pina Bausch, Eric Bogosian are their elected choices. Vito Acconci’s body performances and guerrilla art were starting point of their reflection.5 This congeries, conspicuously lacking the names of other architects, could only have been written by cinephiles. Apart from Charles and Ray Eames, who made over 125 short films investigating space and culture and realized multiple screen installations, few figures in architecture and design have more concerned themselves than Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro with moving images and produced as many.6 Although not always immediately obvious, the screen, the frame, and the position of the spectator typically inform how they generate designs no less than the more traditional concerns of client program, budget, site, and building technology. Historically, Diller Scofidio + Renfro occupy an interstitial position that evokes the work of instantaneous photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a subject of their performances EJM 1 and EJM 2 (1998). Film historian Tom Gunning characterizes Muybridge as “a figure poised between paradigms, operating in the ambiguous interval that separates (or possibly joins) different discourses.”7 Like Muybridge, Diller and Scofidio explore duration in a piece such as Travelogues (1992), whose lenticular screens installed in an airport terminal separate and join time, space, and images. Falling somewhere between the older forms of cinema and video and the flood of images on the Internet, YouTube, cellular telephones, and advertising screens, DS+R straddle platforms and operate at the intersection of architecture, art, mass culture, and cultural criticism. Encountering their projects, collecting materials on the architects, and coming to know Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro as people, I became ever more intrigued. So intensely productive a collaboration among a heterosexual couple, a gay man, and a staff of designers who are mostly younger than the architects struck me as unusual in a profession that typically valorizes the romantic ideal of the individual architect. Every project the studio realizes is the product of many hands and minds and extensive group discussions. Although Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro establish the parameters, standards, and values of the studio, the work they produce cannot be easily associated with a single author. Patient and self-effacing, they belie the confrontational stance of their activity and the heated reception it sometimes provokes. Their colleagues, collaborators, and clients—many of

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whom I interviewed during the course of researching this book—tend to be thoughtful and passionate about their involvement with the studio, intellectually curious, and freethinkers themselves. Diller and Scofidio found a small but appreciative audience beginning with their earliest work.8 For nearly twenty years, before receiving significant architectural commissions in the middle of the 1990s, they relied on the funding structure of public art competitions and (mostly European) art biennials. Only toward the end of that decade did the studio obtain some financial stability and hire additional employees beyond a small permanent staff. Even today, the widely publicized art biennials in which it participates and the building competition entries it submits are commonly financial losses. Realizing an economy of scale (or merely breaking even) is difficult when the work is as laboriously conceptualized, obsessively planned, and programmatically varied as that produced by this studio. Writing as a partisan convinced of the integrity and significance of a body of achievements has a long history. My goal in this study is not to present the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro as emblematic of the contemporary spirit of the age, as Giedion maintained about the work of Le Corbusier. Building in the twenty-first century is irreducible to a single direction or technology, and vibrant contemporary design cultures employ many vocabularies on behalf of multiple agendas. Instead, I want to suggest how a unique architecture studio has fused multiple strands of modernism into a distinctive amalgam devoted to the exploration of vision while remaining in productive tension with professional practice, academic culture, and the arts and how, despite often long odds, it has maintained its commitments and realized its ideas in built form. Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro frequently describe their practice as about exploring seeing, and the subtitle of this book, “Architecture after Images,” suggests that among the lessons their creations reveal is that a built environment responsive and responsible to the present necessitates reflecting upon visual forms and their circulation in the contemporary world. “After” implies not merely relations in time but also relations in space, as in “along the surface of, close to,” in which sense this architecture is never far from sight, even when heeding Duchamp’s predilection for “abandonment of visual phenomena, both from the retinal and the anecdotal point of view.”9 For these architects, conceptual thinking and opacity also belong to seeing, understood not as the activity of a single eye but rather as the product of a cyclopean brain. In place of camera tracking, or panning, or editing, Diller Scofidio + Renfro employ windows, walls, and screens to manage continuity and sequentiality and create new realities through juxtaposition. Many of their projects employ glazing as if to place an architectural environment in quotation marks, much like the effect of a long shot in a film. In narrative cinema, montage dissects space and time and assembles shots into unities intended to convey drama and point of view. The media projects of DS+R frequently emphasize relations between

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spatial interiority and exteriority. Few architects working today more subtly and

iconic design for the Slow House (1989), in which a video monitor and a window display a waterfront view and complicate seeing in and through architecture. Approaching buildings as a display surface for images and media messages enjoys a venerable lineage in modern architecture, from Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919–

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effectively investigate these distinctions as, for example, they did in their today

20 designs for the Monument to the Third International, to the 1928 Volharding Building of Jan Buijs, to Oskar Nitzchke’s 1934–36 Maison de la Publicité, to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s 1967 sketch for the National Football Hall of Fame competition, to the proliferation of more recent digitally enabled architectural media screens in the contemporary city.10 For Robert Venturi, architecture as display dates back to the legacy of inscriptions and ornament and demarcates the “decorated shed” buildings he associates with contemporary commercial architecture.11 Although billboards had existed since the early nineteenth century, the technology to display video images in real time on other than a stationary flat surface arrived with the computer technologies of the 1990s. Yet Diller Scofidio + Renfro part ways from the staleness of much contemporary digital art and the already tired form of the architectural media facade that threatens to transform every building surface into advertising. It is striking how, as in the case of Facsimile, an apparently straightforward concept such as the moving screen has proven a challenge to realize, despite, if not because of, continuing advances in technology. At a moment when digital light-emitting diode (LED) display walls are becoming cheaper than steel, the thoughtfulness and resistance to cliché of the architecture of DS+R is tonic. During the 1980s, scholars across the humanities and social sciences questioned many of the certainties about late twentieth-century culture Diller and Scofidio soon would undermine in their practice. Writing in 1980, a year after they founded their studio, anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted the proliferation of “blurred genres” and the metaphor of social life as “text” across the humanities and social sciences.12 Jacques Derrida published his essay “The Law of Genre” that same year and argued for the contamination and cross-fertilization of genres as a precondition for their existence.13 Diller and Scofidio had not read either essay at the time, and no evidence exists that these writings influenced their design process. Nonetheless, they commenced their practice when a reorganization of knowledge underway in universities—if not the redefinition of human beings in the age of biotechnology and computer data systems—had begun to impact art and architecture. Media art, installation art, and moving image–based practices revived and redefined tensions between the visual and the textual throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the first two decades of the existence of the studio. Diller and Scofidio engaged questions of seeing and reading already in place in earlier modernisms. Few architects studied Dadaism and Surrealism more closely, as confirmed by their work on the 1987 performance about Marcel Duchamp, A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hotplate. They also viewed art by their contempo-

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introduc tion i.2 Diller + Scofidio, Vice/ Virtue glasses, 1997. Photograph by Michael Moran. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

raries, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, and Dan Graham.1⁴ To analyze their works is to encounter both older modernist practices and more recent postmodernist ones that the architects fuse into a continually changing idiom. A tendency toward broadening the definition of architecture is fundamental to their work, as in their folded shirt project, Bad Press (1993). Here ordinary men’s shirts are folded and twisted according to a practice of “dissident ironing” that takes the logic of the box, female domestic labor, and conventions of fashion as the basis for a parody and critique of architectural folds. Such a creation suggests that contemporary architecture is always already contaminated and challenges dogmas about the cleanliness and perfection it can provide, as if to show modernism wrestling with itself, caught in the act of thinking, and refusing to be pinned down to a single mode of making objects or definition. Purity and impurity frequently inform their projects, which nonetheless scorn such oppositions, balancing rigor with openness. Gender relations in the built environment also surface as concerns in their architecture, perhaps most famously in the male and female restrooms in the Brasserie (2000), which share a common sink. In lieu of formulating a philosophical credo of a higher synthesis, Diller Scofidio + Renfro produce work that eschews neat divisions, thrives upon contradiction, and discerns promise where others might recoil from the 8

recalcitrant messiness of human and societal conditions. In their proclivity

the most Socratic of contemporary architects. Creating buildings, art installations, performances, books, choreographed dances, photographs, theater sets, video, websites, and consumer objects, they challenge normative modes of design-

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toward dialogue and gravitation toward paradox, they are among

ing architecture and understanding the boundaries among these media. Yet the architects consistently maintain a sense of public address in their work. Each of their projects is self-contained (rather than self-referential) and presupposes no prior familiarity with previous ones. The expertise they assume involves widely shared experiences such as inhabiting domestic space, visiting a museum, traveling by airplane, or observing people in the windows of urban buildings. Master/Slave, an installation of toy robots that undergo x-ray, first exhibited in 1999 at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art and later a centerpiece of a 2003 retrospective in New York, captivated adults and children. Informed by the familiar ordeals of i.3 Diller + Scofidio, Domestic Prophylactics, unpublished sketchbook drawing, nd. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

the airport security line or closed-circuit television surveillance in public spaces, the piece revealed the banal yet troubling “minimal units” of daily life the architects had earlier explored in their investigation of domestic space, the withDrawing Room (1987). It also introduced a predilection for viewing contemporary culture as a system of signs to be read, performed, and, most optimistically, rewritten. Realizing large-scale technologically based multimedia works in which sociocritical commentary and playful aesthetic exploration coexist, the projects of the studio suggest that visual spectacle and modernism need not serve the ends of global capitalist culture.1⁵ Nor do they propound a cult of technology, which the architects systematically analyze and demystify in their work. Although it explores new materials, shifting definitions of the body, and novel modes of architectural transparency and today would be difficult to imagine (if not prohibitively expensive) without the possibilities of design and fabrication afforded by computers, the work of the studio is irreducible to a fascination with hardware and software. Yet neither can it be understood as antitechnological backlash, a nostalgic rejection of digital culture or a blanket endorsement of the superiority of drawing or other modes of making by hand. Each Diller Scofidio + Renfro project involves a “rethinking of the program within the context of our culture and our time.” The architects refuse to establish a hierarchy of their activities and confine themselves to traditional definitions of architecture. In the words of Diller: 9

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If we paid too much attention to borders, we would be playing into the hands of the border patrol. We have always asserted ourselves as architects even though building buildings is just one strand of our production. Architecture is often a target of our critique and sometimes our most effective weapon. Broadly, our interest lies in interrogating spatial conventions of the everyday. The choice of medium is a matter of the right tool for the particular job.16 More than most architects, these practitioners embrace the challenge of revealing how what we see in the built environment is the product of culture, as much as building materials or construction processes. When Diller and Scofidio began their collaboration in 1976, few immediately obvious precedents in the discipline of architecture existed for the work they began making. Their practice does not readily lend itself to the establishment of a genealogy with respect to the work of other architects. John Hejduk, the longtime dean of architecture at the Cooper Union, was a key interlocutor throughout the 1980s. Some of the 1960s and 1970s experimentation by Austrians Coop Himmelblau and HausRucker-Co also suggests a fascination with bodily prosthetics and architectural environments later evident in their work. The collaborations among artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and technologists organized by Swedish engineer Billy Klüver in his Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) are doubtless significant precedents as well.17 No single method for generating designs, solving architectural problems, producing media installations, or intervening in contemporary culture informs the work of DS+R. A continually evolving palette of ideas and materials has always been more central to their production rather than a unity of style. Their path from one project to the next traces an unpredictable zigzag, especially during the 1990s, when they alternated between gallery projects and urban installations. Undeniably talented, they nonetheless have been lucky to find gifted collaborators, adventurous clients, sympathetic curators, and dedicated public art officials to help them realize their works. Less recognized but equally crucial has been the contribution of architectural photographers such as Michael Moran and Iwan Baan, who have helped their projects to reach a global public. Equally challenging is the fundamentally interdisciplinary and multimedia character of their architecture, which impedes its periodization. If in recent years they have designed more buildings, they also continue to work on installations and performances. Yet to present them as total outsiders to architecture is overly romantic and incorrect. Working with budgets, construction codes, and client programs, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have always participated in the disciplinary collaborations without which nothing could get built, even as they have sought strategies to question the premises of building. Their understanding of architecture as involving the display of performers and audiences in space recalls the legacy of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose theatrical and set designs dramatized relations of power, vision, and social identity.18 Diller Scofidio + Renfro are heirs to this tra-

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dition of understanding spectacle and its sensory modes as integral to the built

Their projects also evoke the commitment to formal investigation, synthesis of media, and exploratory performance associated with the German Bauhaus, the most famous school of design in the twentieth century.19 Like these earlier modernists, Diller Scofidio + Renfro seek to integrate other arts (and the learn-

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environment and the architect as a scenographer of private and public realms.

ing curve such experimentation enables) into their architecture. Yet they do not espouse a hierarchy of media or materials and are distinterested in individual creative self-realization. They betray none of the mystical leanings of Bauhaus master Johannes Itten or the strident Marxist views of Hannes Meyer, and their studio never has been a hotbed of ideology. Unlike the Bauhaus, it has functioned as a place of work rather than a school, despite the steady flow of students from Cooper Union, Princeton, and Columbia. Although well known today through high-profile commissions such as the ICA (2006) in Boston and the redevelopment of the campus of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (2011), their studio is far smaller than those of many firms against which they commonly compete and has but a single office in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Influential as teachers, these architects have no obvious disciples or widely quoted manifesto. Respected as thinkers, their writings never have been anthologized in collections of architectural theory. Only a few publications on their work are in print, and no individual scholar (perhaps wisely) has attempted a monograph such as the present one.20 Given the distance separating their earliest work from the contemporary practice of architecture in the age of globalization in which DS+R today participate, analyzing the trajectory of their achievements to date is more than justified as a historical investigation. If the generally favorable reactions to their accomplishments have brought Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro international recognition, especially among academic commentators and architectural journalists, and more recently among the general public, it has not removed them from a hands-on role in the design process. Theirs is a small (though growing) studio by choice, and their status within their profession, shared by practitioners as different as Peter Eisenman, Lebbeus Woods, and Daniel Libeskind, reveals much about the chasm between obtaining publicity and being able to realize designs that are not generic, cynical, or banal. Inside outsiders, or, if one prefers, outside insiders, their rejection of the operative principles of twenty-first-century architecture—a recognizable design signature, a brand identity in the marketplace, and the cult of the personality—is as striking as it is uncommon. Their work instinctively avoids the reassuring, and treats each project as an opportunity for research into materials, client programs, and the institutions of contemporary culture. Traditional approaches to architectural history prove only moderately helpful in analyzing this architecture, which cannot be unified by reference to a predominant building type, mode of construction technology, commission or client profile, or use of materials suited to a specific region. Realized over the course of more than thirty years, it does not evolve in a consistent direction, manifest

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a single style, privilege specific forms, or advance narratives of an emerging national or collective group, avant-garde aesthetic, or technological utopia or dystopia. Sometimes it appears deliberately conceived to throw commentators off track. One may disagree about whether or not the work of DS+R constitutes a unified corpus (Diller and Scofidio have long maintained it does not), or is a string of ad hoc solutions and approaches. Yet the consistency of its concerns is as striking as its success in reflecting on the discipline of architecture and engaging the larger world while escaping hermetic self-referentiality or megalomania. If the creations of these architects are sometimes laconic, they are also improbably upbeat and joyful, full of indirect suggestions about how to live in the contemporary world, constant reminders of the indispensability of humor and irony. The resonance the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro has encountered provides an inspiring reminder that imagination and a commitment to the public realm can triumph over formulaic solutions. My hope is that this study of a still-evolving practice will enable architects, urbanists, students, clients, scholars, and general readers to appreciate the curiosity, intellect, and skill that infuse its activities.

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1976–1989

One An inclination to “blur” traditional genres and media pervaded much of the most ambitious culture produced during the 1970s and 1980s in New York City. Diller and Scofidio clearly learned from the proliferation of video, performance, postminimalist, and installation art, developments they knew well and that constitute a significant frame of reference for understanding their architecture. Inspired by the political ferment of the 1960s, this mixing of cultural forms sought to apprehend the realities of life in advanced industrial societies. Hans Haacke mapped the holdings of New York’s worst slumlords in Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971.1 Martha Rosler combined photographs of the Bowery with captions in her 1981 work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems.2 Different as the aesthetic creeds and contexts of these projects were, they shared a concern with investigating the spaces of everyday life as highly codified social and political systems, that is to say, as languages, for this was the moment when semiology, the study of culture as a system of signs, exercised its greatest influence in the humanities and arts.3 Visual artists in New York encountered the ideas of French semiologist Roland Barthes in translation and engaged with them in their work by the middle of the 1960s.4 Attempts to theorize architecture as a language

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Ch a pte r One

commenced in the 1930s, yet the project of understanding it semiologically was not taken up until 1969, first in the work of Charles Jencks and George Baird, and later by fellow architectural theorists Diana Agrest, Mario Gandelsonas, Geoffrey Broadbent, and Alan Colquhoun.5 Initially, architectural theorists employed the notion of the sign to criticize behaviorist tendencies in the social sciences, according to which the built environment appeared law-governed and amenable to prediction and control.6 Applying the core insight of semiology developed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the conventional or “arbitrary” character of all signs, these critics questioned the imputation of innate meaning to architecture, the ability of science to establish a correlation between space and behavior, and the alleged neutrality of meaning in functionalist styles.7 Diller and Scofidio took seriously the analogy between architecture and language, as their description of the withDrawing Room (1987) as a contribution toward “an oppositional grammar” of “home” and the isolation of the “irreducible domestic unit” suggests.8 Their work of the 1980s extracted signifying elements from architecture to reveal the social character of spatial codes. It drew sustenance from academic discourse in architecture and the visual arts and had a culturally critical thrust, without however advocating or producing utopian alternative spaces, a key difference between their ironic and analytic leanings and earlier experimental projects by Austrian architects Coop Himmelblau or Haus-Rucker-Co. Many artists in New York during the 1970s understood scrutinizing everyday life and displaying their observations in the gallery, the museum, or the performance space as a political gesture.9 They sought to examine how consumerism, advertising, the mass media, culturally sanctioned gender roles, and notions of domesticity maintained relations of control whose naturalness and benign function appeared increasingly dubious.10 As semiology recast avant-garde cinema and the discipline of film studies leached out into the art world, artists, photographers, and filmmakers sought to expose the complicity of culture with political and economic institutions.11 At its most strident, the 1980s fusion of semiology and psychoanalysis, especially in the field of film theory, could become moralizing, suspicious of visual and erotic pleasures in all their guises.12 If Diller and Scofidio had early on recognized the utility of the semiological logic of binary oppositions between signifiers and signifieds, the components of the sign for Saussure, they never became enslaved to this model, and, driven by the constraints and opportunities of each project, they made architecture that was too playful, too enamored with space, design, and creating objects, to conform to theoretical orthodoxy.13 From their location at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the architects occupied an ideal position from which to observe the New York art world. Although they did not exhibit in art venues in the late 1970s, while Diller was still a student and Scofidio had withdrawn from architectural practice while teaching at Cooper, they followed the work of artist Dan Graham

14

with particular interest. His Projections on a Gallery Window, realized at Franklin

seen), projected slides of other gallery spaces onto the lower half of the front window of the exhibition space.14 Investigating the relationship among windows, mirrors, transparency, photography, and the spectator, Graham’s piece sug-

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Furnace from January 2 to January 20, 1979 (a piece that the architects could have

gests how a visual artist working in multiple media engaged issues of space and vision that shortly would emerge as key concerns of these two architects as well. At this time, Diller and Scofidio also attended numerous events at the Kitchen, the leading venue in the 1970s for performance and experimental video located in New York’s Soho. The missing link between their encounter with contemporary art and architecture and their creative synthesis of its tendencies into a distinctive vocabulary soon would emerge in the studio environment they created.

Th i rty- S i x C o o p e r S qu a r e

In their live-in loft at Thirty-Six Cooper Square in the East Village, above the offices of the Village Voice newspaper and across the street from the Cooper Union, Scofidio and Diller spent much of 1980s writing grant applications to finance small architectural projects in public art and experimental theater contexts. They slept in one corner of the space, worked in another, and hired student designers when a project required them, a pattern largely unchanged until 1997, at which time their studio had just one permanent employee. In 2006, shortly before they moved to 601 West Twenty-Sixth Street in West Chelsea, their once nearly empty loft was overflowing with designers at work stations and spilled over onto an additional floor. The very notion of an architectural studio, implying permanence and continuity, does not capture the rhythms of what during the 1980s could better be described as an artist’s atelier. Months, sometimes years, would pass without paid design work or any discussion in print of their activities, during which time Scofidio and Diller taught to earn a living. Supplies and equipment were charged to personal credit cards, and debt grew along with uncertainty about the future. Neither Diller nor Scofidio sought long-term employment in a large professional practice, although Diller once worked briefly for Richard Meier. They preferred independence and commissions whose outcome they could shape. Nor did they turn toward a conceptually driven “paper architecture,” an option embraced by many architects of their generation who were unable to obtain clients and resigned to the likelihood that their drawings would not be built. Scofidio’s earlier practice, Berman, Roberts, & Scofidio, was founded in 1967 and completed numerous buildings in New York State. Its most unconventional project remains an unrealized proposal for Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn completed in 1968 with the artist Hans Haacke, who later proposed leaving “an area ten feet deep between two topographical contour lines uncultivated for the lifetime of the hilly park.”15 In 1972, the office realized the renovation in the Brooklyn park of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, dedicated to those who

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died on British ships during the American Revolution, with landscape architect A. E. Bye. This commission suggests Scofidio’s interest in the relation of memory to the built environment.16 He and John T. Roberts completed a master plan in January 1973 for the Green Camp in northern New Jersey, then owned by Cooper Union.17 Scofidio and Diller initially did not seek projects with larger budgets and more complex programs. Despite their enjoyment of building, they did not care for the profession of architecture. Their commitment to small research-based projects distinguished them from most practitioners in the 1980s, including other self-proclaimed challengers to the status quo such as Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry. During this time, two schools, Cooper Union and Princeton, provided them with contexts in which to exchange ideas and to encounter colleagues and students who became collaborators and key interlocutors. These academic affiliations enabled them to earn a living as well as to shape pedagogy and the profession by their involvement as faculty and by teaching subsequently noteworthy architectural professionals such as Shigeru Ban, Laurie Hawkinson, Paul Lewis, David Lewis, Jürgen Mayer, Lindy Roy, Henry Urbach, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

Th e C o o p e r U n i o n a n d J o h n H e j d u k

Throughout the 1980s, the key institution for the architects was the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where Scofidio taught from 1967 to 2007. Diller studied architecture at Cooper from 1975 to 1979 and taught there from 1982 to 1990. In 1857, inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper established the charter of his school, which to this day runs on the basis of an endowment and admits students on full scholarship through an entrance examination. A major influence on the identity of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture was John Hejduk (1929–2000). He arrived there in 1963 and served as its dean from 1975 until his death. Hejduk drew, painted, and wrote prolifically yet built relatively little. His best-known project is the redesign of the interior of the Cooper Foundation Building, completed in 1974.18 Although a member of “the New York Five”—an implausible grouping of Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves that was promoted by Arthur Drexler, then head of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art—Hejduk exercised his most profound influence as an educator.19 He believed drawing and storytelling were on par with building and inspired many younger architects who were dissatisfied with the commercialization and commodification of architecture, or who perhaps simply could not find clients during the economic recession of the 1980s. Hejduk’s embrace of verbal language (he wrote poetry and prose) and belief that architecture could function poetically and allegorically mattered to numerous architects of the generation 16

of Daniel Libeskind.20 Analyzing the relation of Diller and Scofidio to Hejduk is

and romantic mode of self-expression evident in his work (especially his writing) after 1970, and as time went on increasingly embraced ideas and subject matter that could find no place in Hejduk’s worldview, they nonetheless com-

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more complicated. Although they never accepted the search for transcendence

menced their practice in dialogue with him. All three architects shared a penchant for conceptual polarities, a distrust of closed systems, and a high tolerance, if not a liking, for ambiguity. Hejduk, a voracious reader of literature and a cinephile, introduced detective stories into the Cooper curriculum and perspicaciously analyzed the relation of architecture to the frame of the moving image. He and Diller admired The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), a film whose mystery, visceral impact, and precision either architect would have emulated in design work.21 If certain projects by Diller and Scofidio of the 1980s recall the elegance and laconic quality of Hejduk’s sketches and objects, if not their occasional anthropomorphism, his example as an architect who cared little about making money and devoted his entire career to exploratory research, wherever it might lead, was likely more significant to them. Beginning his career in 1954 at the University of Texas at Austin as one of the so-called Texas Rangers, a group including architects Colin Rowe, Bernard Hoesli, and Robert Slutzky that introduced a rigorous formal analysis of architecture, especially the interwar buildings of Le Corbusier, into a largely moribund curriculum, Hejduk was a contested figure during his time at Texas (he and his fellow innovators lost their jobs two years later) and remained so wherever he taught.22 Deeply charismatic, highly opinionated, and given to delivering elliptical pronouncements about architecture in his trademark Bronx accent, he brought an extraordinary sensitivity toward built form to his teaching. While in Texas, he developed with Slutzky the so-called nine-square problem, a threesquare-by-three-square grid that could be designed in plan or as a model. It became a key element of studio pedagogy at Cooper, even before Slutzky also joined its faculty in 1968. By emphasizing the frame and its elements through which architecture could develop a program and explore the interaction of posts, beams, and walls, the nine-square exemplified a formal geometrical approach to design teaching. Years later, Hejduk acknowledged its transcendental, if not Platonist, roots by noting that “the nine-square is metaphysical. It always was, it still is for me. .   .   . It is one of the classic open-ended problems given in the last thirty years. The ninesquare has nothing to do with style. It is detached: The nine-square is unending in its voidness.”23 Although it effectively revealed weaknesses and half-baked ideas in student design work, this powerful design tool came at the cost of what an architect of a later generation calls “the complete removal of design decisions from both the physical world and a cultural context,” and many teachers later distanced themselves from its self-contained formalism.24 Hejduk cared deeply about how buildings might enfranchise their users and improve the world. A committed modernist, he believed successful architecture reflected on its form, intervened in lived space, and when most effective could

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be poetic and political. As the Texas years receded in time, Hejduk introduced verbal language into his drawings as a means to tell stories, construct allegories, and issue moral judgments. He frequently excoriated the architectural profession and figures such as Philip Johnson, whom he regarded as false messiahs: Either consciously or unconsciously, I’ve determined not to accept the status quo in architecture, whether it’s practice, theory, or whatever the hell it is. I’m a very pragmatic architect; I believe in the idea of program, but not in the antiquated ideas of program where program is paramount. Program not only has to do with building and aesthetics, it has to do with the sociopolitical aspects of a world.  .  .  . You know what I am getting at? In other words, there are programs today that still maintain their authenticity, but there are other programs now that shouldn’t be around at all. They serve no function. An eighty-story, block-wide high-rise office building is an antiquated program for our time. There’s just no use for it.25 Scofidio taught studio at Cooper, sometimes in tandem with his colleague Tod Williams, with whom he published an essay on studio pedagogy. Its emphasis on developing formal skills in students echoes the philosophy of the school presented in the several editions of the book Education of an Architect.26 If Scofidio occasionally alluded to the shape of his 1964 Porsche 356C in a design, more often he found professional practice frustrating. By the time he began his relationship with Diller, who took a studio with him in 1977, he had contemplated giving up architecture and was increasingly disenchanted with the politics of it. His impact as a teacher was tremendous, and Mike Webb, with whom he cotaught fourth-year studio, claims, “No architect I ever met or had listened to in a studio had Ric’s tough, rigorous mathematical approach to architectural design.”27 Studying in a small school run by an architect as opinionated as Hejduk inevitably affected young architects forming their identity. Other Cooper faculty such as Raimund Abraham and Peter Eisenman contributed to an atmosphere of rivalry in which students took sides. Diller began her studies as a photography major, and perhaps for this reason she came to architecture with a certain distance and fared better than many of her fellow students in retaining her creative autonomy. Writing some years later when already on the faculty at Cooper, she acknowledged Hejduk’s authority in a revealing manner: “Just as his statements must be interpreted, surfacing as they often do through the riddle and parable of the raconteur, his strategy to nurture the independent mind of both student and teacher is equally indirect. It is Hejduk that constitutes the school’s most subtle and pervasive paradox: for, he is a leader that cannot be followed.”28 Williams remembers Diller’s growing distance from Hejduk over the course of her studies and agrees with Diller’s own assessment that Hejduk’s direct impact upon her while a student was minimal.29 Scofidio was closer to Hejduk and enjoyed a warm friendship with him.30 The student work Diller completed at Cooper defies easy categorization and

18

presents formal and social concerns very different from those that Hejduk intro-

years ahead of Diller and later dean at Princeton where he hired her, remembered Hejduk being deeply shaken by the Kent State riots and the political transformations of the early 1970s.31 It was at this moment that Hejduk broadened

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duced during his early years as dean. Architect Ralph Lerner (1949–2011), several

the approach of the school and hired faculty such as Abraham, who introduced a more intuitive and lyrical approach to form making than the modernist precepts of Richard Meier, who taught at Cooper from 1963 to 1973. Slutzky eventually moved to the School of Art after a disagreement with Hejduk about the direction in which the School of Architecture was heading. Diller’s senior thesis of 1979, “Twin Houses for One Resident,” reveals her considerable draughtsmanship. A drawing from it exhibited in a June 5–23, 1984, group show, Detail: The Special Task; An Exhibition of Works by Women Architects, presents the attic window and piano nobile window from adjacent but nonidentical houses for one resident.32 Her brief describes a client with strong aesthetic desiring border on the irrational (who else but someone fascinated by dualities would build, inhabit, clean, and maintain twin houses?) and reveals a palpable fascination with joints and the meetings of architectural surfaces. The project hovers between a meditation on process and affect and a step toward realizing ideas in built form, tendencies one also could discern in Abraham’s own work. It concretizes Diller’s retrospective assessment of Cooper as a school where “the distinction between representation and the represented collapsed entirely. The physical properties of the drawing, the ultrathin space of the drawing surface, and the new strategies of architectural notation defined the school’s agenda.”33 “Twin Houses” is also among the earliest instances of doubling in Diller’s work, an idea that obsessed her and would return in the design work she and Scofidio realized over the coming decades. Yet she also produced three-dimen1.1 Elizabeth Diller, Chair, Loosely Termed, 1976. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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sional pieces that were formally outrageous by prevailing Cooper standards. A good example of this tension is her 1976 Chair, Loosely Termed in which she filled bags with cotton and sand and tethered them by ropes to a poplar frame. The chair could be stacked on a frame created by taught ropes, held in place by wooden “nails” or positioned directly on the floor. Its frank horizontality, which makes it more akin to a chaise lounge than a piece of upright furniture, challenges the presumption of verticality associated with the chair, the first design to which architects usually turn when they attempt a piece of furniture. Typically, chair designs emphasize structure over material, stasis over mobility. Here Diller reverses the standard equation and creates a form that not only conforms to the body of the occupant rather than vice versa but is flexible, process-oriented, and indeterminate. Recalling the organic shapes and materiality of works by Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, Diller’s chair, produced in her third year at Cooper, is a design solution that suggests just how far architectural pedagogy at the school had traveled since the early 1970s. Lerner observed that “if I had drawn a sandbag in my first year at the school, I would have been thrown out.”34 Diller tried her hand at cinema in her second year in Scofidio’s studio, making and later destroying in a pique the only copy of a film, shot in the mode of Andy Warhol, of herself eating an orange. Whether or not this was an epiphanic moment, it suggests that autobiographical expression, conspicuous among women artists in New York during the 1970s, was a creative option she decisively rejected at this time. Indeed, in her collaboration with Scofidio an ever more pronounced removal of their own bodies from the promotion of their practice becomes evident and suggests their distancing themselves from the celebrity culture of architecture. Not many practitioners in a field as dominated by star culture would publish a text called “Autobiographical Notes” and divulge almost nothing personal but provide detailed information about the computer graphic systems utilized in performances.35

Th e V i l l a Rotu n d a a n d “S a d o -M a s o c h i sti c ” Fu r n itu r e

Although the best-known early collaborations of Diller and Scofidio are art projects and conceptual investigations, their first project together was a littleknown 1976 submission to the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition sponsored by the magazine Japan Architect.36 Entitled “The Villa Rotunda,” the design of a recognizably Palladian country house provided an opportunity to explore “the meeting of four different views” through the alternation of sections and elevations.37 Most striking about the design is its juxtaposition of perspectives and contraction of the horizon to reestablish the original views. As Scofidio later recalled: The project was based on the fact that each elevation of the villa originally faced a different 20

landscape giving each identical façade a unique reading, making them no longer identi-

landscapes necessary to hold that original idea. Our solution was to defend the villa. I think the competition was to design a house at an intersection.38

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cal. In the 60s, the urban/suburban sprawl surrounding the villa was erasing the 4 different

The design (which tied for third place in the competition) is more rooted in a Palladian architectural style than anything the architects would ever again attempt, yet it suggests their commitment to exploring urban, landscaping, and perceptual issues at a moment when the appropriation of historical forms under the banner of postmodernism was on the rise. In 1981, Diller showed a drawing in the Window, Room, Furniture exhibition that Scofidio and Williams curated at Cooper.39 It depicted shadows moving across a combined room and drafting board, a demonstration that she could investigate subtle shifts in light and perception that preoccupied artists such as James Turrell.40 Not all of her work was so sedate, and soon her design for a second chair gained attention. Progressive Architecture magazine held a “conceptual furniture competition” that same year, and Diller’s entry struck a raw nerve with New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who devoted the single longest description in his review to it: More unusual, visually, is the sofa/chair by Elizabeth Diller, with assistance from Ricardo Scofidio, which is described as “a pile of bags on leashes that can be assembled on a bed of wooden nails into anything to sit in, for comfort or cruelty.” This may be the first genuine piece of sado-masochistic furniture ever designed; once again, the issue here is much more than mere comfort. It is that not only has this design gone so far from function, it seems also to have gone far from any conventional esthetic purpose that a piece of furniture might express. It is about the interplay between the forms of the dacron-filled bags, their ropeleashes, and the bed of wooden nails, and its lessons would have been better conveyed by pure sculpture.41 If Goldberger is the first critic to interpret the work of Diller and Scofidio as violent and confrontational, he is hardly the last to have overlooked its ironic and humorous qualities. Many designers, especially those aspiring toward “conventional esthetic purpose,” have inadvertently designed chairs as comfortable as sitting on a bed of nails and no more aesthetically pleasing. Recognizing the power over the body and movement implied by all design, Diller and Scofidio give us an anti-chair, part Dadaist gesture in the manner of Man Ray’s clothing iron with tacks, Cadeau (1921), and part exploration of materiality. Entitled Chair for the Condemned Man, it departs from Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”42 This reluctance to impose a normative definition of the body, a one-size-fitsall approach to architecture, informs many of their projects of the 1980s.43 If this renders their work occasionally exasperating, one might well reflect on Duchamp’s adage that “it is better to project into machines than to take it out on people.”44 Violence in this architecture entails an assault on conventions, not on

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1.2 Diller + Scofidio, Colorlab Building, Elmsford, New York, 1981. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

human beings, a distinction Diller and Scofidio continually respect that nonetheless sometimes escapes overly literal critics. Determining when their architectural practice begins is complicated, for it commenced, as do many careers in architecture, with a series of interior remodeling jobs. Realized with precise detailing but with little sense of any larger project at stake, the Hochman House (1987), Duffy House (1986), and Delsener Office (1984) convincingly demonstrate that the architects designed elegant and quiet interiors (and an especially beautiful kitchen in the case of Hochman renovation). These commissions are most plausibly understood to make up the prehistory of the studio. In 1981, the couple realized several architectural works of greater formal complexity and promise. Least known among these is the Colorlab plant in Elmsford, New York, whose pitched roof, dictated by the program of realizing a plant for film processing, is a rare instance of quasiexpressionist formal repetition in their work. Intriguingly nonformulaic, nothing about this design reflected on seeing or images, concerns that prove central to their next project.

Th e K i n n ey P ly w o o d H o u s e

Two years after founding their practice, Diller and Scofidio realized the Kinney Plywood House, a weekend residence in Westchester County, in 1981. They built it on an existing foundation with a budget of $45,000 received as an insurance settlement to replace the previous house that had burned to the ground. The new house utilized a standardized 4' × 8' plywood panel system into which standard 22

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1.3 Diller + Scofidio, Kinney Plywood House, Westchester County, New York, 1981. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Pella casement windows were inserted. These ordinary materials suggest a common single-family residence. Yet its precise fenestration captures attention, and the number of windows appears excessive for a house so small. Even more striking is the alternation of single and double windows on the eastern side of the house, and the regularity of the windows on the northern side, which establish a palpable formal rhythm, an echo of the nine-square problem, if not a sequentiality one might associate with motion picture film strip. That the architects designed their plywood structure on the foundation of a destroyed house suggests the problematic of the double, if not haunting, later discerned by their critics. The interior of the house is unrelated to its free façade. Diller and Scofidio describe it as “the result of the meeting of a non-specific serial strategy on its exterior surface and the conflicting programmatic demands of the interior.”45 From the inside, it becomes clear that the windows are located too high to open easily. Their position is somewhat illogical along a stairway hidden against a wall. A fireplace is nearly at the center of the living room, and its chimney runs through a parallel flight of stairs leading to the second-floor bedroom and bathroom. With the exception of the dividing walls of the bedroom, the house is almost entirely open space. Although well executed, sensitively detailed, and constructed with the tiniest of budgets, the Kinney House initially elicited relatively little commentary.46 In 1984, three years after its completion, it found an enthusiastic champion in Hejduk. Writing in the Italian architecture journal Lotus, he claimed, 23

Ch a pte r One

This house inquires into the very nature of “window,” not as an opening to the outer world, but as opening into our inner core. The house facade acts as a mask which hides a depth (a depth of 8 inches, the depth from the surface of our eyeballs to the rear of our cerebellum). As we look at this haunting, lonely elevation, we are in fact plummeting, by a circular reflection into our own thoughts .  .  . and for this an inner magic begins. I believe Poe to be an inhabitant of this gray house.47 Hejduk becomes the first critic to apprehend the architecture of Diller + Scofidio as not simply a means toward realizing a client program but as a space of perceptual investigation. What interests him about the Kinney House is how its windows access psychic interiority, rather than the external world. He reads these windows in relation to masks, façades, vertiginous fall, and the figure of Edgar Allan Poe. In his romanticist interpretation, Diller and Scofidio emerge as heirs to a modernist tradition associated with Adolf Loos, for whom “the house does not need to tell anything to the exterior” and the facade serves as a mask that protects its inhabitants from a corrosive urban gaze, the public domain of monetary exchange.48 As the Viennese architect told Le Corbusier, “A cultivated man does not look out of the window; his window is a ground glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.”49 While the Kinney House validates the Loosian modernist account of the window as an opening in a mask, in Hejduk’s reading it promotes a premodern theory of vision. If, as visual culture historian Anne Friedberg argues, the window is primarily a framing device in the work of Alberti and a trope of skepticism in Descartes, for Hejduk it provides unmediated access to the inner world.50 Recalling the popular proverb “the eye is the window of the soul,” attributed to American sculptor Hiram Powers, the Kinney House emphasizes the extent to which vision for Hejduk is ecstatic and spiritual, a respite from renaissance perspective and Cartesian epistemology.51 Numerous details of the interpretation advanced by Hejduk remain unspecified. On whose inner core do the windows open out? In a skillful sleight of hand, he omits the ocular term in the triad eye-window-soul, a telling reminder of the unspecified viewer of his reading. Must one see the elevation, and thus be outside the house, to enjoy enhanced introspection, or can someone looking from the inside toward the outside world gain a similar effect? And if staring at the elevation throws the viewer back “by a circular reflection into our own thoughts,” are the windows in the house actually mirrors? Although Hejduk’s essay provides no clarification of these points, and Diller and Scofidio never appear to have embraced his phenomenological interpretation of the house, it does introduce the notion of “circular reflection,” the fluidity of meaning associated with the hinge in the work of Duchamp, that would become increasingly significant in their own work. More remarkable still is Hejduk’s reading the project within the typology of the nineteenth-century small

24

wood house constructed from standardized building elements by unemployed boat carpenters. He writes,

wood house can be found in Yonkers, Croton, Albany, Rochester, Buffalo, and other places of that sort. It is authentic.

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This type of house was not to be found anywhere but in America. The canal carpenters

Scofidio and Diller’s Kinney House is authentic and it is profound, for it has re-captured elements of the above without historic recall. Scofidio and Diller have impacted .  .  . the idea of “mask/masque” in a modern way. Their mask/masque covers stilled time, for its physicality has no past, no future .  .  . only present.52 Hejduk praises the house precisely for its ability to realize what Aldo Rossi, writing about the same time, lamented as the principal failure of modern architecture: its inability to realize a valid historical synthesis.53 Poised on the razor’s edge between the ordinary and the transcendent, memory and presence, timelessness and temporal specificity, physicality and ideality, European and American, for Hejduk, the Kinney House demonstrates how contemporary architecture can locate itself within tradition while creatively adapting precedents to new conditions.

Tr a ffi c

Diller and Scofidio obtained their first opportunity to work on the scale of the city in their 1981 piece Traffic, the winning entry for a public art competition sponsored by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Founded by architect Peter Eisenman and operating from 1967 through 1985, the institute sponsored classes and a lecture series, and remains best known for publishing a book series and the journal Oppositions, both significant venues for critical architectural thought at the time. Less well known and marginal with respect to the interests of Eisenman and Philip Johnson was its “Revisions” program. Scholar Joan Ockman and architect Christian Hubert launched it in 1981 with funding from the young architect Walter Chatham. Anticipating subsequent discussions of the urban future of Columbus Circle, including a 1985 proposal from Moshe Safdie to build two enormous skyscrapers, the ideas competition, juried by Christian Hubert, historians Joan Ockman and Mary McLeod, and architect Deborah Berke, received numerous entries reflecting postmodern views of the city, alternatives to the large buildings eventually constructed there. The competition had no formal brief. Hubert remembers that the visually arresting drawing with its vivid colors submitted by Scofidio and Diller captivated the jury. Scofidio suggests that the unpretentiousness of the design and its refusal to appear as a building explain its selection. He and some assistants gridded out the circle and determined the locations for traffic cones, which he and friends began collecting at 4 a.m. the previous days across the tri-state area. An early rendering of it in color depicts five bands organized along an east-west axis, a different

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1.4 Diller + Scofidio, Traffic, Columbus Circle, New York City, 1981. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

scheme from the final installation of the cones along a north-west axis. Installed for twenty-four hours, the piece deployed 2,500 traffic pylons four feet apart in vertical lines, with gaps for traffic lanes, around the monument at the center. To perceive the patterns formed by the pylons and the relation of the plaza to surrounding architecture, one must occupy an elevated spatial position. The optimal viewing location for the piece was from the concave balcony of the Huntington Hartford Museum of Art (also known as the Gallery of Modern Art) at Two Columbus Circle, designed by Edward Durrell Stone in 1960, and memorably dubbed a “die cut Venetian Palazzo on lollipops” by Ada Louise Huxtable.54 At the end of the day, the participants scurried around Columbus Circle to gather up the cones and returned to the Hartford Gallery for a reception. Photographs of the installation suggest the bright orange cones engaged in a dialogue with the colors of the surrounding city, which the architects later describe on their website as comparable to how snowfall “veils unlike things.” The “cohesive landscape” that “visually fuses the six discrete islands” created by the cones intimates the sensitivity to context and small gestures that later would emerge as significant elements of the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Questioning norms and creating a space for bodily performance proved central to their next project.55

S e nti n e l

The arts organization Creative Time commissioned Sentinel in 1983 for the “Civic Plots” performance held on landfill later transformed into Battery Park 26

City.56 “Art on the Beach,” as the festival became known, took place every sum-

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1.5 Diller + Scofidio, Jim Holl, and Kaylynn Sullivan, Sentinel, Battery Park City, New York City, 1983. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

mer from 1978 to 1985 and generated considerable excitement as a venue for viewing temporary site-specific art installations.57 Today, the future of this area, a few blocks from Ground Zero, is bound up with the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In the early 1980s it possessed a similarly provisional character while awaiting subsequent construction. Collaborating with artists Jim Holl and Kaylynn Sullivan, Diller and Scofidio created a work simultaneously architectural and sculptural, theater, costume and building, and performance set rolled into one. Conceived as they leaned against a car in the street, the project sought a dialogue with the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It “reflected the monolith” of architecture as a “sentinel of wealth and power,” as Sullivan recalls.58 Four steel plates are vertically arranged around the perimeter of a square. Inside, a performer occupies a mask flush mounted with the surface and a glove extending from it. Just below the vertical notches at the top of each plate, a horizontal beam about one-quarter from the top extends through the piece. At one end is a lever, and at the other end a cone pendulum dangles from a pulley and wire. Perpendicular to this, a C channel beam protrudes at a 45-degree angle. A beam connects to a funnel roof, and black sand falls through the suspended cone. The piece evokes one of Diller’s studio teaching assignments at Cooper in which students designed balance mechanisms, a type of project that could well

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have been inspired by her teacher Raimund Abraham. Here, the falling of sand “activates its arm to signal the passage of intervals of time” and becomes an architectural equivalent of an hour glass.59 Holl recalls it more as an exploration of “relational aesthetics” than architecture. Although initially Diller and Scofidio had worked together and collaborated on Sentinel, at this moment she felt the need to discover her own voice.60 Sullivan sometimes sang workers’ songs from inside the structure. The two performances that Holl and Sullivan realized, If the Shoe Fits and Time Is Money, involved burying objects (shoes, money, watches) for which visitors could dig in the sand and aspired toward “an equitable exchange with the audience.”61 Constructing a heavy steel structure on a bed of sand with a minimal budget was a significant challenge that Diller met by designing a foundation of four independent panels without corners joined above grade by a beam. Formally, Sentinel resists classification. Its frank anthropomorphism, “suggesting a male elevation of the north and a female elevation to the south” is confirmed by the hanging breastlike pendulum. Beams resembling spread arms bent at the elbow joints, and the dangling phallic C beam through which flow the sands (or seeds) of time, differentiate the piece from minimalist sculpture. A black box, at whose right angles the city penetrates, Sentinel was not unlike a suit of armor, an early manifestation of Diller’s interest in prosthetics but also a timepiece and a stage. Largely ignored by art critics, a telling indication of the tenuous connection of Diller and Scofidio at that time to the art world, it found a more sympathetic response among architectural critics. Historians Kenneth Frampton and Michael Kagan described it in a French publication as a Leonardo da Vinci sketch for a machine realized four centuries later by IBM.62 Diller herself cited the work of Hejduk as the most significant formal precedent, a claim she would never make about her subsequent designs.63 Indeed, his predilection for elemental geometric volumes that often evoke faces, fascination with mechanical parts, and talent for architectural narrative suggest his work as a key point of reference. In Sentinel, the mask that Hejduk understood as metaphor for the facade of the Kinney House is actually present. The unbounded vision he ascribed to its windows operates here as two eyes behind a slit and a glove, for which reason Sentinel may be the closest the work of Diller and Scofidio ever approached to Hejduk’s own “medieval surrealism.”64

G ate

Diller and Scofidio returned to Battery Park City the following summer with a commission to design an entrance structure for “Art on the Beach” they entitled Gate.65 Two entry kiosks formed by steel perforated plates are vertically mounted in a frame. Hinged foldable canvas sun roofs shade the employees. Metal storage bins stand in back of them. Two black-and-white windsocks mounted on 28

masts introduce a hint of frivolity into what seems a fully armored structure.

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1.6 Diller + Scofidio, Gate, Battery Park City, New York City, 1984. Photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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Windows recessed into each plate, behind which sit cashiers, heighten the tension. Transparency facilitates the receipt of money from visitors. A prism counter on one side and a metal change bowl on the other double the activity. Recessed behind the perforated steel surface, the top windows are encased and separated from the visitor. As the viewer recedes, the scene in the background comes into focus. Safety glass is set in each of the bottom windows. In both instances the choice of materials transforms the most common function of the window from a transparent visual portal facilitating access to the external world to a frame that acknowledges, if not produces, distance. Seeing, typically associated with enhanced knowledge, here signifies confinement and constraint. Visitors proffering their cash confront a visual hypertrophy, the prism to the left or the metal cash bowl to the right, in which reflections of eyes, pebbles on the ground, safety glass, and particle board exacerbate the distance between them and the cashiers. It is as if the structure composed a film projection booth in reverse, animated by the gaze of the viewer. Joining these two surfaces creates an architecture that is edgy, literally and metaphorically, thanks to the formal bisection of the half sphere by the plane of glass where the transaction occurred. Gate suggests a raw yet sophisticated handling of materials and tectonic details that would emerge as a prominent characteristic of architecture by DS+R, together with an attempt to evade categorization. The entire structure exudes a hyperbolic quality, spartan yet protected, as much ironic gesture as building. It revels in the austerity and reduction of single words, both in its title and in the entry and exit signs. As if deliberately spurning Hejduk and the transcendental vision he discerned in the fenestration of the Kinney House, the architects here design windows leading not to the soul but to more prosaic (and barbed) ends of commerce.

A m e r i c a n M y ste r i e s a n d Th e M e m o ry Th e ate r

Constructing spaces for performance was a logical next step for the architects given their positive experience with Sentinel and continued fascination with seeing and relations of voyeurism.66 Actor and director Matthew Maguire wrote and directed American Mysteries (1984), on which Diller and Scofidio collaborated. A work of experimental theater, a hybrid of film noir conventions and philosophical meditations on language and the body, the play includes a detective, a femme fatale, and sundry murder victims, all of whom figure in its condemnation of capital punishment. Maguire describes his approach in words that evoke those of the architects: “Formalism yields emotion through obsession; a hypercontrolled frenzy triggers my work. Formalism is just a tool; I reject it because it is reductive. I embrace it because it contains the beauty of precision.”67 His concerns with performance and the differences between seeing and reading provided a fruitful basis for collaboration with the architects. Indeed, Maguire studied for a short 30

time at Cooper with Abraham.

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1.7 Diller + Scofidio, set design for American Mysteries by Matthew Maguire, produced by Creation Production Company at La MaMa E.T.C., 1983, presented by the Walker Art Center at the Southern Theatre, 1984. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Matthew Maguire and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Diller and Scofidio designed the set as a seven-foot hinged cube, a variation on the nine-square, within whose four-side panels the action alternately transpires. Initially, it forms back and side walls and encloses the action within a room. Later it transforms into a flat grid on which the characters walk. The architects created nine separate rooms for the nine acts of the play, with the central square, typically the locus of greatest realism in perspectival renderings (including the film screen), identified with fiction. Diller and Scofidio cut a window in the rear panel into which they inserted a screen for the rear projection of film images, marking the first appearance of moving images in one of their designs. In a particularly energetic scene, the panels ascend and descend with pulleys and sandbags, suggesting their metamorphosis from walls into wings. If one of the conceits of the nine-square was the presentation of static formal relations, here it injects geometry with the fourth dimension of time and makes space malleable and indeterminate. That same year, they drew a project entitled Balance that explored a similar idea. It began in a series of sketches of a juggler of gravity, in which a body was suspended in a state of equilibrium from eleven points through an elaborate mechanism of pulleys, sandbags, and hinges, inspired by the bodies hanging in space in the film Coma (Michael Crichton, 1978). Writing in an unpublished description of American Mysteries, the architects call it an attempt to “fuse drama, music, architecture and film into a total theatrical experience” and acknowledge their aspirations toward realizing a Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art for which composer Richard Wagner strived.68 Over the course of their careers, they would oscillate between embracing this aesthetic of spectacle and its apparent opposite, an anti-illusionism that reveals vision and its objects.69 Sometimes, as in Blur, these seeming antitheses appear in the same project and suggest their willingness to push their work and audience in unorthodox directions, toward oxymoronic forms of spectacular antispectacular architecture and performance in which ideas assume a dramatic role.

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A second collaboration with Maguire on The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo provided another opportunity to explore theater architecture. The site of the play, that ran from June 18 to June 25, 1986, was the Anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, an inspired choice for a drama about mysticism, lapses in memory, and architectural proportion. Maguire had read The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates, the standard history of Camillo and the synthesis of classical Ciceronian memory theory, Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, and Vitruvian precepts realized in his Renaissance memory theater.70 As he noted in the proposal he had sent to the architects soliciting their participation: The play will be a formalist collage of the psychological thriller and the cabalistic work of the Renaissance memory theatre. Giulio Camillo was one of the most famous men of the 16th century. Through the patronage of the King of France he created a theatre which contained secret powers. Whoever entered the theatre would emerge with a memory of all the knowledge of the world.  .  .  . The Brooklyn Anchorage is a perfect site for this play. Architecturally it is that part of Roebling’s bridge where the great suspension cables of the bridge are anchored in the earth. It is comprised of eight separate barrel vaulted chambers, all brick and stone, all of different sizes and set at different angles, each with an overwhelmingly medieval quality. I will use the anchorage as Camillo used his memory theatre, as an architectural model of the inner chambers of the mind. The play will create a body of images, the memories. The audience as it moves through the eight chambers will be experiencing the mind of Camillo by literally walking through his memories.  .  .  . With this piece, 1.8 Diller + Scofidio, Juggler of Gravity, 1984. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

my ongoing exploration between theatre and architecture has a very fertile ground.71 Initially, Diller + Scofidio proposed constructing two rooms, one above the other, with the lower “experienced in changing perspective while the upper will be understood in plan.”72 This is the earliest written mention by the architects of a space with multiple perspectival modes, later a key strategy of A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate and the withDrawing Room. Although they did not realize this bicameral spatial concept, a metaphor for the halves of the brain, their emphasis upon dynamic opposition subsequently attained simpler and more direct form. Without explicitly mentioning a suspension bridge, the architects’ initial proposal underscores that “the power of complementary structural conditions of direct load bearing is posed against suspension, (their combination also comprise the structural innovation of the Brooklyn Bridge).”73 Maguire invited eight teams of architects to design sets in the eight vaults of the Anchorage within which the play was staged. He recalls that Diller and Scofidio opted for the central chamber with the highest vault, already selected by the team of sculptor Elyn Zimmerman and her collaborator George Palumbo.74 Diller and Scofidio constructed two objects, a suspension bridge that connected two sides of the room and a gridded shelf that hung from a wall in the background. The bridge contained eight constituent parts: four cables tensioned to compress four rigid members against the Anchorage walls. No mechanical con-

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nections fastened it to the masonry, and the wondrous elegance of its construc-

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1.9 Diller + Scofidio, Bridge (Synapse), set design for The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo produced by Matthew Maguire, Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, New York City, 1986. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

tion becomes even more striking when one notices the gap where the cantilevers meet. Against the wall, a nine-square oriented vertically provided a frame for cipher words intended to evoke the world. Maguire understood his theater production as a political gesture, noting in the script “a meditation upon memory is necessary for the present moment: a time in which America is slipping again into a moral amnesia and the accompanying degradation of language is like an epidemic of aphasia.” Appearing during the second half of the Reagan presidency, this exploration of memory lapses (at

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one point the architects called their bridge Synapse) sought to focus attention on the visit on May 5, 1985, by the president to the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where forty-nine members of the SS are buried.75 For Maguire, the contribution of Diller and Scofidio helped “to find the spatial reality that resonates/emanates with the theme.”76 Explaining the gap in the bridge, they call it a “Janusian moment, a location that is no longer here but not yet there. .   .   . A gap between the two cantilevers can only be spanned by the body; the bridge is consummated by the human stride.”77

Windo ws

While a student, Diller made a piece entitled Mirror Piece with Backing Rubbed Off Half consisting of a mirror, on half of whose surface she had scraped away the tain to reveal wires and hardware. A three-dimensional diagram recalling minimalist and conceptual works by Robert Morris, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Robert Smithson, it examines the quintessential trope in romanticism and modernism—the mirror—whose meanings range from self-knowledge to skepticism.78 Exposing construction and material support, it vividly evokes the work of Duchamp, especially the laborious scraping of his Large Glass in his New York apartment.79 Hung vertically from a wall like a painting, Diller’s “mirror piece” was still two-dimensional. A move to three-dimensional form would shortly occur in the Three Windows project she and Scofidio exhibited at the XVII Milan Triennale from March 30 to June 18, 1986. Georges Teyssot, Diller’s future colleague at Princeton whom she and Scofidio had met two years earlier, curated The Domestic Project exhibition.80 Three Windows consisted of three freestanding wood frames supported by cables connected to floor beams and positioned on axis, actualizing the window in varying architectural forms. In the exhibition catalog text, neither a set of procedures for making the work nor a physical description of it, the architects outline an unusual series of definitions: The window reconciles the original violation of the wall. The window excludes the inside and the window excludes the outside. The window is a legal limit that tempts the uninvited. The window is an apparatus that conspires with other machines to homogenize weather. The window resists horizontal load and breeds dust. The window is a section cut through light on which opposing elevations are projected. The window is a solid whose penetration leads out of all reference to place and time. The window is the moment when vanishing point and vantage point converge. The window is a slow liquid, a “delay in glass.”81 Although Diller had rejected representing her own body, she and Scofidio, in a 34

bow to Duchamp, devised a more radical strategy in which architecture itself,

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1.10 Elizabeth Diller, Mirror Piece with Backing Rubbed Off Half, ca. 1979. Photograph by Elizabeth Diller. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

here the window, would manifest its spatial and cultural identity. Although not couched in the first person, this text evokes what the Oxford philosopher of language J. L. Austin described as a “performative.” By this he meant that “when we state something or describe something or report something we do perform an act which is every bit as much an act as an act of ordering or wanting.”82 Diller and Scofidio do not attend in their statement to traditional architectural concerns of material, construction, or realization of an aesthetic ideal. They instead propose architecture as an act of cultural performance and highlight the tension between stating its properties and realizing them in any number of possible forms (spoken, written, rendered, built).83 Performance comes to assume a key role in the work of the architects, not as the occasion for autobiographical revelation or demonstrating mastery of drawing or construction but as a vehicle for narrating architecture, the possibility of extracting stories from and about the built world. Whether actually performing their work or presenting it, DS+R approach space itself as shaped by conflict and drama. In the urban window, transparent glass is replaced with a copper handling system that also contains a viewing mechanism and an antenna. By contrast, the suburban window contains an electric eye and a steel blade to mark divisions between public and private. The rural window separates the glass and frame to explore the relation of vantage point and vanishing point. All three contain

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detailing that protrudes beyond their wooden panels into the gallery space, and the elaborate drawings D+S prepared suggest the play between representation in plan and section, dramatized in the suburban window with its stereoscopic mirrors, as a key problem of the investigation.84

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1.11 Diller + Scofidio, Three Windows, exhibited at “The Domestic Project,” XVII Milan Triennale, 1986. Photograph © Eredi di Luigi Ghirri. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Luigi Ghirri and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro.

A D e l ay i n G l a s s , o r Th e Rota ry N ota ry a n d H i s H ot P l ate

The Duchampian viewing machine implied by Three Windows became fully manifest in the 1987 experimental theater work A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, directed by Susan Mosakowski, as part of a trilogy on Duchamp. Mosakowski, a writer and director whose plays and performances frequently take the arts as their subject matter, had for some time been envisioning a play about Duchamp.85 She had already worked with Diller + Scofidio on the Camillo performance, staged by her partner, Matthew Maguire. After approaching Ellen Stewart, creative director of New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theater Company (La MaMa E.T.C. ) and receiving an enthusiastic response, she mentioned her plans to Dorothea Tanning, a board member of her Creation Company, who initiated contact with the Philadelphia Museum of Art that sponsored the performance as part of its Duchamp centennial. It opened on June 3, 1987, at La MaMa E.T.C. in New York. Although some early renderings of the play in the museum survive, it proved unfeasible to create a stage in its main hall. Mosakowski staged it at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia from October 16 to 18, with Duchamp’s widow, Teeny, and artists Dorothea Tanning, Nam June Paik, and Shigeko Kubota in attendance. Even before the theatrical debut, Diller had offered “a first public presentation of the ground work for a work in progress” in a lecture on March 11 at the Architectural Association in London, at the invitation of its director Alvin Boyarsky.86 Her meticulously typed out text of the lecture suggests a performance score. Ranging across Duchamp’s career and the histories of science, architecture, and art, A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate grew from a body of cultural, historical, and design research that henceforth would become the norm for D+S. Comparing Duchamp’s painting with his final work, Étant Donnés, Diller and Scofidio outline a theory of the visual that challenges the specific identity of architectural elements: The modifier in the Glass is window, the modifier in Étant donnés is door. Both serve to thwart their respective medium. Both temper our extremely self-conscious gaze. Both solicit a visual violation. In both, desire and penetration are properties of vision.87 A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate departed from Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, or Large Glass, on which he worked

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Ch a pte r One 1.12 (above) Diller + Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass,” lecture delivered at the Architectural Association, London, England, 1987. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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1.13 (opposite) Diller + Scofidio, set design for A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate by Susan Mosakowski. Presented by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Apropos of Marcel Duchamp, a Centennial Celebration) at the Painted Bride Art Center, 1987. Premiered at La MaMa E.T.C., 1987. Produced by Creation Production Company. Presented at The Southern Theater, Minneapolis, in association with Creation Production Company, 1988. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Susan Mosakowski and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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intermittently from 1915 to 1923. Diller and Scofidio explained it later as follows: A Delay in Glass will be a tragicomedy. There will be seven animated components, four of them are human. The field, the apparatus, the mechanical bed, the bride, the bachelor, the witness, the juggler. Water, gas and electricity are used as utilities. It will be circuitous anti-narrative whose objective is irreconcilability. Visual and textual languages are simultaneous and sometimes coincident.88 Duchamp’s artwork is one of the most elliptical and highly interpreted of the twentieth century, a meditation on desire, sexuality, vision, and machines. Transforming a static visual art object into a time-based stage production with dialogue, actors, sets, and music suggests a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach that Diller called “ignition” rather translation. It resonated with the expansive understanding of performance explored during the 1970s and 1980s by Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, and the Wooster Group in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Our mandate was to find the point of equilibrium between fidelity and irreverence,” Diller observed. “We always rejected the idea of doing ‘set designs’ and only work on projects in which we help initiate major themes for the works and collaborate on all aspects. We prefer to think about the visual contributions as ‘staging principles’ as they involve choreographing the space of the stage.”89 She and Scofidio understood opacity as a fundamental concern of The Large Glass and conceived of the visual armature for its rendering on stage: the 90-degree rotation of Duchamp’s vertical composition of The Large Glass, to which they discerned an allusion in his note “a/b to isolate the sign of accordance” in The Green Box. The well-known division of the painting into a top and a bottom, the former devoted to the bride, the latter to the bachelors, here becomes a front and back, an elegant solution that in retrospect appears deceptively obvious. Duchamp’s Large Glass is primarily, but not completely, a perspectival elevation. Diller and Scofidio reconfigured it as a plan, among the most important representational conventions of architecture for rendering three-dimensional space.90 Architects continually shift between renderings in plan, section, and elevation, and Diller and Scofidio selected this common feature of practice as the basis for their staging, which fluctuates between two and three dimensions. Approaching the space of the stage as a field with a front and a back, divided by a line of accordance designated as “0,” the architects introduce their apparatus, a device consisting of an obscuring plane of stretched surgical rubber and a revealing plane of lightweight reflective Mylar positioned at a 45-degree angle above the stage area. A retractable metal garage door accentuates the division between front and rear and doubles as a projection screen for slide images.

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Viewers simultaneously can apprehend the front of the stage in elevation and

becomes the visual foundation of the play, the subject and object of its performance. In the words of the architects,

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the rear reflected in the mirror overhead in plan. Architectural representation

The mirror is a reflecting hinge, turning actual image into virtual image, rotating plan into elevation and elevation into plan. For example, the bride performs in front of the plane, the bachelor behind is projected in plan. Or .  .  . the bride lies prone behind the plane while her image appears to float vertically above the bachelor in the foreground. The line of accordance is a revised proscenium edge, that divides real and virtual, physics and pataphysics, male and female, actual and illusory.91 Reading Duchamp as destabilizing boundaries and investigating vision, Diller + Scofidio enter contested terrain of the past thirty years of art history. Alchemy, pictorial traditions of the virgin’s assumption, fourth-dimensional geometry, optics, experimental psychology, incest fantasies, and psychoanalysis are but some of the influential “master codes” art historian Rosalind Krauss notes as having determined the reception The Large Glass.92 Nonconsummation signaled by the “Delay” in its title and the paradox that despite elaborate machinery and pathways, the bride and bachelors remain in their separate spheres, obtaining pleasure through onanistic self-sufficiency rather than coupling, finds its analogue in Mosakowski’s staging of their elaborate flirtation and the layering of space enabled by the sets. At the end of the performance, the Mylar screen was lowered to a 45-degree angle, perpendicular to the floor, revealing its spectators. What Duchamp called “a wedding of mental and visual concepts” evident in the incessant traffic in his work between reading and seeing finds a parallel in Diller + Scofidio’s recourse to puns and double entendres. If the title of the performance evokes Duchamp’s 1920 Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), later reworked in his 1926 film Anemic Cinema, it also suggests the hinged rotation of their apparatus, a variation on the “circulation reflection” perceived by Hejduk in the Kinney Plywood House. Rhyming with “rotary,” “notary,” from the Latin notarius, a shorthand writer, is a guarantor of signatures and documents, the intermediary between the bodily labor of inscription and written texts. “Hot Plate” is a pun on rotating cinematic glass plates, “chair chaude,” warm flesh, or “serre chaude,” hot house. It evokes Duchamp’s unrealized idea of coating the bride’s half of The Large Glass with bromide emulsion, thus creating a photo (and erotically) sensitive surface. Vito Ricci’s bouncy electronic score, the movable magician’s guillotine cart, and the stationary bicycle that rotated a horizontal wheel suggest a rendition of Duchamp more Dadaist than academic, closer in spirit to film comedy than the humorless critique of representation that became all too common in his reception by postmodernists. Diller and Scofidio designed striking armor for the bachelor and the bride. At once an elaborate system of prostheses that dissects the body into parts and removes it from inspection as a sexual object, its metal-

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1.14 Body armor by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio for A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate by Susan Mosakowski. Presented by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Apropos of Marcel Duchamp, a Centennial Celebration) at the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, 1987. Premiered at La MaMa E.T.C., 1987. Produced by Creation Production Company. Presented at The Southern Theater, Minneapolis, in association with Creation Production Company, 1988. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Susan Mosakowski and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

lic impermeability recalls the Bauhaus costumes of Oskar Schlemmer and the cloned robot Maria in the Weimar film Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).93 Over the coming years prostheses would reappear in Diller’s teaching and become a persistent motif in her and Scofidio’s architecture through the early 1990s. Although earlier avant-garde and experimental practitioners such as Ant Farm and Archigram had explored prosthetic elements in the 1970s, they tended to be goofy soft plastic appendages or Rube Goldberg–type machines, or, in the case of Hejduk, conceptual armatures for narratives rather than the metallic and hard-edged body plates.94 Mosakowski recalls the construction of the set for the play as a technical chal42

lenge but one without too many surprises. When stretched properly without

reflectivity than mirrored glass. To gaze at one’s high-resolution image in it was a disconcerting experience. Experiments with angle, reflection, and lighting were conducted over the course of several months on the set built in her loft. The

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wrinkles, Mylar possesses mirrorlike properties and actually a higher degree of

architects constructed a model of the guillotine, and brought an architectural sensibility and a clarity to their collaboration that impressed her, as did their striving for simple and direct solutions. She describes their work together as a “joyful and playful.”95 For Diller and Scofidio, the major gain from the performance was an opportunity to realize mechanical apparatuses for the regulation of vision and opacity. The performance enabled the architects to investigate reflectivity of materials and the movement of bodies in a space more akin to the multiple planes of a building than a proscenium stage. If the hinged design of the set was far simpler than their later efforts, which would more intensively utilize electronic media, it nonetheless outlined an architecture that employed technology not merely to channel or augment vision but to question it. Operating analogously to the closeup in film, a device such as the magnifying glass in A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate prefigures the mobile screen in Facsimile.96

th e w ith D r aw i n g Ro o m

Exploring seeing in and through architecture did not always require elaborate machines. A cut or a juxtaposition, classic filmic devices, could produce effects of similar intensity, as the next project by the architects demonstrated. In the installation the withDrawing Room that Diller + Scofidio realized at Capp Street Projects in San Francisco from August 12 to September 12, 1987, D+S designed for the first time an interior space without a program predetermined by a client, albeit in a setting that was scarcely a tabula rasa. Artist David Ireland had sold a hundred-year-old house clad in corrugated iron and gypsum board to curator Ann Hatch, who then dedicated it to artists’ installations.97 The impetus behind the withDrawing Room was a set of conceptual investigations into interactions between what D+S term “the skin of the house” and the “skin of the irreducible domestic unit,” the opposition between the single-family dwelling as bounded space and a culturally defined interior space of daily life. Both make up what they call “domestic fields.” Realizing “incisions, excisions, implants, and inscriptions” in the house directed attention to activities such as eating, sleeping, and watching television and the nature of spatial enclosure. After fifteen prior installations, the Capp Street space struck the architects as ripe for investigation, perhaps like the Kinney Plywood House haunted by ghosts, in this case previous interventions by artists such as Mary Lucier, Perry Hoberman, and James Turrell. Exaggeration, distortion, and mutilation, a sort of exorcism in reverse, rendered the interior disquieting and unsuitable for normal habitation, part plan, part nightmare, and evoked prosaic desires to eat or sleep,

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Ch a pte r One 1.15 Diller + Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp Street Projects, San Francisco, 1987. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

even as it frustrated them. Organized around four “quadrants”—an incision in the floor, a bed, a dining area, and a living room—the space of their installation was deliberately ambiguous and fractured. The recourse of the architects to a quasi-surgical vocabulary underscores the centrality of the body as metaphor in this project, stripped of associations as an image of wholeness and proportion. Indeed, the withDrawing Room is a space of discomfort, an allegory for the incomplete contemporary individual who dwells in domestic architecture.98 Although the initial meaning of the title evokes distancing from the public realm, whether to seek comfort or pursue disinterested aesthetic contemplation, the violent cuts and dislocations in the installation suggest the untenability of the distinction between public and private spheres.99 To withdraw (from the Latin verb retrahere, to retract) also means, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “To take back or away (something that has been given, granted, allowed, possessed, enjoyed or experienced).”

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Four concepts—The Property Line, Etiquette, Intimacy, and The Narcissistic

effortless dwelling with minimal spatial friction. In the eighteenth century a withdrawing room was the space to which women retreated to allow men to smoke, drink, and discuss politics, activities considered inappropriate in mixed

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Impulse—manifested in the installation thwart prereflective inhabitation,

company.100 Here Diller and Scofidio construct a unisex space, equally challenging to visitors of all genders. An elevated bridge revealed components of the project on ground level below in plan, signaled by the broken or “hidden lines.” As in the Duchamp performance, the emphasis is upon an open-ended process of translation from elevation to plan to section, in which the very possibility of a different perspective, a fundamental property of architecture, becomes the conceptual and visual core of the project. “Oscillation between experiential and analytical information,” the architects write, entails the role of the viewer “constantly fluctuat[ing] between that of the voyeur and that of detached observer.”101 By privileging objective and notational over perspectival views, most conspicuously by designing elements in full scale plan, the architects sought to provoke “collisions and blurred edges” between “the fabricated domestic condition” and “the actual residence.”102 Walls in the withDrawing Room intersect at the bed, its “honorific center.” Cut through the middle, as in a cross-section, its two halves are connected by hinges

1.16 Diller + Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp Street Projects, San Francisco, 1987. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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Ch a pte r One 1.17 Diller + Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp Street Projects, San Francisco, 1987. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

that allow one section to be rotated to 180 degrees. Anyone with a partner who snores might well regard a hinged rotating bed as an inspired solution. Yet the more troubling resonance of this separation that precludes a constant connection and in the architects’ words insures “the occupants can unite but remain spatially divorced .   .   . intimacy is a momentary condition” evokes The Large Glass and the distance between its top and bottom halves.103 Here, the bed rotated from body to body, head to head, and was covered by a spread cast in lead. A thin light well between the adjacent building at Sixty-Five Capp Street provides the location for an investigation of the property line. Placing a mirror within it, the architects incise a cut through the top and bottom floors. This introduces the logic of the cross-section into the interior space, opens up previous layers of installation, and exposes the crawlspace beneath. Revealingly, the cut bisects a chair and transforms it from a banal piece of furniture into an alarming icon of instability. It also provides significant clues about the divergence of Diller + Scofidio’s project from the work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark.104 For if the latter, also trained in architecture, displayed a predilection for the cross-section, more rarely did his finished works acknowledge the plan as a mode of architectural representation. His cuts, circular gouges on the sides of wharf buildings, a bullet hole through the window of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, and

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chainsaw slicings through the middle of single-family residences that introduce

of pure geometries. By contrast, the incisions made by Diller + Scofidio in the withDrawing Room directly investigate the body in domestic space. Matta-Clark, too, explored urban boundaries, most famously in his Reality

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light and the surrounding city, are less fastidious and clinical, more expressive

Properties: Fake Estates series of 1973–74. And he also made films, sometimes records of his works, in other cases “mockumentaries” in which he appeared. The carefully anonymous moving images produced by Diller + Scofidio seldom document their projects. In its predilection for the brute immediacy of rubbish or decaying structures, Matta-Clark’s work suggests a fascination with ruins of the industrial age evident in contemporaneous art by Robert Smithson and Richard Serra that contrasts with the less raw and carefully detailed the withDrawing Room. Refusing to construct new buildings, Matta-Clark explored historical strata through a subtractive method that did not culminate in any new architecture or objects. He consistently returned to specific architectural forms such as row houses and methodically deconstructed them in series, anticipating the subsequent Bad Press series of Diller and Scofidio. While they shared his interest in vernacular domestic forms, his commitment to realizing temporary “antimonuments,” and his aspiration to disorient viewers through interventions in space that function akin to periscopes, Diller and Scofidio added, expanded, and generated new contents for the Capp House. Revealingly, their incision through it exposes the ground, not the horizon. If Matta-Clark often produced work that opened toward the exterior world and intimated a way out of confined interiors, Diller and Scofidio were less sanguine about this somewhat romantic view of space, yet more optimistic about what they could realize within an architectural interior. This becomes clear in the generic furniture deployed throughout the withDrawing Room they describe as “‘de-signed,’ stripped of cultural fixity,” elegant and less evocative of the tension between incisive gesture and the crude matter of building materials one finds in the work of Matta-Clark.105 In some cases, as in the table and chairs suspended from the ceiling, they preclude, or at minimum vastly complicate, their traditional use, an idea already suggested by the toy furniture arranged in the suburban window of the triennial installation. Attached to the table by pivots that limit their rotation, these hinges restrict their maneuverability, holding them hostage to the rituals of dining. Another chair positioned in front of a television monitor has elongated prosthetic legs, perhaps an allusion to the high chairs in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), an updated nightmare in which stern repose replaces bourgeois comfort, and viewing television appears an infliction of power on the body. Amputated, its three legs removed and replaced by a prosthetic support, the so-called vanity chair functions for the architects as a Duchampian bachelor machine within which “the mirror vanishes separateness; space is squeezed out.”106 The poster the architects produced for the withDrawing Room, in which a television reflects its image into a mirror and writing appears backward, conveys a

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Ch a pte r One

48

similar idea. Two pairs of feet standing in opposite directions construct a space in which it is impossible to orient the body thanks to a profusion of mirrors and odd angles. Although Diller + Scofidio collaborated with performers and created a videotape of the installation, they never circulated it, and the acting in the

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1.18 Diller + Scofidio, poster for the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp Street Projects, San Francisco, 1987. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

piece appears amateurish. An initial proposal to use video to penetrate the street wall proved too expensive to realize. Produced at a moment when the work of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, especially his book Discipline and Punish, which appeared in English in 1977, was gaining traction among many American academics and cultural practitioners, the withDrawing Room treated domestic architecture as a disciplinary apparatus of the kind that Foucault understands as central to forming the identities of citizens of modern societies.107 Its illustration and critique of the exercise of power over the body in everyday spatial practices proved bracing to many visitors to the installation, even as it questioned the nature of architecture. As one critic observed of the project by Diller and Scofidio: They have pitted their multi-dimensional vision of structure and space, almost on an adversary basis, against the cerebral, hermetic shell of Ireland’s encasing art.  .  .  . What makes such art convincing here, in an ordinary South of Market neighborhood, is that every component of the installation has been gauged to its proper scale with a sure architectural touch.  .  .  . But the imagery is laden with literary associations that might be better written in a book. The artists, for instance, have injected a medical metaphor into the composition, resorting to “prosthetic” or surgical devices—as clamps or attachments—to explain that the installation is both “a rude and creative antibody in Ireland’s creation.” That brings into question the whole concept of architecture as an open and practical art, whose realities transcend clever anecdotes. But here, confined with Ireland’s corrugated metal walls, it all seems to make sense.108 Foucault’s ideas permeated much experimental architecture of the 1990s, yet in 1987, the high-water mark of deconstructivism and various neo-formalisms, few American architects were exploring issues about power and the body that might have led them to build differently, let alone to recognize the imbrication of culture and vision in domestic space.109 Alain Robbe-Grillet, cited in a project statement by the architects, was also an interlocutor, whose writings approached dwelling as an accretion of metonymic details and acknowledged dust.110 Yet the polemic of the withDrawing Room came at a price. If power squeezed out space in the installation, it also negated any obvious strategy of resistance, and the lack of a positive program accompanying so thoughtful a critique of normally overlooked everyday space was a distinct limitation. The possibility that identities and lived experiences in late capitalist spaces reflect gender differences, changing subcultures, and unique styles of consumption, an insight pursued by practitioners of cultural studies, would obtain a more complete hearing in later projects by Diller and Scofidio, in which the reactions of individual viewers become integral components.

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Ch a pte r One

Bo d y Bu i l d i n g s

Suspicious of the gallery exhibition format and its power to mummify their previous works, the architects warily approached recombining and re-exhibiting. This awareness permeates the catalog Bodybuildings accompanying their September 10–October 3, 1987, exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. It included photographs and renderings from Bridge, the withDrawing Room, Gate, and A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, introduced, uncommonly, by verse: altered excerpts from a collection of remains from recent projects involving the body as component, body as motor, body as site 111 Words such as “altered,” “collection,” and “remains” undercut expectations of originality, just as the use of “probe” (a word that first appears in Diller’s lecture “A Delay in Glass”) throughout the text to describe earlier projects maintains a similar ambiguity. Is it a noun or a verb, a controlled experiment or an unpredictable exploration? In some ways, perhaps both, just as it retains a fluid reference to interior or exterior space. A dental probe searches for cavities, a space probe explores the distant edges of the universe, and it is an odd fact that investigating the human body, the most enclosed and private space, and distant galaxies, the least enclosed and known, involve the same term. As co-organizer of the exhibition architect Lebbeus Woods recalled, the work of Diller and Scofidio at the time was radically unarchitectural in any normal sense, and thus a perfect fit for the Storefront, curated by architect Kyong Park.112 Perhaps most significantly, Bodybuildings provided the first occasion for a catalog publication devoted to their work, and soon spawned a second.

I n v e sti g ati o n s

Investigations (sometimes referred to as Bodybuildings II) followed the Storefront exhibition and shared its aspirations to challenge the white cube of the gallery. Architect Robert McAnulty curated the installation, held the following year at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania from June 10 through July 31, 1988. It included the body armor from A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate and two new works, one of which utilized slide lamps mounted on the wall to display images from the performance. Writing of this element of the installation, a critic observed, 50

way to present their information, a way that accomplishes two admirable goals. It involves the viewer actively in the presentation, and it transforms the usual two-dimensional display into a three-dimensional architectural construct that is itself an object of interest. The

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Photo-documentation can be pedantic and off-putting, but the artists have devised a novel

project photographs are slides mounted in eight vertical stacks (one project has two sets of slides) in front of the gallery wall. The viewer examines them through small magnifying glasses that can be moved along thin cables mounted to the wall.113 Television (1987), the second and more conspicuous piece, was a cathode ray tube with a mirror attached to wheels whose precise detailing contrasts with the indifference to the display monitor common in much video art at the time. If numerous video artists in the 1980s clustered off-the-shelf television sets in rows and deployed them as architecture in a gallery space, Diller + Scofidio 1.19 Diller + Scofidio, Television, exhibited at Investigations (Body Building II), Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

approached the medium from the opposite direction and dissected a television as if it were an anatomical specimen, organs without a body, and exhibited the results. It anticipates their taxonomic approach to display culminating in the 1990 exhibition The American Lawn and suggests an investigation of television as an object rather than as a temporal flow then common in video art by figures such as Bill Viola. Engaging a contemporary art exhibition space also inspired the installation Diller and Scofidio presented July 1–24, 1988, at the Nature Morte Gallery in New York. Curated by Larry Rinder, it presented the results of an architectural competition for “alternative/commercial gallery spaces” in the words of one critic.114 Diller + Scofidio won the competition with an entry that explored the visual axes of the gallery window and door through a track suspended from the ceiling that would transport art objects to the front window for display. An axis on the floor for two mobile chairs led to the front desk. Apart from the cashier windows of Gate, this unrealized design was their first foray into commercial display, and like the earlier piece it sought to heighten awareness of exchange relations. They wrote, “the gallery is effectively collapsed into the shop window, the plane of solicitation. The gallery is effectively extruded back from the door into an extended commercial threshold, a passage commemorating the commercial encounter.”115 Commerce, solicitation, art, and architecture coexist in the installation, evoking the interplay of desire and the visual penetration of space in A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate. D+S would shortly introduce these concerns into the citadel of modern art.

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Ch a pte r One Pa r a -S ite

In Para-Site, installed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art from July 1 to August 15, 1989, Diller + Scofidio’s interest in visual relations took a more public turn, focusing on both the institution of the art museum and its visitors. Live video feeds from seven surveillance cameras were mounted in three locations: the revolving door at the entrance, the escalators in the lobby, and the doors leading to the sculpture garden and were displayed on monitors in the ground-floor projects room. Curators Kynaston McShine and Riva Castleman introduced the 52

projects series in 1971 to present installations by contemporary artists “working

in non-traditional forms” and creating “ephemeral situational work.”116 Diller + Scofidio came to the attention of Stuart Wrede, then head of the Department of Architecture and Design, who invited them to install the seventeenth project in the space, in which no architects had yet worked.

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1.20 Diller + Scofidio, Para-Site (Projects 17) installation view of lobby in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989. Gelatinsilver print, 7.5” × 9” (19.1 × 22.9 cm). Photographic Archive, the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Photograph by Mali Olatunji. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

Grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, first refer to the installation as “the withDrawing Room: body/antibody,” a locution that indicates its connection to the Capp Street Project, as does the reference to its architectural elements as “probes.”117 At a later stage “the withDrawing Room” disappears from its title, and Para-Site replaces “body/antibody.” Matilda McQuaid, then a curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design, who worked closely with the architects on the installation, remembers that the catalyst for the installation’s final title was the growing interest of the architects in its site specificity in the museum.118 The body was equally crucial, as their project narrative confirms: In our time, the human body has not been a prominent concern of architectural practice and has been virtually exiled from architectural theory. However, in the last decade, theoretical writings in other disciplines, such as psychology, politics, feminism, media and literary theory, have begun to focus critical attention on the body in contemporary culture . . . The human body is re-emerging as a rich and urgent generative force toward the advancement of architecture.119 Revealingly, the research of D+S begins as a comparison of models of the body developed by Leonardo da Vinci and Oskar Schlemmer, which they suggest have become anachronistic in the age of the new technologies of information, communication, and travel.120 Conventional experiences of space and time and traditional architectural and cultural programs have become obsolete. Diller and Scofidio posit that architecture “has irrevocably broken away from anthropocentrism” and present their installation as an “architectural environment for the bio-technological body.” This critique of architectural humanism is concretized in a memo describing the ambitions and physical forms of the installation in the museum: Our installation will interpret its context as the interface between two conditions:

» the museum as a surrogate site for the architectural project, a para-site



» the museum as a cultural site for the interrogating architectural parasite.

The para-site provides a fictive space; the parasite exerts an actual force.121 As with the withDrawing Room, the architects define their approach through a tension between the physical space of the installation and the cultural functions of a particular environment, here the museum. Unlike most architectural exhibitions in museums that seek to evoke absent buildings through the use of photographs, plans, and models and often suffer from what Diller called a lack of “cultural

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Ch a pte r One 1.21 Diller + Scofidio, Para-Site installation in Projects Gallery of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1989. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

reciprocity,” Diller and Scofidio attempted to use the museum to exhibit itself, a project with a venerable modernist lineage in the work of artists such as El Lissitzky, Daniel Buren, or Donald Judd.122 Parasites, understood as dependent upon their hosts but also creative generators of new situations, provide the key metaphor for the project, if not their own relation to the museum. Significantly, Para-Site introduces what subsequently will become a productive concern with the lag between real time and the time of video into the work of D+S. An initial drawing of the installation in the exhibition archive file in the museum shows a television monitor cantilevered from the corner. A mirror mounted above it extends from the wall. Perpendicular to it are a camera and cantilevered bracket. The camera points away from the monitor. Observers are positioned between them, and the height at eye level of monitor, camera, and viewer was clearly a key element of the design at this stage,

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although the two chairs mounted on the gallery wall do not appear. In the draw-

monitor appears. It adumbrates the final shape of this corner of the gallery and confirms that Diller and Scofidio conceptualized the arrangement of the media apparatus well in advance of its installation.

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ing the locations of the supporting brackets change and an additional television

In the Projects Gallery, a 20' × 40' × 10' space on the ground floor of the renovated museum, seven twenty-inch television monitors protruded from walls using wood and metal mountings. One reviewer called them “recondite, slightly menacing (with sharp or abraded metal edges and vise-or guillotine-like elements) but often oddly beautiful.”123 A chair with raised text from the book The Parasite by French philosopher Michel Serres hung inverted from the ceiling. One could only read it with a mirror, and the text would have been embossed into the virtual buttock of the occupant of the chair.124 Inserting theory into the installation, albeit in an impossible position, this gesture suggests parody. Another chair was cut down the middle and mounted opposite a convex mirror in an elevated alcove, recalling the vanity chair of the withDrawing Room. Despite the ample viewpoints presented by the installation room, none was all encompassing, and no matter where one stood it was impossible to see everything, an omniscience that would have required gazing behind one’s back, or hanging upside down. If Para-Site explored surveillance, it also investigated the limit of total seeing: the blind spot. At first, museumgoers apparently enjoyed the experience of being voyeurs and watching other museum patrons, yet they quickly realized they themselves had been filmed when entering through its revolving doors, and the camera soon would film them again when they ascended escalators to the next floor. McQuaid recalls that some repeatedly rode the escalators to enjoy the experience of seeing themselves on the video screen, a reaction which appears more gleeful than paranoid. Yet the lag between experiencing physical space and viewing one’s one image could never become overcome. As Diller observes, The most important aspect is the point at which the viewer in the museum becomes aware of himself or herself as the most irreducible museological unit after the artifact itself. You don’t ordinarily feel uncomfortable in a bank, because (the cameras) are already acknowledged. But in a museum, you are there to look at pieces of art. When you become aware that you are the focus, that you are the subject, it can be very disconcerting.125 Provoking a new awareness of the visitor’s body in a museum encompasses only one dimension of Para-Site. Its cognitive aspiration was equally significant. Observing a revolving door from overhead in plan is not a common experience for most people, and through the use of video technology it became possible to tap the potential that Soviet filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov understood as intrinsic to moving images and the modernist project of expanding human perception.126 Cinema for Vertov penetrated dimensions of the visible world normally inaccessible to the unaided human eye and functioned as a quasiprosthetic device.

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Ch a pte r One

Diller and Scofidio share his predilection for recording from improbable (often overhead) angles and locations so as to free the human eye from the shackles of the body. If they never suggest that moving images provide an enhanced relation to truth, they nonetheless recognize their significance to knowledge of the built environment. Para-Site sought to utilize video as part of a system of notation intended to explicate features of architectural space, yet unlike Vertov the reality it sought to make available for critical scrutiny took spatial and architectural relations, not relations of production, as its object.127 Although Diller and Scofidio never worked in the film medium and have always employed video to produce moving images, their utilization of it is notably more architectural than much video art of the preceding twenty years. Even in as spatially self-conscious (and for the architects clearly formative) pieces as Bruce Nauman’s Video Surveillance Piece (Public Room/Private Room) (1969–70) or Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974) that explore surveillance, the differences are as telling as the similarities. In Nauman’s piece, the space is long, narrow, claustrophobic, and has a second room invisible to the spectator. It is self-contained and exudes a wariness toward the museum evoking the critical and spatial distance that sixties conceptual art practices sought to obtain from art world institutions. By the time of Para-Site, most viewers would already have seen themselves on closed-circuit television cameras, and the oddness of seeing one’s image on a monitor would not in itself carry weight. Perhaps for this reason, Diller + Scofidio employ multiple cameras and monitors and investigate circulation throughout several spaces in the museum.128 Crowd and spectacle, the event character of their installation, become central to its meaning, as if to acknowledge that the art museum is here to stay and unlikely to be replaced in the near future. By contrast, Graham incorporates mirrors behind the spectator, time delay, and video-within-video images so as to suggest an infinite regress. If technology disappears in Nauman’s piece and is emphasized in Graham’s, it occupies a secondary role in Para-Site, which explores types of looking specific to the museum environment and suggests its dependence on them, if not the pleasure they can produce. After all, the parasite who fatally attacks its host is self-defeating. Significantly, the museum did not record the video of Para-Site. Lacking the ability to rewind and replay earlier moments, the installation had no evidentiary value and shared little in common with traditional surveillance practices, which tend to concentrate upon potential zones of conflict such as cash registers. As an early critique of the Foucauldian paradigm of power, associated with Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, Para-Site remains prescient. Writing to Stuart Wrede after the conclusion of the installation, Scofidio observed that “the project was of crucial importance. It allowed us to push our work further in its exploration of architecture’s relation to the institutions of our culture. The opportunity to expose our work to such a broad cross-section of the public was gratifying and invaluable.”129

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nificant figures within experimental architecture, indeed the first architects to exhibit work in a museum context previously defined by the works of visual artists. They had carved a niche for their own activities by translating their con-

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Ten years after founding their studio, Diller and Scofidio had become sig-

cerns into multiple media and genres and in the process helped institutions to move in new and unexplored directions. Many of the most innovative features of their practice, its employment of video technology to analyze spaces and staging of performances rich with architectural implications, were now unmistakably in place and would develop further throughout the 1990s.

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1990–1999

TWO Para-Site brought Diller and Scofidio to the attention of practitioners, scholars, and critics interested in architecture and media.1 It yielded more invitations to realize temporary works that Diller only half in jest dubbed the “Department of Money Losing Projects” of the studio. Today, architects often collaborate with graphic artists, furniture designers, museum curators, or theater directors, yet this was less usual when the couple began to do so. Their projects of the 1990s established a precedent for cross-disciplinary and multimedia architecture now more common. During this decade the most significant accomplishments of Diller and Scofidio were the design of the Slow House, the installations Tourisms: suitCase Studies, Bad Press, Soft Sell, Jump Cuts, and Loophole; the performances Jet Lag, Overexposed, Moving Target, EJM 1, and EJM 2; and Flesh: Architectural Probes, their first self-authored monograph. In these projects their concerns with vision, the body, and space attained provocative expression. These works frequently utilized recent liquid crystal film and LED technologies and prefigure the investigation of seeing and moving images realized later in their buildings. They confirm Diller and Scofidio closely followed the development of new materials and rapidly incorporated them into their practice. Producing many small (if measured in square footage) though rarely simple and often temporary works became the norm during the second decade of the studio.

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c h a pte r two

In a profession as acutely marked by status distinctions and fashion as architecture, associating oneself with the mainstream is nearly always identified with a lack of creative and original thinking. Architects inevitably confront the temptation to fashion themselves as outsiders and utilize marginality as a promotion technique, sometimes with unintended comical results as when a lack of commissions is presented as evidence of radicality. A self-effacing portrait of Diller and Scofidio comes across in interviews with their collaborators, correspondence from the early years of their studio, and the photographs of the austere loft at Cooper Square, its telephone number long unlisted, and suggests they had not struck a false or cynical pose. Their 1990 design of a glass dividing wall between the office and work area of Briarcliff Classic and Imported Car Service in Briarcliff Manor, New York, already conveys an interest in architectural transparency. Elaborate drawings and fastidious solutions to structural and technological challenges developed with every project. Most paid little, yet Diller and Scofidio poured time and energy into all of them. By providing a research and development platform to explore new technologies, materials, and problems, their early practice was part laboratory, part atelier, and part classroom, and their initial employees were Cooper students they hired to assist with particular tasks. The financial uncertainty and nontraditional identity this practice implied would have proven too stressful for many architects, yet Diller and Scofidio accepted it without becoming crippled by resentment. Ambivalent as they then were about the profession of architecture, not obtaining building commissions was painful, though it sharpened their critique and own positions. In 1992, they began to realize their work on a regular basis in Europe, where curators understood and appreciated it in advance of most American writers on architecture, with the exception of New York critics Michael Sorkin and Herbert Muschamp who had recognized their talents during the late 1980s.2 By the middle of the 1990s, many architectural academics had taken notice of the couple, although their tenuous relation to the profession had not changed since the 1970s. At the end of the 1990s, their services were increasingly sought after, a substantial shift from earlier years when they depended on writing grants. The appearance Diller and Scofidio’s work at a juncture when both members of the architectural avant-garde and the larger public had grown weary of architectural postmodernism in its most clichéd form—the building as pastiche of stylistic appropriations—partially explains their eventual recognition and success. At its most jaundiced, postmodern architecture courted social irrelevance, as Michael Sorkin suggested in a 1978 review of Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building.3 Always fascinated with the circulation of media images and styles, Diller and Scofidio remained skeptical of the postmodernist understanding of history as recycling and its easy cynicism, believing instead that valid architecture necessitates innovations in programs and materials and challenges to cultural norms. A modernist commitment to making things new and making new things is fun-

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damental to their practice.

postmodernism contributed to a new sense of what it meant to be an architect. By the beginning of the 1990s, the public attention garnered by Frank Gehry, Philippe Starck, and Michael Graves, the rise of architectural tourism, the pro-

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Consumerism, globalization, and branding that developed in the wake of

liferation of the personal computer and design software, new technologies for the display of images and text, and a growing demand for designers in cultural, retail, and media environments promoted an expanded and increasingly elastic notion of architecture of which Diller and Scofidio were beneficiaries. Postmodernism underscored the status of modernism as a historical phenomenon, often taken for granted during the 1960s and 1970s, could no longer be overlooked. Simultaneously, the emergence of English as the language of Europe, especially in the arena of cultural experimentation, a consequence of the dominance of American popular culture since the end of the Second World War, helped to foster a climate receptive to the work of D+S, whose global resonance and cosmopolitan sensibility traveled easily across national and cultural boundaries. Over the coming decade Diller and Scofidio would refine and extend the possibilities of their practice and obtain a new set of colleagues and interlocutors, thanks in part to a new institutional affiliation.

P r i n c eto n

Scofidio and Diller continued to teach at Cooper Union after Para-Site closed. In 1990, Princeton University School of Architecture hired Diller as an assistant professor. Attracted by the academic excellence of the school and distraught after Cooper denied her tenure for political reasons (despite the fact she was an effective and devoted teacher, Hejduk was apprehensive about Diller and Scofidio gaining too much clout), she was initially apprehensive about working outside of New York in so suburban a setting. After receiving numerous assurances that she would be encouraged to pursue her own interests within the school, she joined what at the time was among the most sophisticated and highprofile design programs anywhere in the latter half of the twentieth century, more a small think tank and research center whose faculty and students shared a common vision of architecture as an intellectual enterprise than a typical school of architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, R. Buckminster Fuller, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi had all lectured at Princeton School of Architecture at various points in its history, and its tiny size facilitated close collaboration among faculty and students. High-level philosophical exchanges about the built environment were the norm, and Diller came just as the influence of Michael Graves, the most renowned designer in the school and one of the most prominent American representatives of postmodernism, had peaked.4 Her arrival raised the question of what would come next. Architectural historians and theorists then teaching at Princeton, includ-

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ing M. Christine Boyer, Beatriz Colomina, Alan Colquhoun, Robert Maxwell, Alessandra Ponte, Georges Teyssot, Anthony Vidler, and Mark Wigley, attracted excellent students and contributed to an atmosphere of “intellectual openness and vitality” in which “everybody was totally engaged at the top of the field,” as Ralph Lerner, appointed dean of the School of Architecture in 1989, recalled.5 Students and faculty discussed writings by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and the recently published book Techniques of the Observer by art historian Jonathan Crary in and out of seminars.6 Diller and Scofidio became friends with Wigley and Colomina and later collaborated with them and Teyssot and Ponte on The American Lawn exhibition held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1998. Diller’s dedication as teacher quickly energized the masters in architecture program and confirmed Lerner’s belief that she was the most talented practitioner of her generation. Her studio assignments, especially the charge that students design a cross between a prosthetic device and a brassiere, or dissect an inexpensive high heel shoe and then represent it in section, indelibly marked architectural pedagogy at Princeton. Already in the fall 1990 term, the syllabus for her Architecture 503 “Probe” seminar suggested the range of her interests: Map one of the following objects or events listed below.

a pair of high heeled shoes



the assassination of John F. Kennedy



a boxing match



Las Meninas by Velazquez



a musical instrument



a meal



a strike in bowling



the city in Robbe-Grillet’s Erasers



a one man scull



the deformation of an automobile resulting from a crash



the Statue of Liberty

Your “map” may require the invention of systems or apparatuses to record or decipher information. You are encouraged to explore new media and techniques in combination with the conventions of architectural representation. Consider the molds, liquid light, video, rayograms, xerography, surgical rubber, human hair, assisted readymades, texts, fat, Polaroids, etc.7 Many of these techniques and modes of depiction, including moving images, would appear in the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro over the coming years, so too the work of Duchamp, Marey, Virilio, and other figures included in the fifteen pages of maps, diagrams, and charts appended to the seminar description. 62

Research, not professionalization or vocational training, animated Diller’s phi-

of representation and raised culture to a place of prominence in the studio curriculum. Her syllabi provide revealing insights into her performative conception of

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losophy of teaching. She exposed students to methods of notation and problems

architecture, as when she some years later admonished students, “This is your final review and the installation should be complete, working smoothly, and flawless. Your performance in and with the installation should be rehearsed and choreographed.—Clues: remember, this is a public performance piece and you should treat it as such. Consider who and where are the people who are viewing and who are viewed. Stage the presentation.”8 Diller underscored that investigation must drive the design process and indecision or lack of preparation—vagueness or the absence of commitment— were inadmissible in the public presentation of final results. As committed to the modernist credo of anti-illusionism as Diller Scofidio + Renfro remains, the studio never has suggested that architecture can dispense with drama and showmanship. To construe its work as antitheatrical would be to overlook an axiom that informs it: conflict and performance are intrinsic to space and the movements of bodies through it.9 Once a school where pretty drawings on yellow trace paper and decorative watercolors predominated, Princeton now had become a learning environment in which all materials became fair game for architectural investigation.10 Aluminum apparatuses with parts scavenged from the physics department sprouted against the walls. A student purchased a dilapidated car and dragged it onto campus for a studio review. When design projects made of metal became a mannered convention, Diller insisted that students work with other materials. All who attended the public lecture by Diller and Scofidio in which she spoke while he drew on a blackboard in the dark with a fluorescent glove never forgot its planning, coordination, mesmerizing performance, and alternation of photographs, speech, and drawings. As Teyssot remembers, Diller enabled theoretical discourse in the school to function in parallel with the design studios. Her attention to detail, love of technology, and intellectual curiosity connected these two sides of the school and created a new synergy.11 Not all Princeton students could work with the intensity and sleep deprivation that was the norm at Cooper, and Diller met resistance when she demanded they constantly revise and redraw new projections, for her pedagogy was nothing if not rigorous. If a student had no idea, he or she had no project, and she forced many to start from scratch at the end of the term. The gentleman or gentlewoman architect was out, replaced by an ideal of the designer as cultural commentator with a hunger for ideas and the ability to give a project one’s all and just a little bit more. Diller pushed students to realize work of which they did not believe themselves capable and offered a preview of the deadlines that would await them in professional practice. A public discussion with Graves, Eisenman, and Colquhoun that took place on November 16, 1995, suggested that even five years after Diller’s arrival questions

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still remained about her and Scofidio’s approach to architecture.12 The transcript preserved in the archive of the school evokes the continued distance between her work and the reigning design pedagogy around her. Yet by the end of the conversation the initially confrontational tone noticeably changes, even if the minds of all of the participants had not. Diller’s tough responses, rigorous explanation of her working methods, and ironic humor (she sat at the table with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol) squelched all doubts about her seriousness and conviction. Her ability to provide acute and often devastating criticisms of student work without lapsing into moral judgments or personal opinions became central features of her teaching and her own architectural practice. Teyssot remembers that by the early 1990s most of the school eavesdropped from the hallways when Diller taught, and that she pushed the school toward a broad alignment with cultural studies approaches then gaining traction in humanities departments at Princeton and elsewhere but still excluded from many schools of architecture.13 Publication of an issue of the Italian journal Ottagono in September 1990 that Ponte edited and devoted to prostheses, with contributions by Wigley, Teyssot, and Vidler, introduced an approach to architecture and the body that architects soon associated with the school.14 Diller + Scofidio contributed an investigation entitled “Pretext Machine” involving drawings in section and photographs of an escalator accompanied by textual quotations that served as found poetry.15 This dossier of criticism by their Princeton colleagues in Ottagono provided the most sustained engagement that their work had received to date and established an influential paradigm for reading it in relation to the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonin Artaud, as well as artists such as Hans Haacke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, and Ant Farm. Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973), Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977), A Zed and Two Noughts (Peter Greenaway, 1985), and Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988), mostly science fiction or monster films with doubles, captured their attention. Revealingly, the storytelling and narrative devices in such movies appear to have interested Diller and Scofidio less than their representations of aberrant and augmented bodies.16

E nte r L i qu i d C ry sta l Te c h n o l o g y

Almost the only point of reference downplayed in the Ottagono issue was traditional architecture. Reading their projects in relation to the ideas of feminist theorist Donna Haraway, Vidler placed them in dialogue with the idea of the halfhuman, half-machine cyborg. He analyzed the work of Diller and Scofidio by engaging understandings of the boundaries between the organic and inorganic advanced by surrealists such as Salvador Dalí. Suffused as it was with discussions of the body, Teyssot’s essay (written as a quasi-screenplay with voice-over nar64

ration and quotations) presented the 1975 exhibition by Jean Clair and Harald

as a key precedent for the concerns of the architects.17 This Duchampian problematic of the body, technology, and opacity resurfaced in their next project, the object-based installation Pleasure/Pain, exhibited at the Non Sequiturs show held

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Szeemann, The Bachelor Machines, inspired by the 1954 book of Michel Carrouges,

at the Sadock & Uzzan Gallery in Paris from November 29, 1991 to February22, 1992.18 As they had in A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, Diller and Scofidio engaged the work of Duchamp with a novel technology. Two shelves of a medicine cabinet supported soap, a shaving brush, an Ace bandage, a butt plug, cotton wads, a jar of prophylactics, and bottles of colored liquids. A single-hinged mirrored door bisected them in the center. Suspended on chains from the bottom shelf, a rubber glove, a speculum, a sponge, a straight-edged razor, and tweezers introduce a hint of menace. When the shelf is open on the right side, the word “Pleasure” in green letters becomes visible; when open on the left, the word “Pain” becomes legible. Only one set of implements can be 2.1 Diller + Scofidio, Pleasure/Pain, 1991. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

viewed at a time. Pleasure/Pain was the first Diller + Scofidio project to employ liquid crystal technology, in which the introduction of an electric current through a material can switch between states of transparency or opacity.19 It employed electroluminescent material behind the letters etched in the mirror. When so-called smart glass permitting this oscillation appeared on the market in the 1990s the architects began investigating its applications.20 Long before they had the opportunity to utilize it in building projects, they began to contemplate the visual permeability of new materials and their potential for displaying writing and images.21 Door, 11 rue Larrey is a 1927 work in which Duchamp positioned a single door between a set of jambs in a manner precluding total openness or closure.22 Evoking its undecidable character, the medicine cabinet of D+S alludes to ideas that the architects explore in their matching His/Hers towels (1993), Clean Body/ Dirty Mind soap bars (1994), No Means Yes perfume (1997), and Vice/Virtue (1997) drinking glasses. No matter how hard one looks or thinks, one cannot reconcile contradictory states. Any hint of a dialectic that would overcome and transcend oppositions is denied. Making tangible the indeterminacy of meaning, these pieces do not embrace total skepticism. Yet neither do they posit a simple of unity of opposites or acceptance of paradox.23 This openness toward uncertainty and invitation to the viewer or occupant of space to fasten upon its conflicts would shortly manifest itself in a bold design for a single-family house.

Th e S l o w H o u s e

While working on Para-Site, Diller and Scofidio met Koji Itakura, a Japanese real estate investor. Steven Holl had designed two residential dwellings for Itakura, who later approached architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien for a different per-

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spective. Rather than decline their services directly, Itakura asked them which other architects they admired and then contacted Diller and Scofidio, with whom he became friends. Itakura invited them to design a vacation house in the town of North Haven on Long Island. They worked for weeks with Victor Wong, a student at Cooper, and completed a final design on January 30, 1989.24 At the end of their two-hour-long presentation, the architects asked the silent Itakura for his reactions, and he pronounced it too beautiful for words, causing the normally controlled Diller to break out in tears. Written in a series of paragraphs suggestive of Duchamp’s Green Box, the proposal introduces the design through a series of propositions about domestic space.25 Yet it also evokes a screenplay and sometimes reads as if the anonymous narrator of Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) were moving through a vacation home equipped with technology thirty years more advanced. As architect Jürgen Mayer H. has noted, Diller possesses the ability to draw with words, a skill she and Scofidio employed here to dazzling effect.26 Their text defamiliarizes through the use of phrases such as “apertures,” “cooking zone,” and “dining zone” rarely employed by architects to woo a client. 2.2 Diller + Scofidio, Slow House model, 1989. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

The footprint of the house is an arc shape the architects called a “decelerating” curve and commentators have likened to a snail (hence its name). Each cut is accompanied by a rotation ten degrees off axis. Its facade, a front door four feet wide and eighteen feet high, is a theatrical gesture, a hyberbolic portal adjacent to the driveway, which deflects upward to become a roof, and evokes the ironic handling of form in Gate. By emphasizing the kinship of their design to the automobile windshield, the television, and the picture window, Diller and Scofidio suggest that architecture begins before one enters a building and the spatial and cultural logic of the single-family home inevitably participates in other visual practices. Only the front door and a picture window at the opposite end of the building form planar surfaces. The winding exterior shape of the house initially suggests an organic form evoking the skeletal architectural designs of Santiago Calatrava, yet its interior never intimates that biomorphic precedents, let alone reconciliation with nature, inform its design. Writing of the vacation home as architectural program, Diller and Scofidio observe, “it somehow stood for a second chance—a chance to improve upon the first home, to replay a life, to live out a fantasy.”27 Echoes of Diller’s “House for Two Residents” and its fascination with the logic of doubles reverberate here and in a concerted play between binary oppositions such as work/leisure, home/vacation, artifice/nature, country/city, and high

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culture/low culture.

remains an integral component of architecture—is one the architects never have denied. Well before the advent of digital avatars, a striking number of their projects explore the possibility of spaces and institutions obtaining second lives.

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An unstated corollary of this emphasis upon second chances—that fantasy

This core optimism of their practice and its underlying faith in the possibility of remaking the built environment is less sensational than their fascination with prostheses, plastic surgery, and the role of bodily modifications in creating and stabilizing identity yet can easily be overlooked. Doubling in the Slow House is not a literal juxtaposition of twin houses, an architectural variant of the uncanny and its Doppelgänger, but emerges in the conduct of daily life and is facilitated by technology.28 It implies an understanding of leisure architecture far removed from the summer homes designed by contemporary celebrity architects and the historical tradition of the villa and typologies of domestic leisure architecture. Diller and Scofidio rejected these precedents by replacing the codes of renaissance perspective with a flattened space that transforms the interior of the house into a single curving surface without a direct visual axis. In a critique of visual perspective more strident than in A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, they create a space with minimal depth to surround and engulf the body of the inhabitant. Immediately after the quasi-drawbridge front door, a knife-shaped wall divides the interior in half, leading to the kitchen, dining, and living areas on the right and the bedrooms and bathrooms on the left. “As the axis of vision is bent, the formerly centered unified subject in control of his world is teased off center, off balance.” Writing in a sentence worthy of Robbe-Grillet, they observe, “Vision is eroticized, the hostage of the ‘desiring eyes.’”29 Located on a lot with a view of the Great Peconic Bay, a site that Scofidio helped Itakura to select, the house was designed with a programmable TV camera directed at the water. Next to the television displaying this view was a fireplace. Although the VCR had already been invented in 1977, few architects had incorporated it in their projects, let alone conceptualized a waterfront view as portable, storable, and capable of being transported back to the city, a commodity as well as a sight and an experience.30 Diller and Scofidio remained acutely sensitive to the fascination with shoreline vistas that invariably drives up real estate prices and forces architects to pander to voyeurism. Indeed, it is possible to observe water as a persistent leitmotif throughout their work and trace a trajectory organized around the deliberate frustration of waterfront views, from the Slow House, through the Blur building, to the Boston ICA, and Pure Mix. Juxtaposing a video image of the sound with a view through the window ironically doubles the visual pleasure provided by the house just as it transforms vistas from experience to idea. “The electronic eye instrumentally extends the limits of natural vision and destabilizes it,” the architects write, as if fusing Dziga Vertov’s understanding of film as a prosthetic device with a psychoanalysis of

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architecture that asks what an architect, client, or occupant of a building desires from a window.31 Hejduk shared these concerns, and not surprisingly he was one of the colleagues to whom they regularly showed the model and drawings of the house and whose reactions mattered to them considerably. Le Corbusier’s Beistegui Penthouse (1930) and Hejduk’s Wall House, both equipped with periscopes, appear suggestive precedents, yet prior to the Slow House few architects had employed electronic technology to question the convention of the window.32 Less an expression of the postmodern idea of simulation, the notion that the multiplication of images derealizes them, this juxtaposition of real and televisual views ironically and playfully reveals the conventions of the single-family house.33 As the architects write, If a picture window turns any view into a representation, collapsing depth onto the surface of glass, the framed ocean view in the Slow House is no less “mediated” than the “technologized” view on its TV screen. The terms of mediation are thus put into question, as are the designations “high” and “low” in relation to technology. As advanced technology strives to dematerialize its hardware, leaving only its effects, is not the picture window, in fact, a more advanced technology than the television set, in that its socially and economically driven mechanisms are virtually invisible, leaving only a simple frame? 34 Images on the video monitor and actual horizon do not coincide, a denial of the ultimate authority of either while a reminder of television as both an agent of surveillance and a source of companionship, a more benign attitude toward the medium than may at first be apparent. One open window nests within another, and the scene creates a powerful, if subtle, prefiguration of digital culture and its today ubiquitous multiple frames.35 Long before the Internet and the webcam, the architects understood the reassuring effect of television. Indeed, the flow of CNN (Cable News Network) formed a frequent background ambience in their Cooper Square studio. The design of the Slow House captivated the jury of the Progressive Architecture Thirty-Eighth Annual Awards Competition in 1990, and a model of it emblazoned the cover of the January 1991 issue. Recalling the arc of rotation of the bed in the withDrawing Room, it featured a television monitor with the horizon line at one terminus and a rearview mirror at the other, between which appeared fan-shaped drawings of the house in section and plan drawn on gesso spread over a plywood sheet. An arm of an architectural drawing device, dangled like a windshield, and a toy car protruded from it. Arresting models of other designs in unexpected forms (a musical instrument case in Slither) or renderings in unusual materials (a rubber portfolio for Jump Cuts) revealed D+S as masters of imaginative architectural presentations. Juror Adele Santos might well have been thinking specifically of the model when she wrote in the award citation, “It has an original sensibility; it doesn’t refer to anything else that we could think of.”36 Part architectural drawing, part

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drawing, and containing elements presented in section, plan, elevation, and in

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2.3 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of television mounting bracket in Slow House. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

c h a pte r two 2.4 Diller + Scofidio, Slow House on cover of January 1991 issue of Progressive Architecture magazine. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

three dimensions, it fused rigor with playfulness, specificity with allusiveness. Traced on plastic by a computer, the model scarcely suggests how digital technology would later transform design practice. Paradoxically, despite its invocation of mediated electronic views, it is still an exquisitely hand-made object, like the fastidious drawing of the television mounting but unlike the purely digital renderings that soon would become the norm in architecture. Rem Koolhaas, another member of the jury, was uncommonly lavish in his praise, and recognized the design as a critique of suburban domesticity: It has a beautiful and believable argument.  .  .  . It’s not that easy to design a good house on a superb site. Many architects have the weakness of having an incredibly obvious relationship with a view, and what I like here is that the house itself is a kind of mise-en-scène. It manipulates the view: The house both blocks and finally exposes the view, and I think that’s probably itself an experience, and probably a way of avoiding boredom and monotony once you live in the house.37 Twenty-seven vertical bents formed the stressed skin structure of the house, more akin to a boat than a single-family residence. An unexpected collapse of Itakura’s finances (he had invested heavily in contemporary art) prevented him from completing the Slow House, which went directly from concept to construc70

tion to ruin with no intermediate stage of dwelling. Had the house actually been

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2.5 Diller + Scofidio, Tourisms: suitCase Studies, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1991. Photograph by Glen Halvorson. Courtesy of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

built, it might well have transformed the practice of Diller + Scofidio into one specializing in vacation homes. Perhaps precisely because it was unbuilt, the project soon became well known in avant-garde architectural circles and garnered attention for the studio. It represented what Thomas Fisher, then editor of Progressive Architecture, calls a “profoundly new idea that had not been represented, for architects always used windows to connect us to nature. The breakthrough of the Slow House was to ask ‘what’s real, what is virtual?’”38

To u r i s m s: s u itC a s e Stu d i e s

Picture taking and sightseeing were the central concerns of Tourisms: suitCase Studies (1991), commissioned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and on exhibit there from January 6 through March 17, 1991, before it traveled to the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts.39 The installation originated with the idea of Mildred Friedman, design curator at the Walker, to exhibit work by emerging architects in a series entitled Architecture Tomorrow. Comprising fifty identical Samsonite valises equipped with maps, postcards of travel sights, explanatory texts, and bar-coded destination tags, Tourisms’s compactness plays upon the idea of the traveling installation, down to the fact that each piece of luggage also doubles as a shipping container. If the suitcase represents the “irreducibly edited, portable unit of the home” and its spatial system, its multiplication and arrangement in alphabetical order of the fifty United States powerfully evokes the space of the nation.40 Cords connected each bag to a map of its state on the ceiling. Rankings listed the significance of tourism in all fifty economies. Frequently overlooked by critics and observers, who seized upon the modularity of the suitcases, an argument about the geography of tourism was key to the installation.41 Serial repetition never yields an encounter with the bare object of minimalism and enables Tourisms to function as counterspectacle and database in one, for the suitcases appear in an order that hovers between abstraction and the

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suggestion of a pattern. Architecture presents information in the installation, and, not unlike the multimedia installations of Charles and Ray Eames, the sensation of being overwhelmed is integral to its effect. Multiplied by a dizzying plethora of souvenirs, guided tours, reenactments, narrative descriptions, brochures, plaques, and instructional videos, the postcard of the tourist site is only one among many representations, whose authenticity competing attractions short circuit.42 The design of the suitcases, in which mirrors set into their upper and lower lids reflect the front (image) and back (inscription) of the postcards, elegantly telegraphs this concern. Significantly, the inscriptions we read are not those of the original postcard, and the very structure of the piece with each suitcase containing two cards, 2.6 Diller + Scofidio, photograph of contents of suitcase in Tourisms: suitCase Studies, 1991. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

one inscribed at the top and the other illustrated at the bottom, dissociates text and image. Each card locates tourism in a rule-generated social practice and follows a formula: “The date, The salutation, the indecipherable statement. The description of sight. The travel itinerary. The domestic inquiry. The remark to elicit envy. Meal comments. The closing. The Signature. Proper Name, Street Address, City and State, Zip Code.” Architect Robert McAnulty faxed many of the often quite hilarious messages to the architects. In Tourisms the fully mature prose style of Diller + Scofidio made its public debut, and the project is as significant for its employment of verbal language as architectural form.43 An impersonal tone, emphasis on descriptions and processes, and delineation of how component parts of a project interact, as if words compose an intellectual diagram, characterize texts by the studio. They evoke comparison to the “writing degree zero,” which Roland Barthes discerned in the literature of Robbe-Grillet, whose neutral language “describes objects quasi-geometrically .   .   . in order to release them from human signification, to correct them of metaphor and anthropomorphism.”44 Lacking emotion and withholding moral judgments, the texts of Diller and Scofidio often echo these traits, emphasize details and visual surface, and sometimes evoke an atmosphere of foreboding, like that of Robbe-Grillet, whose fiction included drawn architectural plans and continually described precise spatial environments.45 Lined with descriptive text from the attractions on the inside top of the suitcase and topographical maps on the bottom, each valise also contains a text from a tourist guide printed on a rubber mat in its lower half. The most iconic image of the suitcase that circulated around the exhibition is a mock x-ray photograph depicting how its components might appear disassembled in an airport metal detec-

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tor. While exuding toughness, the image conceals that the elements

careful packing and cushioning, as one collaborator recalls.46 Installing the exhibition in Minneapolis required two weeks of nonstop highly precise labor.47 During the final two days of the installation Diller docu-

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of each suitcase were quite fragile and consisted of many little pieces requiring

mented with a video camera herself and her fellow sleep-deprived collaborators. “This is going to be an absolutely impossible show to photograph,” she observed. Ostensibly standardized mechanical objects, the suitcases were in fact complex handmade artifacts whose effective display necessitated rendering, prefabrication, and site-specific installation. Rows of Samsonite cases evoke an absent army of tourists, as if to emphasize the filiation between leisure travel and warfare.48 Diller and Scofidio explored this topic at length in their book on the D-day celebration, Back to the Front.49 Yet Tourisms: suitCase Studies is wickedly funny about the cultural fixations it documents. Anyone who has toured the United States recognizes its acute portrait of a society obsessed with the topoi of its history, no matter how banal or forgettable. While avoiding nostalgia or sentimentality, it escapes condescension, and “sees tourism critically but affirmatively—as a tacit, semi-fictional pact between sightseers and sightmakers,” in the words of the architects.50 Although skeptical about the domestication of space, the exhibition refused to adopt an air of superiority or uncritical celebration, evident in many explorations of popular culture housed in museums. As D+S phrased it, “Operating under the assumption that the target and the weapon can be the same, the installation overtly plays out its own role as tourist attraction.”51 Indeed, Tourisms deflects the hostility common among tourists, each in pursuit of an authentic experience (the unspoiled photograph) that others inhibit.52 By inviting visitors to become fellow travelers, its irony pleased crowds, as the generally positive reviews suggest.53 Recalling her work with Diller and Scofidio, Friedman observed, “Of all the architects I’ve worked with, they are the most interested in challenging people and coming up with ideas no one had seen before.”54

Sti c k i n g It to D u c h a m p

Revisiting an architectural commission canceled by a client is just such an uncommon idea, for few architects willingly return to a project halted while under construction. Diller + Scofidio irreverently took on this challenge in The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, which opened May 20, 1992, at the Gallery Ma in Tokyo and the following year at Le Magasin in Grenoble and Arc-en-rêve in Bordeaux. Reworking the house as an installation, splicing and editing it as if it were a film, introduced another layer of reflexivity into a project already concerned with vision. It demonstrated the ease with which the Slow House could obtain a viable afterlife as more than plans and models but less than a realized building at a moment when museum and gallery exhibitions of architecture were becoming more common and architectural drawings increasingly traded

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c h a pte r two 2.7 Diller + Scofidio, The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, installation at Gallery Ma, Tokyo, Japan, 1992. Photograph © Fujitsuka Mitsumasa, Supported by Toto Gallery MA. Reproduced by permission of the photographer, Toto Gallery MA, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

on the art market, not that the architects seemed to have sold their work in this manner.55 Rather than consolidating the Slow House into a single (and saleable) object, the exhibition multiplied its representations. The Desiring Eye deployed twentyfour freestanding steel poles and lecterns in a grid on a raised floor in a gallery space. Each display consisted of a rectangular steel lectern frame with its top horizontal segment removed and a halogen lightbulb suspended over it. At first glance they resembled music stands, and the gallery conveyed the impression of a concert, minus the instruments and performers. Extending from the floor at a slight angle, not unlike the mirror terminating the leg of the vanity chair in the withDrawing Room, the displays are best seen from a standing position. Two glazed panels, a liquid crystal film panel and a sheet of glass, realize a complex layering of text and three-dimensional objects. No two panels are strictly identical. Plans and models of the project, comic strips, and Polaroid photographs appear in individual lecterns, evoking Duchamp’s The Green Box (1934),

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in which the artist included notes and instructions for his earlier artworks.56

with images including architectural details of the house, the exhibition plays looking and reading off each other. Designed the same year, the unrealized 1992 project for the headquarters of

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Juxtaposing written statements, such as observations about waterfront real estate

Creative Time in the Battery Maritime Building (Richard Walker and Charles Morris, 1909) extended this playfulness to the design of a lobby, office, and waiting room.57 To accommodate exhibitions and performances, the waiting room contained foldable units for seating, a film projection platform on a scissors lift, and a stage/screen that simultaneously conserved storage space and suggests a fluidity of possible viewing relations. As the first design for an auditorium realized by D+S, it is notable for proposing maximum flexibility of use.

Te xt i n S pa c e: Th e L i qu i d C ry sta l C y c l e

Foto Opportunity: Eight Strategies of Niagara Falls, Soft Sell, and Case # 00-17164/003841983 show the architects continuing to investigate how new display technology could engage architectural space. Although frequently overlooked by commentators, these four projects after Pleasure/Pain and The Desiring Eye underscore that liquid crystal film (enabling oscillation between transparency and translucency) functioned as a technological pivot in their work of the 1990s and their attempt to relocate it from the space of the gallery to that of the actual city. The Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada commissioned Foto Opportunity: Eight Strategies of Niagara Falls, exhibited from June 12 to July 19, 1992. Eight liquid crystal film panels, mounted on vertical frames attached to the wall, with small audio speakers protruding on their right side, displayed texts about photo opportunities, Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, and the Love Canal at six-second intervals. Small photographs of Niagara Falls intermittently became visible. Speakers played an automobile tour narration of Niagara Falls. George Baird, who curated the exhibition, later recalled that “working with a series of pre-constituted ‘touristic’ images of Canada, it had a real charge. And as was invariably the case back then, the installation was exquisitely constructed.”58 Photographs of Foto Opportunity indicate that it was cramped within the exhibition space, for which reason it perhaps was among the last instances of an installation Diller and Scofidio realized on the flat space of a gallery wall. Indeed, it suggests they most effectively realize work in three dimensions through and around which a viewer can move. With few exceptions, they have since remained wary of exhibiting their often striking drawings, graphics, and audiovisual productions as individual objects. In Loophole, an installation sponsored by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) for an exhibition entitled Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory, held from September 13, 1992, to January 23, 1993, at the Second

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Artillery Armory and curated by Beryl Wright, the architects engaged with a unique architectural environment that connected their interest in transparency to the dynamics of surveillance. Demolished in 1993, the Armory Building occupied the site that today houses the MCA Building designed by German architect Josef Paul Kleihues, which opened to the public in 1996. The decision to mount an exhibition in a decaying building slated for demolition appears prescient of the now common practice of displaying art in abandoned civic structures such as schools, hospitals, and military facilities that became common during the 1970s. To propose a museum exhibition occupy such a site, if only on a temporary basis, was a relatively novel idea, for New York’s P.S. 1, arguably the paradigm of such an institution, had opened in a Queens elementary school in 1976.59 Loophole, installed in the nearly identical (doubles once again) north and south circular stair towers in the eastern wing of the armory, engages with two definitions in its title: The word “loophole,” derived from the Middle English loup, meaning to watch or peer, refers to a small vertical opening in a medieval fortification used to discharge firearms or to permit observation. Implicitly, a loophole weakens one system of defense (the wall) to make way for a stronger one (firearms or the defensive eye). The ultimate substitution of walls by more effective means of security (smarter firearms and the electronic eye) has rendered the wall a vestigial symbol of defense left over from an age in which conflict was thought of in spatial terms with vulnerable interiors, defensible boundaries and the threat of external invaders. The word “loophole” however, retains a spatial force in the context of law. A legal loophole identifies a small defect or rupture in the otherwise smooth, continuous surface of a law—an opening in which to escape its closure. A loophole can be a skillfully intentional and undetectable omission or ambiguity which leads to the destruction of a logic.60 Two video cameras positioned in the stairways and directed outward to the surrounding city feed into two monitors and eight “window interventions,” which transform portals into screens. Each window panel fluctuates between a state of translucency, in which a fictional text becomes visible, and a moment of transparency, in which the city outside comes into view. Crosshairs drawn on a liquid crystal display panel locate the target under surveillance. Stenciled onto the banister in uppercase letters, the injunctions “DO NOT TOUCH,” “DO NOT FEEL, “DO NOT CARESS,” “DO NOT FONDLE,” and “DO NOT LICK” address the viewer in a manner so as to deprive him or her of any sensation or affect that might offer escape from this spatial constriction. Scofidio describes the piece as follows: The video cameras sent their images to monitors in the opposite tower. As the towers were symmetrical the image on the monitor appeared to be a view of what was in front of you (like the Slow House)—however a person might walk by in the monitor but there was no person in your view. The view out the loophole window had a cross hair on a particular exte-

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rior site—a balcony a street corner, a window, etc. On a panel adjacent to the window was

2.8 (left) Diller + Scofidio, Loophole, installation at Second Artillery Armory, Chicago, 1993. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 2.9 (right) Diller + Scofidio, Loophole, installation at Second Artillery Armory, Chicago, 1993. Photograph by the architects. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

a text describing a particular event that happened at the site captured in the cross hair and the text on a liquid crystal film panel would become clear to show a matching photograph showing the event that was described.61 Cantilevered metal braces extend into the stairwell and support a fluorescent tube from which two video cameras slant downward. The tube provides both structural support and illumination. Evoking the work of minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin, best known for his use of fluorescent lights mounted on walls, it calls attention to the shape of the stairwell but also establishes a link between floors. Eight images and texts present fictional narratives of an office worker, a doctor, a nurse, and a resident in an urban neighborhood. Clearly responding to the logic of doubling through its installation in two stairwells, Loophole aspired to employ “symmetry” “to destabilize its plan.” How successfully it realized this aim is difficult to gauge from surviving documentation of the installation. For Chicago architect Ellen Grimes, it memorably challenged its own material and conceptual status: I adored this installation; it was the most subtle work in a really amazing show. It was hard to find, delicately made, ephemeral, but on the other hand, tough to warm up to. It was part of the building, it melted into a derelict stairwell, unframed, un-composed, almost like some eccentric form of graffiti. It was absolutely a kind of anti-object. It was the only project that really became part of the building; most of the other work, which was very good, was quite confident in its objecthood, but Loophole was not. It makes me think that the offhand, ironic quality to their installation work, which I can’t bear sometimes, might be about a simple stubborn commitment to being submerged in the mundane.62

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c h a pte r two 2.10 Diller + Scofidio, Soft Sell (Times Square), New York City, 1993. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Loophole can also be read to suggest contemporaneous investigations by proponents of deconstructivist architecture, although its tenuous relation to conventional architectural programs, spurning of objecthood, and clear absence of a design signature caution against pushing this analogy too far.63 D+S had managed to produce a work that challenged definitions of conventional media and suggestively trained its sights on the metropolis beyond the walls of the armory, a harbinger of projects to come. A subsequent indication of the interaction between an installation, its audience, and the urban environment the architects sought took place in the next project in which they employed liquid crystal film displays. Soft Sell was installed from June to December 1993 at the Rialto Cinema, an abandoned movie house that once screened pornographic films in New York’s Times Square.64 A video projection of an enormous female mouth in close-up appears on the reflective mirrored doors of the theater. Her seductive voice emanates from the ticket booth and solicits passersby for a wide range of pleasures, none of which, significantly, directly involve sex. Stenciled on to the four doors, the words “shameless,” “sinful,” “savage,” and “scandalous” appear. Behind them, fluctuating apertures the architects call “light valves” open onto jeweler’s boxes in which additional words associated with desire (“discrete,” “virtuous,” “innocent”) become visible. The panels oscillate between transparency and translucency yet display only text. Together with the body armor in The Notary Rotary, Soft Sell is among the most overtly gendered projects of Diller + Scofidio, its voice and lips clearly female, its tone seductive, its promise gratification. What the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser called “interpellation,” the hailing of individuals by ideology so that they recognize themselves as addressed, here finds an equivalent in the “hey you” directed to the spectator.65 Solicitation is the ambit, a cross between erotic comeon and advertising pitch. Satisfaction is infinitely deferred. Words, rather than images, are the main attraction here, for if the lips are captivating, language is even more so. The projection screen is a door, actually a set of doors, but also a mirror, 78

which throws the viewer back upon her or himself while watching the moving

the perplexed reactions of the urban crowd into a dynamic audiovisual mix, the first urban sound installation realized by Diller + Scofidio. On display at the moment when Times Square was becoming an outdoor family entertain-

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lips. An exercise in window display and defamiliarization, the piece churned

ment mall, Soft Sell today creates nostalgia for the unmanicured seediness of the neighborhood. Throughout the 1960s in nearby theaters, playwright Charles Ludlam staged his Ridiculous Theater Company productions with local drag queens; male moviegoers, as described by film critic Manny Farber, congregated to watch films noir by Samuel Fuller or Anthony Mann; and the Filmmakers Cinematheque screened Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, 1966).66 To conflate the area with its now sanitized identity is to forget its history as home to subcultures and an urban avant-garde, in this instance called into existence by the Creative Time public art project. Studio member Calvert Wright recalls his ambivalence about the role public art projects played in the gentrification of the neighborhood and suggests the richest element of Soft Sell (that he remembers as often difficult to hear) was its attempt to acknowledge, however imperfectly, the situation in which it was enmeshed.67 Today, the thirty-story Reuters Tower (Fox and Fowle, 2001) occupies the former site of the Rialto at the corner of Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue, unintentionally granting Soft Sell the status of an architectural document, an installation, like Loophole, realized in a building shortly before its disappearance.68 In his review of Soft Sell, Herbert Muschamp, who by this time had emerged as the most articulate proponent of Diller + Scofidio in his role as architecture critic for the New York Times, wrote what was in effect a public letter to the architects, by then his friends, that urged them to set their sights even higher: In the field of architecture today, there are no higher brows than theirs. So elevated is their thinking, so highly esteemed are they in academic circles, that these two are constantly at risk of floating out of the field altogether. Indeed, it could be said that they’ve yet to take solid root there. . . . And that’s a problem. For while Diller and Scofidio have avoided being eaten alive by conventional practice, they’ve been gobbled up by the art world with scarcely a burp. The risk now is that they may be turning into an architectural peep show: a teasing look at ideas that won’t alter anyone’s view of architecture because they are indistinguishable from the kind of art that is meant to look funny and strange. . . . The rigor with which these architects translate cultural truths into visual forms is formidable. But theirs is a partial and a somewhat chilly truth. “Soft Sell’s” reduction of desire to a self-deceptive commercial transaction leaves no room for those who might be driven by a desire to make a better city or, like Diller and Scofidio themselves, to tell the truth about it. Their refusal to discriminate among desires may be democratic, but it’s also dispiriting. Though the project engages the life of the street with a fine sense of humor, “Soft Sell” is a sealed system.69

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Muschamp hit upon the strengths and limitations in the work Diller and Scofidio then were making and challenged them to overcome their insularity. Yet his claims that they not had established themselves in architecture and were being assimilated by the art world are overstated. In retrospect, the projects that the studio produced throughout the 1990s prefigured a turn toward digital technology in both architecture and the visual arts. Today, its works appear more, not less, central to these fields than they did in 1993, and two decades later the assertion that either discipline has gobbled them up is unconvincing. Attuned as he was to the work of his friends, Muschamp did not perceive how creating their own disciplinary self-definition and working at the scale of the city would soon move them beyond a “sealed system.” Case # 00-17164/003841983, in which Diller and Scofidio combined their interests in the metropolis, crime, and technology, was their last liquid crystal film project in a gallery setting. The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City commissioned the installation as part of a group exhibition entitled The Final Frontier, held from May 7 to August 15, 1993. D+S proposed modes of temporality are as central to electronic media culture as time and motion studies and labor-saving strategies had been to the discourses of modernity and demonstrated the ease with which they could switch between exploring modern and postmodern culture, options they never regarded as mutually exclusive.70 Photographs, graphics, video displays, and liquid crystal displays explored the results of a crime, and the project put the studio in contact with numerous forensics and technology experts. DNA sampling, electron microscopy, fingerprint analysis, polygraph tests results, ballistic test reports, blood sampling, and video surveillance footage unfolded against a grid, accompanied by interview transcripts of five suspects accused of committing a murder. A subplot involving computer fraud and money laundering developed 2.11 Diller + Scofidio, detail of Case # 00-17164/003841983, installation in The Final Frontier exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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on five liquid crystal panels. Diller produced a series of haunting study drawings in her notebooks that evoke film noir. In its fascination with the potentially infinite quantity of information that a crime might generate, Case shared a concern with data mapping and the graphic representation of events unfolding in complex urban spaces that interested Charles and Ray Eames and later engaged architects such as Rem Koolhaas, MVDRV, and Asymptote throughout the 1990s.71

Moving from the space of the gallery to the urban environment was a slow process for D+S, as the histories of two unrealized propos-

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Th e LED D u et

als for LED text-display projects, Ventilator in Chicago and Feed in New York, suggest. Realized without the benefit of wireless networks (invented in 1991 and not yet widespread), both media-intensive works would have entailed larger budgets and the expense of wiring beneath ground level. Ventilator was to have been a permanent installation on the front steps of the new Kleihues museum, whose architecture encountered a mixed reception upon its opening. The studio proposed transforming the face of each riser of its thirty-two front steps into an electronic reading surface. As a later description by the architects put it, the project sought “to thwart the NeoClassical entrance to the new Museum of Contemporary Art whose podium steps elevate art to a privileged domain above the abject street.”72 Yet the great expense of ripping up the steps after their construction to feed six-inch-thick cables across them prevented 2.12 Diller + Scofidio, Ventilator, rendering for installation at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

2.13 Diller + Scofidio with Paul Lewis, Feed, 1993. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

the realization of the project.

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D+S developed Feed in 1993 with the help of studio collaborator Paul Lewis for permanent installation in the Park Avenue and Thirty-Third Street No. 6 IRT subway station in Manhattan. It would have embedded an LED signboard of red letters in the 90 foot length of the southbound platform to continuously broadcast news, sports, and weather. Individual seats unfolded from station columns on the western side of the platform. Metal texts embedded in the floor would have explored the history of the New York underground transportation system and juxtaposed the delivery of the breaking events with a fixed chronology. Although the Bloomberg organization had agreed to supply news feed, the project was killed by a city official in charge of subway art. Had it been realized, a new chapter in the long history of public reading in New York might have commenced.73

B a d P r e s s: H o u s ew o r k S e r i e s

Diller and Scofidio remained undeterred by the rejection of their two urban LED projects and turned to investigating standardization, a theme that would permeate their activities in the latter half of the 1990s. Recognizing the obstacles to realizing site-specific works in cities, they began to explore spatial conventions and codes, such as proper techniques of shirt ironing, the American fondness for the lawn, and airports and air travel, simultaneously localized and generalized. The first step in this new direction was the installation Bad Press: Housework Series, exhibited from April 21 to June 23, 1993, under the title Dysfunctionalisme at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Castres, France, and from November 18 to December 18, 1993, at the Richard Anderson Gallery in New York. Eighteen men’s shirts displayed on six ironing boards formed a rectangular pattern in the gallery. On the walls, the architects posted an excerpt from a 1950s text on shirt ironing and a statement by them on scientific management and housework. Folded and ironed in elaborate shapes, a sleeve tucked into a pocket of a rectangle, a bow with a noose, an inside-out facade of irregular pleats, and a triangular wedge with asymmetrically arranged sleeves, the shirts parodied everyday sartorial conventions and suggested larger issues around regulating the body, the labor of ironing traditionally performed by women, and time and motion studies. Although the gallery wall included a photograph of a male body (cropped below the head) wearing a “correctly” folded ironed shirt, the exhibition proposed conventional propriety as ridiculous. Its model (architect Calvert Wright) literally becomes a “stuffed shirt.” Bad Press rendered the everyday abnormal and became a manifesto for a “dissident ironing” practice, which has not yet widely, or at least purposefully, caught on.74 Later variations of the piece exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2003 Scanning exhibition and today included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art introduced a video in which the body of the wearer rotated on a platform. 82

Diller + Scofidio suggest the task of ironing is governed by minimums:

pressed, rectangular form which fits economically into orthogonal systems of storage— packed into cartons for delivery from the site of manufacture, reinforced in the display cases of retail space, sustained at home in dresser drawers and closet shelves, and

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The standardized ironing pattern of a man’s shirt habitually returns the shirt to a com-

perpetuated away from the home in suitcases. A minimum of labor is expended to reconfigure the shirt, through a minimum of flat facets, into a two-dimensional modular unit which will consume a minimum of space. When worn, the residue of orthogonal logic of efficiency is registered on the surface of the body. The parallel creases and crisp square corners of a clean, pressed shirt have come to represent refinement and distinction: the by-product of efficiency is now the object of desire.75 2.14 Diller + Scofidio, Bad Press: Housework Series, 1993. Photographs © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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To overlook ironing as an efficiency technique is to ignore the organization of space, from the shirt, to the box, to the bricks that compose buildings, urban grids, and ultimately the form of the city. Yet the architects never claim their asymmetrically ironed shirts represent a superior practice by which constricting spatial codes can be circumvented. An ideal form of the everyday, or merely one that is not ridiculous, is nowhere to be found in the project, and not until Slither and the Brasserie renovation do Diller and Scofidio overcome an initial suspicion of usefulness and become comfortable designing or proposing norms. Their approach to the fold suggests an oppositional stance comfortable with indeterminacy, if not the odor of starch that permeated their loft as a European intern in a corner painstakingly ironed dozens of cheap shirts. Bad Press is most compelling as a parody of tectonics, the domain of architecture concerned with the articulation of joints and surfaces.76 Long accustomed to the criticism that their architecture overindulged in detailing, Diller and Scofidio heap irony upon the norm and present it as ludicrous.77 Diller sometimes recited the ironing instructions in her lectures, a reminder of how the projects of D+S often involved architecture as performance and text. The installation appeared contemporaneously with the translation into English of a book by Gilles Deleuze on Leibniz and the baroque, just at the moment when the fold was becoming a major issue of 1990s architectural theory.78 Significantly, the publication accompanying Bad Press’s first exhibition in France is bilingual and folded in the manner of an accordion.79

O v e r e x p o s e d / Fo u rth W i n d o w

Architectural standardization figured prominently in the video Overexposed that Diller premiered during a conference organized by the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities (today the Getty Research Institute), “Cine City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space, 1895–1995,” held in Santa Monica, California, on March 28, 1994.80 It was a twenty-four-minute continuous-pan video of office workers in the former Pepsi-Cola Building (now the ABN-Amro Bank Building) at Five Hundred Park Avenue, aka Sixty-Two East Fifty-Ninth Street, built in 1958–60 and designed by Gordon Bunshaft with Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).81 As the video played, Diller read in an emotionless voice a text that described the people visible and their activities.82 Before doing so, she played a promotional video for 3M/Viracon/Martin Privacy Glass and explained her and Scofidio’s interest in the architectural and cultural investigation of this new material.83 Overexposed depicted twelve offices, some occupied by active inhabitants, others empty. Only one office at a time is entirely visible in the frame, which slowly morphs in its center from black and white to color, freezing upon the scene, and in one case replacing it with lustrous female lips. Panning to the left, the camera 84

holds on each office for around two minutes. It then pans down one floor and

puzzle. People work at their desks, reflections appear in windows, a pigeon flies through the frame. No one inside seems to notice the filming. What does capture attention is the curtain wall facade of the building, whose

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moves six offices to the right, as if obeying the arbitrary logic of a crossword

silver aluminum mullions demarcate the offices yet make clear the lateral extension of space beyond what initially appears as a frame. Over these images, text floats three times, advertising different imaginary glass systems with specific properties of heightened transparency and strength. This overlay directs the attention of the viewer to the glass, making its normally seen-through (and unnoticed) transparency primary object. The standardized offices prove stubbornly resistant to explanation or comparison, as if taking a cue from the title of the video. Overexposed evokes comparison to films such as Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964) and Play Time (Jacques Tati, 1967), both of which represent office towers, one iconic (the Empire State Building), the other generic (a film set constructed to represent international style urbanism), in a deliberately neutral style free of affect.84 Like Tati, Diller and Scofidio approached the sight of people occupying the cell-like cubes of modern architecture as a chance to estrange the ordinary. Here the similarities end, for Diller and Scofidio extract no comedy from the office workers, nor do they ever include any sound, interior or exterior, a key element of Play Time and its evocation of modern architecture in postwar French technocratic society. Tati films from a slightly skewed angle, and his camera often moves toward the scene. Diller and Scofidio consistently utilize a telephoto lens and a more affectively neutral pan. “Hyper-sightedness,” the valorization of transparency by twentieth-century architecture, is the target of the video, as the architects acknowledged: In early modernism, glass was to liberate vision from the disciplinary confines of masonry. It was considered a material of “truth,” an instrument of disclosure. And like the emerging electronic technologies today, it promised to democratize space and information in a world guaranteed to become transparent, available. While the curtain wall was becoming the dominant building technology of the twentieth century, it was becoming evident that the technology which permitted unlimited vision to the outside also exposed itself to observation from that very same outside. The gaze was, all of a sudden, a two way system. Glass was becoming an anxious material of surveillance and control.85 Overexposed is most rewardingly understood as denying the possibility of innocent materiality in architecture and the belief that any set of formal decisions can be stripped clean of ideology or dissociated from a historically specific visual culture. It presents transparency as a particularly recalcitrant, if not the most recalcitrant, form of opacity. Ironically, and apparently unbeknownst to the architects, the building they scrutinized was one of the few international style office towers designed by a woman, Natalie de Blois, a senior architect at SOM. Their decision to study it in detail restores her building, today a historical land-

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c h a pte r two 2.15 Diller + Scofidio, Overexposed, 1994. Composite photograph by Ricardo Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

mark, to well-deserved visibility, while suggesting that the video “notation” system they employed could profile urban histories of which even they themselves had been unaware. The actual making of Overexposed provides revealing clues into their working methods. Paul Lewis, a former student of Diller’s at Princeton, who joined the studio in 1993, spent days walking around Manhattan in search of a glass curtain–walled skyscraper whose windows matched the rectangular proportions of the video frame.86 What appears effortless surveillance is in fact the consequence of a careful matching of architecture and moving image technology, a production process that begins with selecting an existent architectural window with an aspect ratio identical to that of video. After Diller weighed in on speed and sequence, Scofidio and Lewis filmed from the Hotel Delmonico (converted in 2004 to Trump Park Avenue condominium apartments). Their presence in a room with a video camera directed at offices across the street in the Disney Company elicited complaints after two or three hours from employees and a visit from the manager. Filming continued for the remainder of the day (all that the budget would allow) after Scofidio and Lewis explained they were professors of architecture documenting important curtain wall structures. Scofidio labored intensively to reproduce twelve offices in a composite image, utilizing an early version of Adobe Photoshop that did not allow for layering, in effect hand crafting a rendering with a computer. A parody of transparency was central to “The Fourth Window,” which Diller and Scofidio realized in the May 1995 issue of Forum, the quarterly publication 86

of the Amsterdam-based Society Architecture et Amicitia. In collaboration with

Vanti-View and Recipro-View.87 While earlier architects such as Loos and Le Corbusier had associated themselves with product endorsements, and conceptual artists such as Dan Graham, Lee Lozano, and Stephen Kaltenbach had placed

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Lewis, they published three advertisements for fake brands of glass they termed

counterfeit advertisements in newspapers during the 1960s, the promotion of nonexistent architectural materials does not appear to have been previously explored by architects.88 Titled with obvious reference to the interview with Paul Virilio, “The Third Window,” acknowledged in their work on the Slow House, the ad campaign promotes a hyper-transparent form of glass subsequent to the door, the window, and the screen, and promotes new forms of visual experience.89 The first advertisement implores its reader: Perform with the comfort of knowing that you can always see yourself. Enhance your glass. Resurface it with VANITI-VIEW© the first environmentally-correct neo-narcissistic reflective glass inner coating which simulates night time reflection twenty-four-hours-a-day so that you can watch yourself as others look on. VANITI-VIEW© gives back to glass Modernism’s feeling of “mastery” with the postmodern assurance of doubt. Yesterdays Ideals made possible through tomorrow’s technologies for today’s Zeitgeist. Fourth Window™ Architectural Products for the New Humanism.90

“ Th e S ite - S p e c i fi c S pa c e o f th e Bo o k ”

This caustic vision of “the new humanism” filtered through the language of advertising and glass technology served as a coming attraction for the next project by the studio, not a building or installation but the single-authored monograph, Flesh: Architectural Probes, published in 1994.91 Although numerous articles and reviews treating projects by the architects had appeared in many languages, this volume offered them the first opportunity to work with the printed page at a scale larger than a magazine spread or pamphlet, in what they call “the site specific space of the book.”92 At once an engagement with the tradition of artist books flourishing in the 1990s, Flesh spurned fine letterpress printing, vibrant color, lyric poetic or autobiographical expression, political agitation, or the repetitive serial structures of conceptual art. Designed by hand, it strenuously avoided any association with craft and trod the fine line between commercial graphic art and cultural commentary that artist Barbara Kruger had explored in her confrontational juxtapositions of words and photographs during the 1980s and 1990s. Diller and Scofidio appreciated the deft appropriations of media imagery, barbed irony, and typographical parries of Kruger’s work, yet Flesh spurns the catchy aphorisms (“I shop therefore I am”) and intimation of bodily pain often found in her art. Its alternation of design projects and found imagery anticipated the sprawling

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inclusiveness of other 1990s books by architects, notably S,M,L,XL published the following year by Rem Koolhaas.93 Architectural monographs typically serve as visual calling cards to introduce a studio to prospective clients or to anchor its historical reputation. Flesh is indifferent to celebrating the work of its creators and may well be the definitive non–coffee table architecture book of the final quarter of the twentieth century. It promulgates no aesthetic program, contains little personal or professional information, lacks photographs of completed buildings, and is a challenge to read from beginning to end. Its obstinate unwillingness to respect traditional categories, more than any borrowing of visual imagery, is where it can plausibly be called an artist book. On its front cover, a photograph of Diller’s right buttock is photographed with the word “Flesh” stamped in cut-out text letters. Scofidio’s (hairier) left buttock appears on the back cover and the crack between them runs half way up the spine of the binding, joining his and hers in a seamless montage. Even when showing their rear ends to the world, a gesture in this instance more ironic than aggressive, Diller and Scofidio reveal their commitment to high-level detailing. A superscript number one in green type appears next to the word “Flesh.” The subtitle “Architectural Probes” and the authors’ names appear at the top of the cover. Turning to the title page, the superscript leads to a footnote at the bottom with a definition “the outermost surface of the ‘body’ bordering all relations in ‘space.’” It announces the aspirations of the volume to place human corporeality and space in quotation marks.94 Eschewing linear chronology or biography, Flesh unfolds as a series of descriptions of body parts and the regions of experience they promote on somatic, cultural, and social levels, as well as the spaces of the bed, the office of the psychotherapist, the museum, the television viewing room, and the kitchen table. Diller and Scofidio designed the width of the spine to accommodate the crack of their buttocks, from which the rest of its design and its relation to other areas of human anatomy followed.95 Before segmenting the body, they establish a set of rules, a system of proportions as the axiom for a critique of ordered and ordering systems in architecture and culture. A tension between investigating vision and space and recognizing that such analysis presupposes a conceptual matrix animates the book, a more rationalist enterprise than its apparent disorder lets on. Starting with the buttocks on the front and back covers, Flesh treats the chest (Bad Press), the torso (the withDrawing room, A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate), the walking figure (Overexposed, Para-Site), the eye (Tourisms), and finally the mouth (Soft Sell). It is a taxonomy of the projects of Diller + Scofidio and a historical record of them in one. Omitting a table of contents and captions exacerbate what are likely to be abrupt (and frustrating) transitions for readers not already familiar with this work. Photographs of the architects (presenting the Slow House at a public hearing) appear but once in the volume with their faces blacked out, circumventing any

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possible publicity function. An introductory essay by Teyssot, “The Mutant Body

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2.16 Diller + Scofidio, cover of Flesh: Architectural Probes, published by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994. Photograph by Diller +Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

of Architecture,” links their projects to histories of architectural and visual production in a manner clearly inspired by their own practice of cultural montage.96 Laid out by the then husband and wife design team of Heather Champ and Brendan Cotter, the book utilizes multiple type fonts and sizes (sometimes as many as five on a page) and suggests examples from a typography manual of practices to avoid.97 Words in bold, italic, white, black, and gray letters careen in multiple directions. On page 102, citations from Jacques Derrida and Balzac appear alongside an explanation of how the Hays Code of Hollywood cinema represented beds. Presentation of the withDrawing Room ends suddenly, and the reader is directed to page 136. The discussion then shifts to the Pleasure/Pain, after thirty-two pages on A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate. Photographs, plans, and sections of installations on a single page; stills from films and television programs; excerpts from newspaper articles, advertising slogans and images; transcriptions of visitor reactions to Para-Site; and a mock dialogue between a married couple and their sex therapist interspersed with documentation of the withDrawing Room demonstrate the plurality of modes—architectural, cultural, political, and narrative coinhabiting Flesh. Its appropriation of media imagery recalls the graphic design employed at the service of détournement in the journal internationale situationniste, as well as the high-contrast Xerox aesthetic of journal semiotext(e), in which D+S had published a text on Tourisms in the 1992 issue devoted to architecture.98 Flesh is a modernist text clothed in postmodern media culture. Writing of Eliot’s The Waste Land, first published in 1922, Tim Armstrong describes an aesthetic credo, if not a distinct attitude toward the culture or waste and recycling, equally applicable to the book by D+S. 89

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The materials of mass culture are crammed in.  .  .  . The poem seems to revel in excess, consuming conspicuously in its gratuitous piling of allusions and eclectic cultural borrowings. Like a potlatch, it participates in a paradoxical order, destroying culture in order to reinforce it. The process of waste production is knitted into its cultural moment: it cannot (and Pound cannot) “edit out” all the waste, because it is waste material; both the abject and a valuable surplus which enables culture to continue, creating its own moment as it orders its abjection. There can be no production without waste.99 Clearly in dialogue with a multitude of sources—earlier literary modernisms, photomontage, cinema, conceptual art, performance, and Dada/surrealist impropriety—Flesh was irreducible to them. Architect Raphael Berkowitz, a collaborator on the volume, recalls the hours spent laying it out by hand (among the final predigital projects of the studio) and selecting slides of A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate, a recollection that suggests its visual appearance was anything but the product of quick or haphazard decisions.100 Today it evokes a moment, like that of the Slow House, when designs did not yet take shape on the computer screen and emerged through the interaction of eye and hand rather than keyboard and algorithm. Its seemingly arbitrary or disorderly pages are of a different era from the computer software programs that today allow architects and graphic artists to realize designs that are perfectly random or perfectly balanced. While many architects and scholars throughout the 1990s attempted to define the autonomy of their discipline, Diller + Scofidio moved in the opposite direction and sought to destabilize, if not explode it.101 The first sentence of Flesh, “Deviants, by definition, cross lines,” not only attacks the Florida statutes defining indecent public exposure but offers a self-definition. Several pages later, the architects present their critique of architecture. It must be clarified here that architects grapple with the socially constructed body more than they will care to admit. Even the “pure, plastic” icons of High and Late Modernism resonate with the overwhelming expression of the body’s denial. The problem, rather, has been in the reluctance of contemporary architectural practice to regard the body and space as interdependent constructs, inseparable from the constructs which have shaped them. Architecture refuses to admit that space is already constructed before it gets there— coded legally, politically, morally and socially. Space is nothing other than “contractual” and is prescribed in advance of architecture. All too frequently, architecture enters into a simple regulatory role, in collusion with the systems which employ it.102

C o l d Wa r

Diller and Scofidio negotiated the divide between producing immanent criti90

cism of the existing built environment in their projects and realizing a positive

this distinction. When the time came to create new objects and spaces with the potential to establish cultural norms, their skills and high standards served them well. Having designed numerous build-

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program with little evident discomfort. Indeed, their practice elides

ings earlier in his career undoubtedly helped Scofidio, as did his genuine affection for machines, automobiles, and building technology. Diller possessed an equally refined sense of architectural form. Improbably, they are sophisticated modernist aesthetes equally fond of media culture and technology. By the mid-1990s they began to design projects that confronted the viewing positions and spectacle of mass culture. Paradigmatic of this turn was Cold War, proposed in 1995 to the Public Art Commission of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as a permanent installation in the Broward County Civic Arena, home of the Panthers National Ice Hockey League. The violence and rhetoric of competition in professional sports events (which Scofidio knew well as a fan) and their similarity to institutionalized warfare intrigued the architects. So did the immense ice field (85 feet wide by 200 feet long) and its potential as a horizontally oriented video projection screen. They designed a grid of overhead video projectors whose programming would foil “the expectations of a captive audience perched to witness a sporting event” by instituting “a cultural framework of ‘battle.’”103 Their most extensive presentation 2.17 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of Cold War, 1995. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

to the client was submitted on October 9, 1996, and prepared with consultants Steven M. Artsis of Mobile Wall One, Inc. and Harry Spielberg of Consentini Associates.104 An elongated male face, stretched in close-up to fit the hockey field, suggests the effects possible by rotating the traditionally horizontal film screen 90 degrees along a vertical axis. Rippling blue waves in a swimming pool with the word “Host” projected in the center appeared in a sample video of the pool being tipped over and emptied of water. It captivated the art commission, although the expense of the large number of projectors required to cover the surface of the rink killed the project.105 Altering the traditional relationship between the horizon line and the human figure presumed by the rectangle of the film screen could well have produced a defamiliarizing effect, if not a challenge to the theories of cinematic identification film scholars have posited to explain the experience of motion pictures.106 Seated 360 degrees around the rink instead of behind a traditional flat screen, viewers would have occupied distinct orientations toward the image, their bodies an integral part of the performance space. A nontraditional screen was also central to the set and projections for Matthew Maguire’s production of Racine’s Phaedra that Diller +

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Scofidio designed that same year, in which a single-hinged wall was divided into four segments for rear projection.107

J u m p C uts

Working in the space of the city became a reality for the architects with Jump Cuts, a media installation that commenced as a public art commission for the San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs. On February 3, 1994, the San Jose Redevelopment Agency Board approved the construction of a multiplex cinema on empty land on the south side of the Paseo de San Antonio between First and Second Streets in the city’s downtown.108 Adjacent to condominiums, shopping, and a repertory theater, the movie house was envisioned within a pedestrian and entertainment district with glass facades and lobbies, the now dominant idiom for American urban regeneration in the age of the suburban mall. Developer 50 West San Fernando Associates contracted with United Artists Theater Circuits Inc. to run the United Artists (UA) Cineplex. The San Jose Urban Design Review Board sought to differentiate the marquee from the cinema designed by Kenneth Rodrigues and Partners and Robert Poeschl Architecture and completed in 1996.109 After having made a strong impression on members of the board when they were finalists for the adjacent repertory theater, Diller + Scofidio obtained the commission to design “a marquee for the twenty-first century.”110 They submitted a schematic proposal in which they advocated contributing “to the atmosphere of ‘spectacle’ inherent in the program” and proposed exchanging the view of the activity in the lobby seen from the street with video views of those activities taken from within the building—thus, flipping the building inside-out and back, electronically. Watching this fluctuation between bodies projected onto the marquee and bodies seen through it is analogous to watching live performers shift onto the screen. As people watching is the ultimate form of entertainment, the marquee will inevitably attract attention to itself as well as to the theater, thus adding to the publicness of the public space of the Paseo.111 Evoking the aspirations of Para-Site and Loophole, Jump Cuts also sought to overcome distinctions between interior and exterior space. In their initial proposal, D+S outlined what in effect was not one but several installations. Translucent video screens, “text machines,” and glass plates would have displayed movie trailers, opened the lobby to the street, presented the escalators in plan thanks to overhead cameras, and then cut to theater interiors filmed from the projection booths. Risers on the escalator were to display single letters or words in loops, revisiting their Text Machine concept. Screens projecting words suggestive of the mobil92

ity or stasis of the film-viewing experience made up the other text machines. An

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2.18 Diller + Scofidio, Jump Cuts, 1996. Photograph © César Rubio. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

electronic sign composed of LEDs was to present movie information, perhaps advertisements as well. Diller and Scofidio even designed the temporal order and alternation of the media displays, just as they later would do for the light displays visible through the translucent wood walls of Alice Tully Hall. If the project sought not only “a technological revision for this transmission of information but a rethinking of urban seduction,” the realization of such goals turned out to be more complex than the architects had anticipated and would stretch out over fifteen years. Budget limitations forced the elimination of the text machines and transmission of images from inside the movie halls. In its final iteration, the design comprised twelve 5' × 6' 8" liquid crystal screens that when translucent received video images from projectors inside the lobby. During the day, the screens were transparent and allowed the passerby to view the interior of the theater through texts applied to the surface of the screens. At night, projections of movie trailers alternated with views of the escalator in plan and elevation. UA insisted on the projection of the trailers in their entirety, which together with the escalator views would be controlled by a computer.112 Long-term viability of the installation concerned the design commission early on, and a service contract and purchase of backup hardware became part of the project budget. A change of ownership of the movie theater also cast the future of the project in doubt. Its present owner, Camera Cinemas, purchased it in 2003. Theater managers needed to edit out the commercials on the laser disks on which the trailers were supplied. Replacement of laser disks by DVDs as the distribution standard for movie trailers led to the deactivation of Jump Cuts for many years while it was retrofitted to accommodate the more recent platform. When last I visited it in 2010, its video monitors displayed only movie trailers, a

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2.19 Diller + Scofidio, Indigestion, 1995. Photograph by the architects. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

reminder of the technical complications and maintenance issues public media art projects continue to raise.

I n d i g e sti o n

The conflict-fraught atmosphere of the unrealized Cold War, albeit in a gallery space more intimate than an ice hockey arena, defined the next project by D+S, a video projection onto a horizontal table called Indigestion. Scripted by Douglas Cooper, voice-directed by Marianne Weems, and produced in 1995 at the Banff Centre for New Media, it employed interactive video and virtual environment technology with more flexible installation options.113 Its dialogue, intended to evoke film noir, contrasts with the silence of Jump Cuts. Diller and Scofidio videotaped couples whose mannerisms evoke distinct social milieus.114 These bad dates culminate in one person being poisoned. Cliché and pattern characterize each variation on a set of common themes. Interactivity enters into Indigestion through a touch screen menu that allows the viewer to specify the gender and class of the characters and to switch between them while remaining at the same place in the narrative. It evokes the film remake, if not the structuralist logic of a combinatory.115 Moving through a magnified version of the dining room table, which became a visually organized database, was possible in an adjoining room. As in Case, the intent was to produce a “multi-layered information” space, with the additional goal of realizing what the architects call a critique of “reductive binaries such as masculine/feminine, high class/low class, fact/fiction, and 94

real virtual.”116 Whether or not this effect was apparent must remain subject

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2.20 Diller + Scofidio with Stuart Romm, We Interrupt This Program . . . Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

to conjecture, for the published reviews offer praise but not much detail.117 Lamentably, the recitation of dialogue is often pedestrian, less witty than film noir, and full of bad acting. Cooper offered an instructive assessment in an interview published four years later: Indigestion deals with the false promise of interactivity. The audience has the illusion of narrative power—they seem to be able to control the direction of the story, by making meaningful choices—and yet each narrative proves ultimately unyielding, subject only to the will of the author. And this is generally the case: a complex interacting narrative is invariably scripted, and the audience’s sense of contributing to the narrative process is illusory. At best, they’re choosing which path they wish to take through a preconceived structure. I had to deal with every possible combination of various interlocutors, and it was a serious headache. We had been warned in advance that “creating interactive art is like cleaning your loft with a tooth brush” but we only fully realized the truth of this when we’d spent some weeks trying to make all the narrative bits mesh.118

W e I nte r ru pt Th i s P ro g r a m . . .

Jump Cuts and Indigestion suggested that the relation of D+S to the productions of the culture industry were never simple and formulaic and admitted novel possibilities of engagement that unsettled distinctions among modernism and postmodernism. Their most significant attempt to work in the media and information sector was the unrealized 1997 CNN Center proposal, We Interrupt This Program .   .   . on which they collaborated with Stuart Romm, of the Atlanta

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architectural studio of Romm + Pearsall. The project commenced as an investigation in an architecture studio that Romm taught at Georgia Institute of Technology. This design sought to give spatial form to the experience of liveness and temporality, the trademark of the network and involved an addition to the fourteen-story Omni Center complex designed across from Centennial Park in 1976 by Thompson, Ventulett and Stainback. Ted Turner acquired the property in 1987 and renamed it the CNN Center. Revealingly, the Omni began as an indoor shopping and entertainment complex but proved to be a financial failure in the central city spurned by suburban residents until it acquired a second life as a broadcasting center. Diller, Scofidio, and Romm acknowledged this fascination with media transmission in their design proposal by organizing it around screens, here understood as the heart of the contemporary city. In 1989, artist Dara Birnbaum had proposed a similar idea for a wall of twenty-five video monitors in an Atlanta atrium mall that combined live footage with digitally manipulated images. Declining fortunes of the shopping mall in which it was installed and a change of mind by the developer later derailed its operation.119 The project of the architects was more ambitious. A “satellite clock,” a 96' × 30' liquid crystal display projecting an image of the earth, was to have been complemented by a “video cab” climbing up and down on the building at half-hour intervals and a video marquee at the entrance. A grid of smaller LCD panels in the central atrium would have alternated between news programming and transparent phases. Regrettably, CNN management later commissioned a tamer media installation in the atrium. Yet the design inspired the key elements of the next major project by D+S, in which a media screen also alternated lived and prerecorded footage and rotated, not vertically but horizontally, around the facade of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, complemented by cameras that, like the ones planned for the CNN Center, broadcast interior and exterior views.120

Fa c s i m i l e

D+S commenced work on Facsimile in 1996. As the most cinematic of their projects, for which they filmed twenty-four hours of scenes in a studio environment, it richly illuminates their understanding of the relations among architecture and moving images. The San Francisco Art Commission (SFAC)—an agency supported by the city’s art enrichment Percent for Art ordinance, which funds the costs of public art for up to two percent of the construction budget of new or renovated civic structures—commissioned Facsimile. Diller + Scofidio won the competition to install their project in the George R. Moscone Center Convention Center located at the intersection of Howard and Fourth Streets in the downtown center. Surrounded by a park and a shopping complex in the larger Yerba Buena 96

Gardens, the Moscone Center hosts private trade fairs and professional gather-

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2.21 Diller + Scofidio, Facsimile, sketchbook entry, nd. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

ings, and the paradox of realizing public art in a setting with little public access or public space captivated the architects. Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum designed Moscone South, which opened in 1981. Gensler designed two additions, Moscone North and Moscone West (the latter with Michael Willis Architects and Kwan Henmi Architecture), which opened in 1992 and 2003. In 1996, the SFAC circulated a request for qualifications that stated a “a major consideration for the client is the visibility of the building and its identification as part of the Moscone Complex” since it was located a block away from the older structures.121 After screening a national pool of sixty-two candidates (which included Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, and Nam June Paik) and narrowing this to a short list of six teams, the selection panel interviewed D+S on January 14, 2007, and awarded them the commission on

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January 22. On June 15, the architects signed a contract with the art commission to design and implement the project. Early ideas appear in a series of renderings dated April 10, 1997, produced by Lyn Rice, his first project in the studio. The Moscone management and the city rejected embedding LED text in strips on the street parallel to the three Moscone buildings, in the lobby escalator handrail, and in a special elevator to the roof of the complex.122 Stand-alone vertically oriented video screens with projected images of “meeter greeters” to welcome convention goers, and vitrines with banks of five screens were among the other preliminary concepts, together with a ribbon of LED displays above the street. Zoning, traffic, safety, and maintenance considerations led the city to reject twenty separate ideas the architects proposed. Lacking significant space in the interior or adjacent grounds to install their project, D+S opted to realize it on the building facade. The next series of renderings dated February 24, 1998, settle on a single design for a bank of twenty projection units mounted above the roof line, below which a pan-tilt camera would alternate between interior views and scenes of the city. Scofidio noted that “the panorama view descending slowly to the sidewalk will build in speed from a slow to a free fall. The external views will be integrated with internal ones, specifically at the escalators .   .   . we would like to use for both video and text interventions.”123 This scheme is modified again in the proposal submitted by the architects on May 27, 1998, which plans “to layer a new skin in front of the section of curtain wall on Fourth Street .   .   . composed of a thin wall LED video system, subdivided into a grid of discrete screens that will serve as the display surface.”124 It drops any reference to text display and emphasizes the alternation between live and prerecorded images and calls the project Second Skin.125 In the Request for Proposals completed by the architects on October 21, 1998, this description is retained, and the display hardware specified as sixteen individual panels each approximately 6 feet high by 8 feet wide. Three cameras in the prefunction space, one outside the building, and several fixed along the escalators, would transmit different views. Responding to a query from Scofidio, structural engineer Alan Burden sent a fax on December 8, 1998, that explores the possibility of a triangle-shaped assembly on a top track and bottom guide that moves the display around the side of the building between Fourth and Howard Streets. The possibility of designing the armature in a Y shape was dropped because of its resemblance to a TV antenna.126 By 2001, the technical challenges of installing a moving monitor along the facade of the Moscone Center introduced complexity of a new magnitude. Designing and engineering a mobile screen would prove the most complicated element of Facsimile, one for which no precedent existed and which in effect added a third project to two earlier ones, the exterior video monitors and the filming of the live and prerecorded scenes. Scofidio discovered Les Okreglak of Pol-X West, an engineering company specializing in aerial tramways and amusement park rides whose work included the roller coaster at the New York

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New York Hotel in Las Vegas, and who said he could build it.

moving video armature to a single 15' × 25' panel, rather than sixteen individual monitors, whose rear would feature an alphanumeric (scrolling text) LED screen visible from the interior of the building. D+S hired artist Ben Rubin of the EAR

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Working with Pol-X, the architects changed the display technology on the

Studio and statistician Mark Hansen of UCLA to collaborate on this component called Retelling, which selected text for display through real-time data feeds from online news stories found on Google. What had been a relatively smooth working process, albeit a complicated one given the need to coordinate design standards and schedules with the Moscone architects and multiple contractors and subcontractors, began to slow down in the summer of 2001. The first LED manufacturer was fired after it proved unable to deliver a product customized to the needs of the installation, rather than a standard stadium screen and to respond in a timely fashion to requests for technical information. By April 2002, a new vendor, Multimedia, obtained the job after submitting a bid to fabricate the screen at a lower cost. In a memo of May 31, 2002, to George Pappas, president of Multimedia, project leader Matthew Johnson of D+S refers to the installation for the first time as Facsimile.127 Its features synthesize and refine earlier design iterations. Two cameras mounted on the screen would be suspended from the 100-foot-high vertical armature held at the parapet and soffit. One would be positioned at the rear of the sign and directed on the interior of the second-floor prefunction space. A second, mounted on top of the armature, would be trained on the horizon of the San Francisco skyline and could record. The pan/tilt controller in a room on the first floor would allow for changes in camera position and adjustment of the zoom lens. Prerecorded video footage would constitute a third source for processing by a server, receive data from the motion control system, allow for updates, and generate wipe, fade, and dissolve effects between live and staged images. Indeed, the notion of liveness, which Diller and Scofidio regarded skeptically, is systematically undermined by the installation. Devising a schedule for the daily operation of Facsimile entailed distinguishing between category A normative uses in which thirty or more schedules of live and staged images were mixed and matched and category B in which fifteen schedules of prerecorded images and skylines views could replace the realtime images of the building, in effect turning off the cameras for clients of the Moscone Center not wishing their events to be publically displayed on the building exterior. While unwavering in their support of the project, the convention facility did insist upon the right of groups to control cameras trained on the inside and cited growing concerns about security after September 11, 2001, as well as the proprietary nature of many product rollouts and promotional events. Normal hours of operation would be between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. On May 22, 2002, Diller presented storyboard concepts to the Visual Arts Committee of the SFAC, and met with enthusiastic approval. A representative of the Moscone Center particularly taken with project requested that its staff be filmed in the prerecorded sequences, an option impossible to pursue because of

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time constraints but one that the architect noted could be realized in the future. Diller predicted that Facsimile would be up and running by late October or early November. Challenges in preproduction led her in July to request a postponement of the opening until March 2003.128 D+S requested an upgrade of the

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2.22 Diller + Scofidio, Facsimile renderings, nd. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

screen from 18-millimeter to a higher resolution 12-millimeter display, a prospect that Moscone would consider only after the final cost of the track armature was known. Diller and project leader Matthew Johnson filmed all of the video for the prerecorded scenes in an office building in Bloomfield, New Jersey, from October 14 to 25, 2002, and during the second half of 2002 they became de facto independent film producers. They outlined the “impostor videos,” which included twenty-one office vignettes, twenty-one night scenes, and twenty-three hotel vignettes along with night scenes, close-ups, and scenes of a nighttime janitor and window washer. Production designer Paul Avery built the sets wall to wall within the width between mullions at Moscone. Like the video recording of the offices in Overexposed, the aspect ratio of the camera and architecture needed to coincide, although the timed coordination of the camera tracking with the forty-five-minute round trip movement by the monitor around the facade of the Moscone Center necessitated even more elaborate preproduction. A custom dolly was fabricated to travel between five and ten miles per hour past the sets of the hotel rooms and office cubicles arranged in a row. The employment of the tracking shot as a device to convey a single continuous space was a significant aesthetic choice that links Facsimile to the work of virtuoso practitioners of this technique, directors such as Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Miklós Jancsó. A note by Johnson conveys the intricacy of filming the office scenarios: Each of the primary foreground scenes will be filmed using the same set which will be reconfigured between takes based on the spatial arrangement needed for each character. Continuity will be established in post [-production] running seamlessly from scenes A, B, C, D and back to C, B, A; looping up to 4 times. As the video makes its circuit each scene develops in real time; the development of that scene reflects the amount of time spanned-in between. Each scene will be filmed on separate days (or possibly 2 per day) running the camera back and forth according to the timeline and storyboard established for continuity in post. Scene A will be filmed, the set will be changed out and then scene B will be filmed.129 Over 250 individuals auditioned during casting calls, and the architects selected one hundred actors. Filming took place from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, with a crew of twenty and a cast of thirty to forty usually present. Cinematographer Dan Gillham filmed, and Johnson and Diller directed. At the end of the shoot, 250 shots constituting twenty-four hours of footage were the result. Averaged over eleven days, 130 minutes of footage, the equivalent of a long feature film, was recorded daily. Rushes of the scenes were later viewed on a billboard in Times

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c h a pte r two 2.23 (above) Diller + Scofidio, still frames of Facsimile video, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 2.24 (below) Diller + Scofidio, still frames of Facsimile video, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Square, a unique experience as cinematographer Gillham recalls.130 While filming in New Jersey proceeded, SFAC public art program director Jill Manton discovered that Facsimile was over budget, a problem exacerbated by a bill for $80,000 in sales tax that the commission had received from the State Board of Equalization for the fabrication of the monitor by Multimedia. Although works of art purchased by the city are exempt from state sales tax, the initial position of the California tax board was that the screen did not meet this definition. Manton turned to the Office of the City Attorney, and a request for advice was submitted by Deputy City Attorney Adine K. Varah in which she argued that Facsimile’s screen is not a raw material, and it is not a part of the Moscone Center’s architecture.  .  .  . In Facsimile, the screen acts more like a painting than the wall behind it.  .  .  . This screen has no use apart from effectuating the artist’s contemplation of the final work, which is conceptual, not utilitarian in purpose. As a result, a court would likely find that it is art.131 On May 30, 2003, the State Board of Equalization accepted this argument and relieved the SFAC of any tax liability for the purchase of the screen.132 While awaiting clarification of the tax issue, Manton became aware of the growing pressure faced by the Moscone Center from large corporate clients to whom the screen appeared an ideal advertising medium during their rental of the facility. Deputy City Attorney Varah underscored that the art commission retained exclusive jurisdiction of the work as mandated by the city charter.133 After the ruling from the equalization board arrived, Manton wrote a statement in June summarizing the noncommercial character of Facsimile. Working with technologies first

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employed in advertising and stadium signage, Diller + Scofidio had created a new

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2.25 Jill Manton, Facsimile public art description, 2003. Reproduced by permission of San Francisco Arts Commission.

category of public media space for artistic expression whose legal protection was guaranteed.134 How far this would extend in practice, and whether Moscone clients retain the right to turn off the second-floor lobby public video transmission without violating the public art component of the project, still remain unclear. Installation of the armature and motion system components and the LED system took place on June 11, 2003. On July 8, while the Sheedy Drayage Company was replacing the bushings of a roof bogie, unsecured and unbraced wooden logs failed and slipped, causing the forty-thousand pounds of the carriage and monitor to crash into the roof and produce noise and vibrations throughout the building. The video display that worked flawlessly when first demonstrated now misfunctioned. D+S found themselves caught in a legal conflict between Multimedia and Sheedy over who would pay the estimated $100,000 for remanufacturing the LED screen and replacing its broken diodes. Damage to the armature necessitated the construction of an elevated arm along which the screen would travel. It also produced water leakage that required installation of a new power supply. Manton noted that during a test “people who were standing on the sidewalk near me were mesmerized by the screen” and that by January 2004 it was fully functional.135 On the evenings of Monday, March 29, and Tuesday, March 30, it proved overly functional, as she discovered after

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receiving an emergency telephone message that the screen had turned itself on during the middle of the night and disturbed senior citizens living in the Woolf House Apartments across the street.136 By November 2005, the bogie affected during the accident still produced a loud banging sound each time the motion system was activated. Diller + Scofidio confronted the possibility that Facsimile would need to operate with the screen in a fixed position.137 Okreglak recommended repairing the curved portion of the roof track and straightening the frame. Early in 2006 it appeared that at least some of the noise problem might have been caused by flaws in the original curtain wall construction, for which installing a Teflon plate was proposed as a solution.138 After additional evaluations by outside and city engineers, the SFAC Visual Arts Committee agreed in February 2008 that redesigning the wheel and bogie elements of the motion system and reinstalling new components designed by Okreglak were the most promising solutions. Sheedy agreed to provide crane and rigging services at no cost, and D+S returned its fee to help finance the retrofit.139 The contract with Pol-X West specified completion by 2010. During the fourteen years Facsimile was being designed, constructed, and repaired, it was widely published and regarded by many observers of the work of the studio as operational, a telling reminder of the chasm between the renderings of its screen in Photoshop and actual construction and operation. A definitive aesthetic and cultural reckoning with this most ambitious of DS+R media projects must await the completion of the retrofit and full functionality. If a string of accidents and unanticipated technical challenges, for none of which Diller and Scofidio bear responsibility, seem to have jinxed Facsimile, it is useful to recall the ambitions of its moving screen and image transmission, whose complexity dwarfs that of contemporary digital media facades, which since have become ubiquitous.140 Accustomed to viewing telephone, text, and e-mail messages on small screens on their ubiquitous handheld devices, San Franciscans will doubtless react to a large public screen with curiosity, and the passage of time may well render Facsimile even more timely as an urban art project in a city ever more saturated with personal (and largely private) media. In an age of webcams and live-motion video conferencing with minimal jitteriness and distortion, the architects constructed a machine for revealing opacity and undecidability as general conditions of viewing architecture and images in an age when the definition of media is rapidly shifting. Not knowing the status of what one views on the screen becomes a positive virtue, the first step toward knowledge. Should the Moscone Center staff eventually collaborate with the architects on programming, enabling those who work inside the building to appear as actors on its exterior, sometimes in real time, at other moments in recorded images, the meaning of Facsimile and its exploration of the boundaries between liveness and performance, private and public, is likely to shift yet again. Diller and Scofidio

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might well attain in an architectural and urban environment the aspiration of

to better realize the objectifying experience .   .   . seeing themselves from outside themselves, which potentially could lead to the realization that we are all actors— or that we are not realizing our potential.”141

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video artist Ira Schneider, who spoke in 1969 of his Vertical Wipe, “helping people

Bo d i e s: L i v e a n d M e d i ate d

While working on Facsimile, Diller + Scofidio realized an installation, a performance, and two dance pieces in Europe. They were more electronic media intensive, emphasized choreography (even of immobile bodies), and more accepting of spectacle than earlier projects. One exception to this tendency was Skin, an installation held in 1996 as part of the Investments series at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels and realized as a collaboration with Matthew Maguire. It involved Maguire writing characters based on photographs of male and female characters taken from head to waist, then displayed on video monitors. Maguire later recalled the charge given him by the architects: “A dialogue about the cultural and architectural implications of the uniform should be generated and character-subsumed versions of those ideas woven into the narrative,” thus suggesting the piece as a collage of issues around the collar and sartorial identity raised by Bad Press.142 Investments also included a hybrid of Bad Press and The Desiring Eye with folded shirts and text substituted for models of the Slow House. Monkey Business Class, a theater work realized in collaboration with Hotel Pro Forma, Copenhagen, and Dumb Type, Kyoto, premiered at the Malmö Musical Theatre in Sweden on August 10, 1996.143 Cultural conventions of the movie musical, especially the work of Busby Berkeley and the Marx Brothers, defined its structure. A vertically stacked performance space consisting of a four-part video screen displaying live and prerecorded video, together with a mirror tilted at a 45-degree angle (evocative of A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate) allowed the simultaneous representation of scenes in plan and section.144 Projected on a screen, a close-up of legs presented a sudden change of scale. Every member of the chorus had a video body double. The minimally narrative quality of the performance included country-and-western songs and slot machines displaying some of the corporate logos employed in Pageant. Changing views in section and plan hovered above the performers, rendering their bodies as forms hovering between machines and organic life.145 Yet the fusion of individual body and larger social body never transpires, and the absence of a collective “mass ornament” in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, suggests a skepticism toward the production of group identities through choreographed movement. Rejecting both machine aesthetics and the erotic fantasies of engulfment associated with the surrealists, Monkey Business Class was a counterspectacle whose playfulness and basis in popular culture dissembled its critique of fetishism and mass aesthetics.146 105

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Moving Target was a 1996 dance work realized in collaboration with Frédéric Flamand, choreographer and then artistic director of Charleroi Danses, Belgium, known for setting dance performances in nontraditional spaces such as swimming pools and factories and collaborating with architects, including Zaha Hadid and Jean Nouvel.147 Based in part on the diaries of dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, the piece combined dance, music, narration, and video projection.148 It commences with a video excursus on the human foot (written by Douglas Cooper) as a structure capable of sustaining up to five times a person’s weight and a meditation on the beauty of shoes. Presented in x-ray plan graphics, what initially begins as a lecture on anatomical structures soon turns festishistically erotic through the narrator’s suggestion that a tongue can explore the foot. This juxtaposition, surrealist in tone, next depicts the foot on a glass floor filmed from underneath.149 Utilizing a mirror/projection screen mounted at a 45-degree angle above the stage, which they called an “intersce2.26 Diller + Scofidio and Frédéric Flamand/ Charleroi Danses, Belgium, Moving Target, 1996. Photograph © Fabien de Cugnac–Atelier d’Image. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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nium,” D+S opposed the traditional proscenium stage by depicting the dancers’ movements in plan. Dancers realize a pas de deux with electronic doubles or against the background of their projected bodies. Advertisements written and spoken by Cooper for an imaginary line of “Normal” pharmaceutical products to regulate self-esteem, libido, and desires break up the action. Wearing cartwheel ruffs, dancers move against the pattern of electronic snow on blue video screens. An overhead mirror magnifies a woman in a trailing blue dress. Names of body

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2.27 Diller + Scofidio, sketchbook entry for conceptualization of EJM, 1998. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

2.28 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of moving screen for EJM, 1998. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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parts run in vertical bands across the stage. The piece ends with Nijinky’s words on reason and infinity projected horizontally in LED across the stage. Writing of his collaboration with Diller + Scofidio, Flamande described their conception of architecture as encompassing “everything that can be made or done between the skin of one person and the skin of another person. Dance is akin to this.”150 Two years later, D+S and Flamande collaborated again on EJM 1: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed and EJM 2: Inertia realized with Charleroi Danses and the Ballet Opera of Lyon and performed September 16–19, 1998.151 These pieces explored the work of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, two nineteenthcentury pioneers active in the 1870s and 1880s in the use of still photographic images to represent motion, most famously in the research of Muybridge to prove that a horse galloped with four feet off the ground.152 Today, their work is commonly presented in relation to tensions between art and science in the development of cinema and forms of visual media.153 Given the concerns of Diller and Scofidio with architectural notation, representations of the body in motion, and the claims of audiovisual media to objectivity, Marey and Muybridge were obvious subjects. Diller and Scofidio spent considerable time studying and comparing the work of each figure. Realizing a fluid exchange between dancers recorded in video and those actually on stage, they sought to explore “liveness” in the performance and the ability of video to “store time.” In the piece’s most arresting images, a dancer pushes his own body projected onto a moving screen, lightweight mobile stage architecture designed by the architects. Dancers carried construction beams emblazoned with LED texts in French. EJM 2: Inertia was an effective instance of the architects manipulating words in space, which here appear weightless. The antigravity machine D+S had designed for the body now lifted words across linguistic and national borders.

I nte r c l o n e H ote l / Pa g e a nt

As Diller and Scofidio collaborated with more partners abroad, the subject matter of their installations and performances turned toward global commodity culture. Advertising discourse and standardization became the themes of Interclone Hotel, presented at the Attatürk Airport in Turkey for the Istanbul Biennial from October 5 to November 9, 1997, the first of several installations in airports and explorations of air travel they would undertake. A fake promotion campaign for an imaginary hotel chain in six locations (Baku, Bangelore, Ho Chi Minh City, Kampala, Ljublana, and Tijuana), raises issues of uniformity in the built environment. Organized around its own combinatory, with selections for “motif,” “labor/class,” and “traveler’s advisory,” it intimates that such values are both marketing points and meaningless gestures. Similar concerns informed Pageant, a video installation in which corporate 10 8

logos continually morphed into one another, another frightening suggestion

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2.29 Diller + Scofidio, Interclone Hotel, installation at Attatürk Airport for Istanbul Art Biennial, 1997. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

of a multinational economy in which consumers possess little real choice. The architects realized it for the Second Johannesburg Art Biennial held in South Africa from October 12 to December 12, 1997, two years after South African independence. In austere black and white, it presented the trademarks of Disney, IBM, Shell, McDonald’s, and Nike on the floor of the gallery space, as well on its external facade, and in one version, on a high-top sneaker. Its hypnotic trancelike effect, increased in the gallery version by a droning soundtrack, was noted by one critic, and several participants in the biennial thought it among the strongest pieces on display.154 If its argument, an analogy between the visual flow of

2.30 Diller + Scofidio, Pageant (1997) projected on sneaker. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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c h a pte r two 2.31 Diller + Scofidio, Subtopia, installation at The Mirage City: Another Utopia exhibition, NTT International Center for Communications Gallery, Tokyo. 1997. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

corporate logos and the logic of global mergers and acquisitions, remained more implicit than explicit, Diller + Scofidio nonetheless addressed the image culture of global capitalism before many other architects and two years in advance of the book No Logo by critic Naomi Klein, around which an international discussion of branding culture later developed.155 In 1997, Diller and Scofidio traveled to Japan to realize two projects. Subtopia was an urban plan constructed as a large model and exhibited in The Mirage City: Another Utopia from April 19 to July 13, 1997, at the International Center for Communications Gallery of the NTT (Japanese Telephone Company) in Tokyo. Responding to a master plan devised by Arata Isozaki for an island utopia city, the couple proposed three systems of subtopia, “1) Sex Industry System (Streetwalker’s Zone), 2) ‘Game’ System (Gambling Zone), 3) Chemical Pleasure System (Drug Zone),” that emphasized risk and conflicting elements and sought to overcome the dualism of traditional utopias.156 Resembling a subway network, the design integrated these three systems into existing infrastructure below ground level, which would remain inaccessible to authorities. X,Y was a multimedia installation in a Kobe pachinko parlor commissioned

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by Itakura, the client of the Slow House. It employed horizontal and vertical

less a cinematic sampling such as in Overexposed than a sustained scanning of an interior space by moving cameras reflecting the fascination of the architects with disembodied mechanical vision and surveillance.

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video cameras, and alternated views in section and plan on a video display wall,

J et L a g

D+S realized Jet Lag with playwright Jessica Chalmers and the Builders Association, an experimental performance and media company founded by Marianne Weems in 1994.157 It premiered in the United States on May 30, 1999, at the opening of 2.32 Marianne Weems/The Builders Association/ Diller + Scofidio, Jet Lag, 1999. Photograph © Tina Barney. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Photograph courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

MassMoca in North Adams, Massachusetts, a fabric mill converted into a contemporary art space, and toured in Århus, Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, London, and Budapest. Based on two stories widely reported by the news media, it treats their circulation as much as the tales themselves. Donald Crowhurst, a British electrician by trade and a sailor by passion (known as Roger Dearborn in Jet Lag), entered a 1969 competition sponsored by the Times of London to circle the world in a yacht. Ill equipped nautically and psychologically for the long solo voyage, he began to fabricate a taped diary of his experiences, sailed far off course from his intended

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route, and sent erroneous radio reports of his travel speed and location. Authorities found his boat abandoned off the Azores, and Crowhurst was never seen again, presumably having gone mad and drowned.158 Sarah Krasnoff, a seventy-four-year-old Cleveland resident (named Doris Schwartz in the performance) flew at least 167 times (and perhaps as many as 180) from New York to Amsterdam with her fourteen-year-old grandson Howard Gelfand (named Lincoln Schwartz in the piece) to avoid apprehension by the boy’s father who wished him to receive psychiatric evaluation. Walking through deserted airports, sleeping in airport lounges, and engaging in minimal dialogue about their flight schedules (suggesting a Samuel Beckett play set in an airport), they eventually end their journey after Sarah dies of a heart attack in Amsterdam. Virilio’s essay “The Third Window”—in which he claimed Krasnoff died of jetlag, called her a “heroine” of the modern age, and proposed her living in “deferred time” as emblematic of the contemporary relationship to temporality—was the source from which the architects learned about the case. Obvious parallels between the two stories making up the first and second parts of Jet Lag present themselves. Both treat travelers who flee their past and are seduced by the fantasy of mobility, which transforms constant motion into stasis. Distance is conquered, yet arrival at a final destination is infinitely postponed. Networks of people on the ground—the British media and Dearborn’s wife in the former case, KLM flight attendants and the messages Lincoln’s father leaves at the airport in the latter—connect the two characters to times other than that of their journeys. Both stories reflect the state of electronic technology in the 1970s. Dearborn’s elaborate ruse about his actual coordinates would be impossible in the age of instantaneous global positioning systems, just as the evasive itinerary of Lincoln Schwartz appears less plausible today when many teenagers have cellular telephones. Dearborn records himself with video technology provided by the BBC. Rewinding and re-taping allow him to fashion a carefully controlled self-image (more unlikely in the contemporary age of the webcam) that occludes his descent into madness. Doris and Lincoln Schwartz are more at the mercy of the surveillance cameras that capture them passing through airport corridors (a fascination of Diller and Scofidio in the 1990s when they began to research them). Indeed, the first scene in which Roger introduces himself juxtaposes ocean waves to the right (soon pitching as if caught in a storm) and his magnified video image projected on the screen. Jet Lag presents a world in which solitude disappears and its characters always play for the cameras. Many of the most effective visual moments in the performance involve the simulation of motion, such as the projection of an airport curtain wall on a screen against which Doris and Lincoln enter the frame. Initially they walk toward the right on a moving sidewalk. A moment later, the viewer realizes the background moves while the characters remain in one place, a powerful metaphor for what one narrator calls “chronic aviation syndrome—the compulsion

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to keep going” despite real immobility. Diller and Scofidio suggested that “in

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2.33 Diller + Scofidio with Dbox, still of motion graphics sequence from Jet Lag, 1999. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

an interesting exchange of gender stereotypes, the female reproduces a static domestic space—in constant motion, while the male fictionalizes motion—frozen in space, confined by the trappings of masculinity and the bravado of movement.”159 Throughout the piece, the employment of fades, dissolves, and sound is never less than masterful, at once eerily familiar yet distanciated, most notably by the use of the control panel (oscillating in visibility thanks to liquid crystal panels) from which the commentators speak and at one point even produce Foley sound effects. Dbox produced a computer animation sequence of the plane from wire frame to rendered surfaces that begins the second part of Jet Lag. It is the most arresting motion graphics sequence of the piece, the first instance in a D+S project in which the construction and detailing of built form unfolds as stages in a temporal process and the final image represents their combination in a whole. As a frontal view in section of Doris and Lincoln on airplane seats elevated on a scissors lift rotates 360 degrees, the image suggests the airplane as prosthetic extension of the body. A similar idea informs the metal and wood, tripodlike Crutch Lamp that the architects designed that same year, which evokes the metal stands of The Desiring Eye.

Th e A m e r i c a n L aw n

Architectural and landscape historian Georges Teyssot conceived the idea of The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life exhibition that premiered at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal from June 16 to November 8, 1998. It subsequently traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where

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it appeared from April 4 to June 7, 1999, and to the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, from September 3, 1999, to January 2, 2000. Diller and Scofidio belonged to the curatorial team selected by Teyssot and consisting of Alessandra Ponte, Beatriz Colomina, and Mark Wigley.160 Initially, the CCA hired D+S to design the exhibition and supervise the fabrication of its displays, although their roles subsequently increased. Realized as the final installment of The American Century, a five-exhibition program from 1995 to 1998 organized by Phyllis Lambert, founding director of the CCA, devoted to the influence of the United States on the modern built environment, three of its five curators teaching at the Princeton School of Architecture shortly would move to other universities and never again collaborate on a project of similar intricacy.161 Lambert invited Teyssot to submit a proposal for an exhibition related to his research interests, domesticity and gardens, and he selected a topic that combined both. He suggested the lawn as exhibition topic as part of the American Century series in a letter to Lambert, dated January 3, 1993.162 “The principal aim of the proposed project is to interrogate the visual and textual practices of the American lawn as an institution of democracy, within its artistic, literary, political, religious and everyday contexts.”163 Together with Vidler, Colomina, Wigley, and Ponte, Teyssot already had done much to establish Princeton as a center for studying the built environment through cultural and textual interpretation.164 Diller and Scofidio spelled out their role in the proposal of February 25, 1994, they drafted together with Teyssot: Three constituent and distinct parts: a publication, an exhibition, and an installation project. The curatorial committee will collectively be responsible for the conception and realization of the exhibition and catalogue. Diller and Scofidio will design the display system, supervise the book design, and produce an installation for the exterior of the CCA.   .   .   . A curatorial text printed on a system of liquid crystal displays will guide the exhibition.   .   .   . A living exhibition will be constructed on the exterior grounds of the CCA building by D+S. Using a variety of materials which subvert the categories of “nature” and “artifice” the project will address the authority of lawn as the framing device of the “institutional building.”165 Liquid crystal displays of curatorial texts never materialized. Nor did Diller and Scofidio design the accompanying book publication. In other respects, the exhibition held four years later significantly followed this script.166 That it had been scheduled for July 1996 but opened nearly two years later hints at the initial uncertainty surrounding its content and organization. Teyssot had located fascinating texts about American landscape history in the Library of Congress. Translating them into the visual form of an exhibition proved a challenge for the team.167 Historical oil paintings and two newly commissioned gallery installation pieces that Teyssot planned to curate with Mildred Friedman fell by the wayside. The presentation of objects and the visual and spatial identity of the lawn

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became more prominent, and the exhibition design of D+S eventually contained

first proposed. Alluding to this transformation, Nicholas Olsberg, chief curator at the CCA, wrote in a memo of August 8, 1995, that “since the historical framework of the

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only two elements (the Museum of the Lawn and the book display) Teyssot had

lawn will be thoroughly discussed in the publication, the exhibition will primarily attend to the lawn and contemporary culture.”168 From around this time to its opening, the initial role of D+S as cocurators and codesigners steadily increased and moved beyond providing visual identity to proposing and inventing content. In the catalog, Teyssot describes the exhibition as having been “developed” by himself and Diller. Lambert alludes to the friction this produced by noting, “No collaboration is easy. But at their best, as here, collaborations benefit from a diversity of ideas and a layering of approaches that no one person could achieve.”169 Diller later recalled her and Scofidio’s work on the show and suggests the blurring of responsibilities and roles that transpired during the course of its development: As the exhibition was conceptualized, the team took on different perspectives and roles. The historians approached the lawn by researching archives and basing theories on the historical material they found. This analysis lent itself more readily to the development of the book. In contrast, we proposed possible theories, which in turn we had to substantiate through artifacts. If the artifacts did not exist, we had to fabricate them. For example, working with the “nature/artifice” theme, a grass cultivar was devised that played off several species of artificial and natural turf. Patches of sod were acquired, freeze-dried and then hand-painted, while the various “species” of artificial turf were sourced and assembled. The physical design of the exhibition layout was considered in tandem with the generated objects, historical artifacts and multi-media components.170 Speculation, research, design, fabrication, and installation formed inseparable moments of a single architectural process. Early renderings of lawn mowers and blades of grass in section and plan in the exhibition file make clear that the studio emphasized transforming perceptions of the ordinary. Teyssot and their Princeton colleagues assembled rich source materials. Diller and Scofidio imposed conceptual and visual order in spatial form, sometimes, as with the freeze-dried grass samples, developing new techniques in the process.171 An early drawing of the exhibition gallery in the CCA archive shows a photograph of a suburban house as the terminus of the point of view through the rounded arch of the gallery. In the final exhibition, media displays suspended and protruding in autonomous galleries blocked this clear sightline, a telling indication that D+S had realized its ideas in the eight parts of the exhibition that corresponded to seven gallery spaces and the rotunda of the CCA. Entering the first room, the visitor steps onto a video projected on the floor of a green turf welcome mat. This experience is triply disorienting, as it relocates the projected image from the vertical wall to the horizontal floor and con-

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c h a pte r two 2.34 Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of room 1 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

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2.35 Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of light boxes in room 2 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

founds social codes of not stepping on the grass and not touching the objects in a museum. A wall display of colored plastic lawn care implements in the shape of a human figure makes up “homo lawnicus,” a threatening anthropomorphization of ordinary tools found in any garden supply store that reeks of suburbia and conveys with expressive brio the predilection of D+S for metonymy. The second room, entitled “Democratic Surface,” explored the lawn as a liminal space between the urban region and the countryside. Nine light boxes mounted close to the floor displayed infrared aerial transparencies made by the U.S. Geological Survey of cities such as Riverside, Illinois, and Celebration, Florida, and provided instantly graspable overviews of the relationship of lawn to built surface. Next to them, the architects mounted three-dimensional models of specific suburban forms. Significantly, these displays implied no predetermined sequence. Yet to view both the models and the light boxes required mov-

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c h a pte r two 2.36 (above) Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of book case in room 2 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

ing off center, or completely walking around them. With their electrical cords

2.37 (below) Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of stereoscope viewers in room 3 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

book and its cover at the same time. Olsberg thought the photographs by Gregory

dangling from and spreading across the ceiling, the models appeared organic, yet studied. At the four corner walls of the gallery, book displays mounted flush with the walls instantiated what Olsberg called its “argument” and curator Helen Malkin referred to as a counterpoint in each gallery between “center and periphery.”172 Above each book a magnifying glass was trained on a specific passage. Below the cases a mirror pointed upward and through a second mirror reflected the spines and back panels of each volume, thus effectively allowing a reader to judge both a Crewdson detracted from the focus of the room, but Diller insisted on retaining them over his objections. In the third room, “Decoding the Lawn,” projections of textual excerpts from legal suits involving the obligations to mow and weed, liability, the right to display signage, cross burning, and guaranteed access by the post office were projected on the floor, divided into one column for the prosecution, the other for the defense. Stereoscopic photographs from a “Neighbors” series by photographer Robert Sansone on the wall evoked a peep show, if not the Duchampian logic of the art viewer as voyeur. They promised salacious content but upon close inspection revealed similar suburban houses differentiated primarily by the characteristics of their lawns. Grass burst upon the viewer in heightened depth, something of a joke given the historical association of 3-D cinema with epics and scenes of battles and violence. Visitors could not assimilate the entire gallery in one glance and needed to view one pair of images at a time, a sly commentary on the multiple monitors and full wall gallery projection installations that had by then become clichés of media art.173 The fourth room devoted to “The Competitive Lawn” explored the relation between the lawn and sports through photographs of artificial turf by Skeet McAuley and Jim Dow. A slide dissolve display of David Mellor’s stadium mowing patterns occupied the wall at one end of the corridor, opposite an image of a miniature golf course by Alex MacLean. Most strikingly, the room displayed

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thirty-two pairs of athletic shoes for diverse sports in a metal and glass rack

1 990 –1 999 2.38 Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of athletic shoes in room 4 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture. Photographs on wall by Jim Dow, reproduced by courtesy of Janet Borden, Inc.

located at the center of the gallery, suggesting the application of a rigorous, if inscrutable, taxonomic order. “Engineering the Lawn” was the subject of the fifth room. Along one long wall photographs of turf grass patents hung in a series, evidence that grass seed had become a major staple for agribusiness. On the opposite side of the gallery, photographs of lawn diseases evoked a medical text on skin ailments. Without ever explicitly mentioning the human body, its omnipresence in this room was palpable, a reminder of how the lawn transforms nature into culture and anthropomorphizes architecture and landscape. At the center of the gallery, a freestanding display of grass species cultivars above and Astroturf samples below provided an opportunity to employ LED technology to display text in a mirror mounted at a 45-degree angle above the glass. In the sixth gallery, devoted to “The Power Lawn” (Olsberg proposed titling it “The Backdrop of Democracy”), photographs of Eero Saarinen’s IBM Research Building, Gordon Bunshaft’s First National City Bank, and images by Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman, and Balthazar Korab lined the walls of the gallery. Video footage of the White House lawn played on four monitors suspended from the ceiling and oriented at right angles toward the walls. Once again, the display did not allow a visitor to see more than a single image at one time. The seventh gallery devoted to the themes of “Idyll and Anxiety” juxtaposed glass slides of the Garden Club of America from the 1920s and 1930s with clips

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2.39 Diller + Scofidio, The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life, view of grass cultivars in room 5 in exhibition at Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1998. Photograph by Michel Legendre. © Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

of lawn scenes from films selected by Diller + Scofidio, including the opening of Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), crazy Uncle Ira in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956), The Adjuster (Atom Egoyan, 1991), Maximum Overdrive (Stephen King, 1986), and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978). They were projected onto a Plexiglas screen suspended from the ceiling. Three lawn mowers on rotating platforms in the rotunda of CCA greeted visitors leaving the exhibition. On the front of the CCA lawn, two installations generated considerable public attention. Artist Mel Ziegler’s Growing Concern presented a number in actual turf estimating the quantity of blades of grass that grew over the course of the summer. Diller + Scofidio realized a sound piece in which the lawn spoke to passers by in English and French, exhorting them to trample, caress, and dominate. Children loved it. Although The American Lawn received many enthusiastic reviews in the international press and garnered far more attention than any previous work by the architects, it only traveled to Cincinnati and Fort Lauderdale.174 Olsberg speculates that if the exhibition had been titled “Diller + Scofidio’s The American Lawn” it might well have obtained additional venues.

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Diller + Scofidio exhibited Master/Slave from June 30 through November 19, 1999, at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. The Cartier com-

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M a ste r /S l av e a n d Ro o m 1 2 0

missioned the project for the group exhibition 1 monde réel, whose French title, a play on words, can be translated as “One Real World,” “A Real World,” or “First World Real” and retains the ambiguity of whether the global actuality in question is singular or multiple. It included works by Chris Burden, Tacita Dean, and filmmakers Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Ujica, and Andrei Tarkovsky and explored “dialectical relationships between imaginary and action, known and unknown territories, the present and dream experience of the real and fiction.” Within this capacious scope, the exhibition emphasized “rekindling things that surprise and amaze us that escape time and which throughout life maintain the liveliness of one’s childhood.”175 Nostalgia and sentimentality might well have weighed down Diller and Scofidio in this context, yet they successfully circumvented glib emotional responses to create a work that elicited wonder. Master/Slave employed nearly two dozen toy robots from the collection of Vitra furniture company executive Rolf Fehlbaum, including rare (and expensive) 1950s and 1960s Japanese and German models with boxy and elaborately detailed bodies. They suggested fantasies of mechanization and the replacement of human labor by a subservient technology that became a staple of science fiction since Czech writer Karel Čapek (with the help of his brother Joseph) introduced the term “robot” in 1921.176 Moving along a 300-foot conveyor belt in a 35' × 35' glass vitrine supported by pilotis, the robots undergo x-ray surveillance and projection onto a bank of television monitors located below the glass wall of the vitrine. The architects intended the pace of the robots to mimic the monotony of an unemployment office, although many viewers doubtless associated the humiliating spectacle of their inspection with an airport security checkpoint, if not the more ubiquitous surveillance that has become commonplace as one waits in line at a bank, government office, or store, in short in nearly any public space in advanced industrial society. Indeed, the architecture of the display evokes the corporate modernism that became the preferred style in Europe and the United States after the Second World War. The vitrine is a surveillance machine without blind spots in which the robots are constantly visible, not unlike visitors to Jean Nouvel’s transparent building into whose corner the architects provocatively wedged it.177 Yet this space, far too large for the toys, engulfs them. At once a lightly veiled allegory of visual relations in contemporary society—the robots are spatially separated from the viewer by a not inconsiderable physical distance and viewed in greatest detail on the 42-inch monitor beneath the display case and a dozen monitors against the glass façade of the museum—Master/Slave tempers its dystopian commentary on the contemporary world with an affection for the robots as “quality” designed objects. It regards them as genuinely popular yet aesthetically satisfying toys, akin to the trains and spinning tops that so fascinated the

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2.40 Diller + Scofidio, Master/ Slave, installation in 1 monde réel exhibition, Cartier Foundation, Paris, 1999. Photograph © Valérie Belin and © Collection Rolf Fehlbaum, Basel. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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c h a pte r two 2.41 Diller + Scofidio, detail of robots in Master/Slave, installation in 1 monde réel exhibition, Cartier Foundation, Paris, 1999. Photograph © Valérie Belin and © Collection Rolf Fehlbaum, Basel. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Eameses and to which they devoted films. Charles Eames observed that “in a good old toy there’s apt to be nothing self-conscious about the use of materials. What is wood is wood. What is tin is tin. What is cast is beautifully cast. It is possible that somewhere in all this is a clue to what sets the creative climate of any time, including our own.”178 If this seems too saccharine to describe the coruscating irony of the installation, one might reflect on the effect Master/ Slave would have produced had the studio utilized shoddier robots, not to mention the choice of robots at a moment when technology assumes increasingly disembodied forms. While commentators invariably note the criticism of surveillance and transparency in the piece, the robots, each unique and carefully crafted, complicate this dimension and provide a useful corrective to a frequent tendency to overlook the materials DS+R employ. Coordination of x-ray technology and lighting, structural, transport, woodwork, and audiovisual components, the product of

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collaboration with five outside contractors, has also eluded critics, few of whom

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2.42 Diller + Scofidio, Room 120, Budget Inn Motel, installation at Third International Biennial of Site Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

acknowledge that apart from the absence of plumbing and climate control systems, Master/Slave was a small building. It was another instance in which D+S refused to choose between cultural commentary and carefully detailed architecture and managed to deliver both. Fehlbaum regarded the installation as a success and recalls, “I was curious whether the discussion with Liz and Ric would help me understand what attracted me to the robots. The master/slave relationship and the possibility of dialectical reversal gave me some clues. The installation was a great opportunity for seeing my robots (they are in boxes for most of their lives) and the fact that I became friends with Liz and Ric for me was the most important result.”179 He later purchased it, and provided some financial relief for what proved a more expensive project than had been envisioned. D+S installed Room 120 at the Budget Inn Motel as part of the Third International Biennial of SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico held from July 10 to December 31 that same year. Deane Simpson of the studio and Douglas Cooper worked extensively on the installation, which explored tensions between standardization and individuality similar to those evoked by Master/Slave, albeit with a far smaller budget and in a smaller and less opulent space. It introduced closed-circuit television cameras in the generic motel room space, inside the toilet tank and the bathtub, underneath the bed, between bibles on the nightstand, within a closet and a lampshade, and on the ceiling. Cooper recalls the project as an investigation of the “microscopic sublime,” at once a parody of the vast New Mexico landscape so important for modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and a quest for sublimity in a postmodern age.180 Abstract and generally indecipherable images picked up by the camera appeared on the television set in the room. Playing upon films such as Psycho

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(Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974,) whose motel scenes evoke what the architects call “the paranoid sublime,” the experience of visiting the room was, as one critic noted, unsettling: Diller and Scofidio evoke the disturbing sensation of entering your room and finding its contents amiss. Why is the TV on? Who just flushed the toilet? Do the hangers still rattle because the criminal just grabbed his coat? In the bathroom you discover that the river’s source is a dripping IV .  .  . the anonymous motel room is both placeless and a way station to some place.181 Room 120 dispenses entirely with language and provides a series of visual clues and traces, whose failure to establish a single pattern contributes to the overall disquieting effect. Para-Site could lay claim to some cognitive impulse, an attempt to provide the museum patron with a map with which to navigate its space, but here the loss of scale produces a visual abstraction, a reductio ad absurdum of subjecting hidden spaces to surveillance that nonetheless does not relinquish hope a pattern of stains on the wall may yield some meaning. In 1999 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Diller + Scofidio a fellowship of $375,000 for five years, a no‑strings award citing their work that “explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.”182 As the first architects to receive the “genius award,” a phrase loathed by the foundation that nonetheless has stuck among members of the media and general public, they joined a distinguished group of creative artists, musicians, scientists, scholars, and social activists and obtained heightened public notice. Diller reduced her teaching at Princeton to half-time. As she and Scofidio might have anticipated, the award produced considerable envy among their colleagues, none more so than Hejduk, and further complicated their relation to the architectural profession by demonstrating that nontraditional practice, creative accomplishment, and critical recognition could coexist. Living and working simultaneously in the Cooper Square loft had become impossible, for the number of collaborators and the tight American Lawn exhibition deadline had transformed it into a twenty-four-hour shop. After Diller and Scofidio began checking into a hotel to sleep, they realized a separation of living and working spaces had become necessary. The number of architects was increasing faster than the information technology infrastructure in the studio (not yet completely networked and only fully upgraded in 2002) could support. Computer-assisted design programs had become ubiquitous in architecture and were transforming the manner in which they and all architects worked. How to create a studio environment that fostered collaboration and creativity and the continued generation of complex designs became a central challenge for Diller + Scofidio, the condition of possibility for its third decade of activity.

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2000–2008

three From 2000 to 2008 the most significant projects realized by Diller Scofidio + Renfro include the Eyebeam competition entry; Slither public housing; the Brasserie renovation; Blur; the Institute of Contemporary Art; the codesign of the High Line; and the first two components of the Lincoln Center redevelopment, the School of American Ballet and Alice Tully Hall. Realizing new forms of public space, larger platforms for visual and spatial investigation, as stand-alone buildings or parks, became increasingly central to the studio and its activities. Its skill at designing complex projects and deftly fitting them within the existing urban fabric was now fully evident. A rich cross-fertilization of issues and genres from earlier work is also noticeable in the projects of this period, which include many unrealized designs and new technologies, materials, and media forms. Preparations for The American Lawn transformed Diller + Scofidio from a husband and wife partnership in 1997 to a studio with about forty people by 2008, after long having on staff a dozen employees. Projects such as the Brasserie, the ICA, Lincoln Center, and the High Line led to more hires and the introduction of a design-team working structure involving more delegation of work and frequent group meetings. Until 1997, only two people previously had worked in the loft. Victor Wong was the first full-time employee, from 1989 to 1992. Paul Lewis arrived in the summer of 1993.

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Mark Wasiuta and Gwynne Keathley were present for much of 1997 and 1998 to work on the lawn exhibition. Nicholas De Monchaux began around the same time and contributed to Refresh, a website, and Rapid Growth, a moving tree. Lyn Rice started in 1997 and collaborated on Facsimile. Rice recommended Charles Renfro, who supervised much of the construction of the Brasserie and became a partner in 2004, at which point the studio adopted its current name. Renfro studied architecture at Rice University and later at Columbia, where his teachers included Mary McLeod and art historian Rosalind Krauss. In the early 1990s he worked for Smith Miller + Hawkinson, a small New York architectural firm with a reputation for finely conceptualized and elegantly detailed design work. After a stint as a freelance architect, he joined Ralph Applebaum and Associates, the interpretive museum design firm. He built his own loft from parts he purchased on Canal Street. His interest in questions about the body and visual culture, predilection for irony, and appreciation for architectural details at all scales of a project established a comfortable working relationship with Diller and Scofidio, just as the volume and complexity of projects in the studio increased.1

Stu d i o C u ltu r e

The architecture culture of the design charette, the round-the-clock collaboration that frequently tests physical stamina, typical in schools and studios, became the norm at Cooper Square and on West Twenty-Sixth Street. A sense of deadlinedriven urgency continues to inform the work DS+R produces as it has grown and moved to larger quarters. Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro are demanding employers, workaholics intolerant of shoddiness and vocal in their criticisms. Yet they are willing to give young architects as much (and often more) responsibility than they can manage, as Ben Mickus, who worked on Lincoln Center not long after graduating from architecture school, recalls.2 Even those early employees who later departed to pursue other opportunities concede that arriving each morning not knowing what they would be expected to do that day and the sheer amount they learned from interacting with Diller and Scofidio made working for them unique. While the couple has sometimes described the decision-making process in their studio as that of a dysfunctional family, this seems one-sided.3 That the architects initially lived and worked in the same Cooper Square space inevitably led to their being protective of it, and early collaborators such as Wasiuta and Rice recall an environment in which Diller and Scofidio could be friendly and solicitous toward acquaintances but chilly toward the hapless architecture student who made the mistake of dropping off a resume without an appointment at what he or she thought was an architecture studio like any other.4 With Diller’s mother sitting in a corner and the frequent lunch of sausage purchased at a local Polish butcher, the loft at Cooper Square began as part fam128

ily dwelling, part artists’ atelier, and part architecture school. Scofidio likened it

shop workers broke down the dichotomies between design and fabrication.5 Like Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Coop Himmelblau, Diller and Scofidio had opted for a small studio in which to realize conceptually driven work. If not

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to the legendary California “Skunk Works” aircraft plant in which engineers and

the first architects to realize this mode of practice, they had pushed it in new directions by working on an uncommon variety of building types in diverse settings, as their next project demonstrated.

S l ith e r

Diller and Scofidio commenced work on Slither, a public housing tower in Gifu, Japan, eighty-six miles west of Tokyo, in 1994. Completed in March 2000, its design and construction entailed the longest gestation of any of their projects up to that point. After a decade concentrating on performances and installations, it was a pivotal project for obtaining subsequent commissions for renovations and freestanding buildings. If previously they had “real reservations” about being architects and expressed a wish to Douglas Cooper to “go back to the fun stuff,” while immersed in mundane details, by the time they finished Slither they had found a way to balance designing a building with remaining true to themselves.6 Japanese architect Arata Isozaki was the major force behind the Kitagata Public Housing Project, which he recommended to Governor Taku Kajiwara of the Gifu Prefecture to replace a complex of crumbling postwar apartment blocks.7 As architect Christine Hawley recalls, Isozaki was likely offered the entire commission and eventually decided that it should be divided among a group of architects.8 Public housing in Japan since 1995 had been under the jurisdiction of the Japan Housing Corporation and heavily oriented toward the construction of the maximum number of dwellings in large buildings, typically in the form of slabs that evoked the overbearing scale associated with the unrealized designs by Weimar-period architect Ludwig Hilberseimer. Japanese critics contemptuously referred to them as “rabbit hutches.”9 Capitalizing on the public interest around the incoming female governor of Gifu, Isozaki proposed that an international all-women team of architects comprising Hawley, Diller, Kazuyo Sejima, and Akiko Takahashi collaborate with landscape designer Martha Schwartz, designer Emi Fukuzawa, and artist Aiko Miyawaki to design four buildings and a landscaped courtyard. Each architect was assigned a local Japanese partner architect and contractor and provided with a standard budget for a public housing project. Diller and Scofidio worked with Koji Imanishi of Misaki Design and Architects in Gifu. At a preliminary brainstorming workshop, Isozaki assigned each team of architects a different part of the site. In selecting female architects, his intention was to thwart the imposition of what he called “the masculinist principle” by which structural engineering

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maximized apartment units and sacrificed traditional Japanese-style residential space in public housing. Rather than a return to older forms, he sought designers capable of realizing flexibility and a sensitivity to the changing nature of kinship and domesticity that would represent an alternative to the “penetration” of upper-level planning to the slightest details of the dwelling unit.10 As he observed, “I thought that having women architects do the planning would help to make clearer the collapse of the nuclear family. I wanted to reverse the planning process by starting with the design of the individual housing wings.”11 To introduce the non-Japanese designers to the national family structure, he recommended that they watch the films Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953) and Family Game (Yoshimitsu Morita, 1983). Whether the solutions of each team realized an alternative “feminine” architecture remains debatable. Indeed, Hawley recalls her conversations with Diller and Scofidio centered upon comparing information needed for building rather than feminist theory. Yet the variety of interior and exterior design schemes offered by the teams and their introduction of new thinking into what is typically a highly formulaic undertaking is evident. Hawley employed a duplex form in her designs. Takahashi divided each apartment into four equal parts of a square. Sejima organized the rooms of each apartment along a corridor.12 If the latter two adapted traditional Japanese forms of the engawa (wooden strip flooring adjacent to a window) and iniwa (garden passage), the D+S design of the apartment interiors according to the principle of open flexible loft design is striking. Each room could be spatially reconfigured through the deployment of sliding panels, an approach that evoked the space of New York lofts, traditional Japanese domestic architecture, and perhaps the flexible interior plan of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schroeder House (1924). The exterior form of Slither was determined by what the architects term “three small disturbances in plan and section as a modest resistance to the inevitable anonymity of mass housing” that is worth quoting at length: 1 Seven units are assembled vertically into a stack. Each stack interlocks with the next stack, wedging an increment of 1.5 degrees at the joint. The accumulation of this slight angle along the building’s 15 stacks results in a shallow curve, convex to the curve and concave to the communal courtyard. The long elevations are faced with diaphanous overlapping “scales” of perforated metal screening that modulate the degree of privacy at the circulation corridor and the balconies. 2 Each unit slips 1.4 metres in plan from the next unit, thus freeing every entry door to be approached on axis. On the north side of the building, each front door is metaphorically a private facade. The slippage also produces a privatized balcony on the south side. 3 The floor slab of each unit is offset 200 mm vertically from the next unit. The circulation system of shallow continuous ramps strings together all the units, creating a subtle artificial topography in which no two units share the same elevational address. As the lowest unit at the west end of the building and the highest unit at the east are offset by

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the dimension of one full floor, the building appears to tip up from grade.13

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3.1 Diller + Scofidio, interior of Slither apartment, 2000. Photograph by Diller + Scofidio. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

This description is akin to a performance score, a set of instructions, for disrupting a linear housing block by realizing standardized deviations in plan and elevation. Although the procedure is formulaic, its results are not. More surprising than its curve is the tip in the elevation of the building that raises it toward the west and is most evident when it is photographed from the south. Viewed from this angle, one notices the irregular levels of the balconies created by the open spaces in the wire-mesh facade. A subtlety that probably escapes many occupants and viewers of the building who have not first studied its renderings, it powerfully underscores how following a regularized incremental design process produces effects that nonetheless appear variable. Described by the architects as “reptilian,” the arc of Slither recalls the design of the Slow House, although as with that project the biomorphic reference appears more post facto than generative. The building derives no inspiration from copying nature, and the disjunction between its name and the organic metaphor it promises but ultimately refuses to instantiate is striking. Each individual block of apartment dwellings realizes the arc, a challenge to unimpeded verticality that resonates with Isozaki’s stated goal of countering top-down approaches to design and Diller and Scofidio’s insistence that social housing “need not lead to the erasure of individual dwelling.”14

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3.2 Diller + Scofidio, Diller with Slither model, 1994. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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3.3 Diller + Scofidio, exterior of Slither, 2000. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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3.4 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of Slither in plan, section, and elevation, 1994. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Earlier models and renderings confirm that the architects alternately conceived the wire-mesh screens as adjustable and capable of covering the entire facade, a device for modulating visual contact with the external world and obtaining privacy when desired. Gifu construction authorities altered the design in response to fire hazard concerns.15 The architects also lost their continuous-road drive-through garage that would have gradually descended underground. Although Diller and Scofidio admired the work of their local architect partner, Misaki Design, collaboration with Japanese building officials was frustrating and forced changes that did not allow them to realize all of their original intentions.16

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3.5 Diller + Scofidio, exterior landing of Slither. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Yet residents of Slither praised it. A female office worker in her forties, a single mother with two children, ages nine and seven, noted, “Other apartment buildings have internal stairs. Since Diller’s apartments have no internal stairs, I felt it would be safer for when I get older. Also, it feels like I’m living in a house instead of apartment housing, since the entrances are not at the same level due to slightly sloped corridors. When you come into the apartment, you feel the main room is more spacious since the walls gradually widen.”17

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3.6 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of Rapid Growth. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

R a p i d G ro wth

Designs for public spaces continued to engage Diller and Scofidio in the year 2000 with an ambitious set of proposals submitted in June for the centenary installation celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The best known of these was Rapid Growth, a series of thirteen motorized grass mounds with live trees, proposed for installation in front of the neoclassical museum building designed by the firms of Horace Trumbauer and Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary and completed in 1928. Each vegetation-laden island was closer to a slow-moving amusement park bumper car than to a conventional landscape form. By approaching trees and grass as figures in motion against a stable spatial ground, Diller and Scofidio defamiliarized them. An elaborate mechanical apparatus in each mound, equipped with a motor and motion-sensing equipment, would have moved it in random patterns, creating a real time–based media landscape architecture of potentially infinite variations.18 1 35

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Th e Br a s s e r i e

The invitation to compete for the renovation of the Brasserie restaurant in the basement of the Seagram Building, designed by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson and located at 375 Park Avenue between Fifty-Second and Fifty-Third Streets in Manhattan, was an unexpected opportunity for architects who never had previously designed a restaurant and whose largest building to date was the little-visited Slither. Opened in January 1958, the office tower remains an icon in the history of the skyscraper.19 In July 1959 the Four Seasons designed by Johnson at the Fifty-Second Street entrance established a new paradigm for contemporary eateries: an elegantly austere and consciously modernist space decorated with a suspended abstract metal sculpture by Richard Lippold over the bar.20 On the other side of the building, at 100 East Fifty-Third Street, was its twin separated at birth, the Brasserie, also designed by Johnson and opened in tandem with the Four Seasons. Initially proposed for use as an exhibition area and even an automobile show room, it was a less opulent and expensive twenty-four-hour eatery that, until its destruction by fire in 1995, had been the all-night restaurant of record in midtown Manhattan.21 “We never had a key to the front door,” Nick Valenti, the CEO of Restaurant Associates, operator of the Brasserie, recalled.22 Several generations of high society socializers, media personalities, night owls, and hungry jet-lagged travelers dined in this setting with Picasso plates on the wall and green leather banquettes separated by glass dividers, more elegant than the average coffee shop but less formal than most restaurants then serving onion soup. Eating at the Brasserie (restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton once dismissed its food as “reminiscent of airline cooking,” although since the renovation it has noticeably improved) was always a pretext for people watching.23 Like the traditional European coffeehouse, an institution that would not find an American analogue until the expansion of Starbucks in 1987, it was a venue in which ordinary people and celebrities mingled at odd hours, and one never knew whom one might see there lingering over the newspaper. Phyllis Lambert, whose father Samuel Bronfman, hired Mies to design the Seagram Building, played a key role in the commission. When the family sold the building in 1979 to the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, it insisted upon a clause that granted Lambert, herself an architect and founder in 1979 of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, “aesthetic control” and the right of approval for design changes in the exterior and public spaces. Even minor alterations in the signage and lobby required her approval. Valenti had planned on hiring Fred Brush, architect of Café Centro and Naples 45, after the 1995 fire. Lambert rejected Brush’s design and insisted that Valenti interview three New York studios for the job. She also requested that he make the final choice himself, so as to prevent any blame from landing on her shoulders in the event that the

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architecture proved unsuccessful.24

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3.7 Diller + Scofidio, interior of Brasserie restaurant, 2000. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Each of the firms had vastly different profiles and backgrounds, and shared little more than the fact that they had never designed a restaurant and impressed Lambert by their design acumen. Pasanella, Klein, Stolzman, and Berg, the largest of the offices, had realized many academic, civic, religious, and commercial projects in the New York area. Lambert knew of them through their work certifying the Seagram Building for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.25 Reiser + Umemoto, a smaller office with a portfolio of residential projects, produced more experimental architecture in a formalist vein that reflected the emerging possibilities of digital design technology. Lambert recalls that she most likely first met Diller at one of the conferences sponsored by the architecture journal ANY. Diller and Scofidio decided against

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submitting a formal design proposal and during their interview with Valenti in 1997 showed slides of their earlier installation projects and Slither. Being food aficionados helped to win over Valenti. Recalling the selection process, he observed that “they were by far the best of the bunch. They represent the cutting edge, they’re downtown. To do a restaurant in midtown that will pull people in, we need that.”26 Although Lambert exerted no direct pressure on his decision and apart from some later consultation on the color palette of the bar stools did not intervene in the design process, it is clear that by including the couple on her short list she had effectively stacked the deck. If the new Brasserie was to attract notice, Diller and Scofidio were the obvious choice as its architects. They submitted their design proposal to Restaurant Associates on November 3, 1997. The renovated restaurant opened in 2000. Working with a budget of $5 million, a medium-high sum for a 7,000-squarefoot restaurant with a new kitchen and 213 seats, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro were able to explore materials, finishes, and detailing to a degree that had not been possible on earlier projects. Every object and surface in the restaurant—from the reservations desk to the mirrors in the bathrooms—was realized with adequate financial resources and conceptualized and designed with respect to its role in the total ensemble. Few elements in the Brasserie are standard catalog items (the white Saarinen chairs are the most conspicuous exception), for which reason it looks and feels like few other restaurants. Rather than breed self-indulgence, these preconditions enabled Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro (the latter who worked as lead architect on the project) to realize a design in which their concerns with media technology, theatricality, and public space advanced Valenti’s goal that the renovation promote a sense of making a dramatic entrance. He worked closely with the studio on details large and small and shared data on the clientele and business patterns with the architects. The aspiration of the studio to “use both architecture and theater, merged with aspects of performance and art, to celebrate the social aspects of dining” evokes the highly ritualized meal explored in Indigestion, here realized in a threedimensional space.27 Johnson’s designs for the Four Seasons and the Brasserie provided key reference points, and once again Diller confronted the problem of twins. Describing the more luxurious Four Seasons (actually joined to the Brasserie by a common service area), Interiors magazine wrote that “one singular paradox of the design is that despite the exceptional richness of its materials and workmanship, it is essentially colorless and unobtrusive. It is not a stage setting; rather it is a theater that is not to date, nor tire the audience.”28 Johnson himself asserted the Four Seasons “was to be modern and yet get away from the austerity, the sterility, of the International Style,” and in many ways the Brasserie that the studio redesigned also overcomes the opposition between earlier modernisms, in this case between the structural language of Mies and the two-dimensional theatrical effects at which Johnson excelled. It is the rare contemporary work of architecture that successfully creates an

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evocative interior space through the deployment of tectonic elements and

media displays. Removing all traces of Johnson’s design in the shell of the restaurant, the architects applied new skins of wood, terrazzo, tile, and glass, a process that they

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three-dimensional forms while simultaneously incorporating two-dimensional

characterize as “the restoration of an old coat” through the introduction of new liners that “often lift from their surfaces to become structural, spatial, and functional components.”29 Although the metaphor of an old coat relined implies the retention of comfort (only experienced by the wearer) and preservation of style (fully public) through the manipulation of an invisible structure, here the new wooden skin liners realize highly visible modifications. Like many elements of the Brasserie design, they complicate distinctions between interior and exterior space while announcing the richest treatment of surface and volume in a large functionally specific public room that the studio had yet realized. Pear wood skins descend from the ceiling and wrap around into seating at the front and rear. They are met by madrone skins that peel up from the floor and meet (but do not join) them beneath the banquettes. Warm but not cloying, this architecture initially suggests the molded wood designs of Aalto or Eames, but such comparisons fall short of recognizing its unique shape and far more challenging treatment of space through curves and folds. Obvious pleasure in handling materials extends to the mattresses upholstered in Naugahyde (a material whose association with petit-bourgeois philistinism the architects gleefully subvert), and which tilt up from the ground to create twelve private seating booths. The studio conceived the nose cone lights which Enno DePasquale, a designer and fabricator who rebuilds classic racing cars, hammered out of aluminum. A defining feature of the Brasserie renovation is its engagement with the basement of the Seagram Building, a space without windows or vistas in a modernist monument associated with glass and transparency. Even the Slow House had a view that could be denied, mediated, or engaged as a foil, and if the Four Seasons was awash with light, its less spectacular counterpart on the north side of the office tower always lacked natural illumination and direct contact with the street. To introduce a view into this space was to call attention to its most fundamental deficit. Recognizing the impossibility of connecting interior and exterior space by traditional architecture, the studio employed a media technological solution that also added an element of public address to the project. Entering through the revolving door of the Brasserie, a patron is picked up by a closed-circuit television camera that after a delay of several seconds transmits his or her blurred image to a bank of fifteen monitors over the bar. Valenti realized that eating breakfast at a restaurant counter had gone out of fashion, and he insisted on adding a bar to the renovation so as to obtain better value from the space.30 Diller, Socofidio, and Renfro understood its role in orienting patrons and designed a separate access. The “bar bank” was a collaboration with Ben Rubin of EAR Studio and Marty Chafkin of Perfection Electronics, who designed the electric-eye sensor system. Each time a new patron enters, the image is racked one monitor to the right. Unlike Para-Site, the images here are

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still, rather than moving, taken in full profile rather than overhead or in section. As the visitor presses the revolving door, a single image, suggestive of a blurry photograph taken by star-stalking paparazzi, is triggered by its spin. Located at the front door of the restaurant, the camera is lower than typical closed-circuit video surveillance systems, usually mounted overhead and canted downward toward a doorway or cash register. If the sequentiality of images proposes them as quasi-cinematic, their display on the row of monitors above the bar recalls the horizontal displays of Jump Cuts and Facsimile. Theatricality is emphasized by the staircase emerging from the small reception foyer into the dining area whose transparency promotes the goal of “making an entrance,” a more efficient spatial solution than the catwalk that the architects had initially proposed. Whereas Johnson’s Brasserie was split-level, here the floor in the main dining room is treated on a single level with the uncommon result that there are no bad tables in the restaurant. Behind the bar, a translucent glass wine rack displays the bottles with a blur. Its fabricator, Carroll Todd, a sculptor, also produced the metal work. The bar stools were injected with medicinal gels, and the green tables cast in resin.31 Interestingly, the fear that people would object to their images being broadcast over the bar does not seem to have become an issue, and more than a few patrons have noted that the surveillance camera is not noticed.32 One critic expressed disappointment that the images were not available over the Internet, and it would be possible to trace the history of architecture by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in relation to the growing comfort of people allowing cameras to record their everyday activities.33 As with Para-Site, the traditional notion of surveillance as a set of power relations fails to describe these closed-circuit video images without recordings that can be rewatched. After opening in 2000, the architecture of the renovated Brasserie received uniformly positive reviews.34

Tr av e l o g u e s

In Travelogues, which Diller and Scofidio completed in 2001 for the new Terminal 4 of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, their fascination with tourism informed their design of an artwork in the sterile corridors of Concourses A and B, a domain of limbo between traveling and arrival in the United States before clearing customs and immigration. Incoming passengers would experience the installation as the first thing they see in New York, a structuring of perception that doubtless intrigued the architects. Thirty-three backlit lenticular image panels narrate three stories whose conclusions are revealed in x-ray images of suitcases, whose contents range from prosthetic limbs to souvenir models of the Eiffel Tower. A woman deliberately spills a glass of wine on the shirt of her companion. Another throws off her 1 40

wig from the observation platform of the Eiffel Tower. An Indian family poses

directly imprinted their shape on photographic paper, the x-ray images of contents of suitcases—a prosthetic limb, scuba mask and hose, and bodily extensions in one; tourist statuettes in another—constitute some of the wittiest imagery the

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in front of the Taj Mahal. Evoking the rayograms of Man Ray, in which objects

architects have realized. Mysteries and short vignettes are presented, and as in Facsimile, the images never congeal into a complex narrative. The suitcase is a synecdoche, what Diller in reference to Tourisms calls “a portable edited unit” of the home, the product of a cinematic winnowing down to ideal form, the architectural equivalent of the film shot. Lenticular screens, ribbed plastic surfaces with lenses that change scenes depending on the angle from which they are viewed, lend themselves to 3.8 Diller + Scofidio, Travelogues, public art installation in Terminal 4 (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) of John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York City, 2001. Photograph by Joshua Bolchover. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

sequential organization. As the architects noted in a description posted later on their website: Each screen holds one second of action, animated by the speed of the moving viewer. The succession of screens builds a sequence of micro-movies; the spaces between screens form time-lapses. Thus, the traveler walking down the sterile corridor will inadvertently engage a real-time moving picture narrative in tiny installments. Each set of panels tells a short fiction about an anonymous traveler via the suitcase they carry. The cases are x-rayed and contents materialize to trigger a flashback of a travel experience.35

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c h a pte r th re e 3.9 Diller + Scofidio, storyboard for Travelogues from sketchbook, 2001. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Wendy Feuer of the Department of Transportation praised Diller and Scofidio for their “out of the box creative response to the challenge” of creating relatively low-maintenance public art without the use of electronics in an airport environment where art is not a priority.36 Lenticular screens returned in the collaboration of Diller and Scofidio with Mira Nair on Have You Ever Been Mistaken For?, a 2006 installation in Lille, France, that displayed on the streets of the city life-sized photographs of racially and ethnically diverse inhabitants, within which “ambiguous gestures .   .   . in the climate of fear could be construed as suspicious.”37 A little-known project, The Virtual Office, that the studio completed for the Vitra furniture company, and exhibited at the 2001 Neocon commercial interior fair in Chicago, confirmed its adeptness at developing characters. Here the charge was to promote a recent Vitra product, the Ypsilon Chair. To accomplish this, the architects created characters they dubbed the Multitasker, the Drone, the Mole, the Slacker, and the Workaholic. Visitors to the Vitra display wandered through a minimal office and confronted looping footage on large vertically oriented plasma screens. Perhaps the most rewarding to the viewer was the Multitasker,

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whose activities alternated from one screen to the other, an intimation of a subsequent work of kinetic media architecture.

The competition entry that the studio developed in 2001 for the Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology, to be constructed in New York’s West Chelsea

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Ey e be a m

neighborhood, once more shifted the terms for reception of its work and fused design for a building with media and time-based performance. Its surfaces were to be programmable displays that interacted with strolling visitors and provided multiple conduits to art and the Internet. Reading in public, the premise of the unrealized Feed installation in the Thirty-Third Street subway station, here gives way to the reception of visual images and sounds in a performance and an urban space rolled into one, a promenade for digital culture. John S. Johnson, an heir to the company best known as a manufacturer of bandages, began the Eyebeam foundation in 1996. He later purchased a garage and a plot of land at 540 West Twenty-First Street, to house a 90,000-square-foot facility in which education, art production, theater, and presentation would commingle with public spaces. In September 2000, thirty-four firms were invited to submit proposals for a building. Fifteen of them would be requested to develop conceptual proposals, from which three finalists would be selected.38 Young designers with an interest in digital media, such as Neil Denari, Greg Lynn, and Reiser + Umemoto, were included on the long list. After making it onto the short list of fifteen designers, D+S emerged as one of the three finalists, together with Thomas Leeser and the Dutch firm MVDRV.39 The twenty-four-page minutely detailed brief for phase 3 of the project offered little hint of the architectural form the building should take.40 In his letter of March 8, 2002, informing the studio of its receipt of the commission, Johnson singled out its “spirit of cooperation with the open source process.”41 This $90 million commission was unlike anything the studio had previously designed, not that it could have been given the new building type it was being asked to invent for still evolving technologies. Its exposed structure and flexible plan were enabled by the steel frame cores spanned by Vierendeel trusses, rectangular frames with fixed joints but no diagonal bracing that allows the disposition of the floor as an open space free of columns.42 Activity within the building would have been visible in a section cut through its interleaving curves, which the architects understood as a radical alternative to the mute and noncommunicative facades of most New York museums.43 Frequently associated with the architecture of single surfaces, folds, and the rejection of angularity emerging in the 1990s and often related to the ideas of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the bent ribbon shape of the Eyebeam became the most iconic feature of its design. Contemporary buildings such as the Educatorium (1997) and Jussieu Library (1992) by Rem Koolhaas/OMA and the Villa VPRO by MVDRV (1997) with their looping folds and interweaving of internal and external spaces undoubtedly provided key points of reference. D+S transformed a fairly common design convention at the time, typically employed as an aesthetic device with little overarching rationale, and subjected it to a rigorous analysis whose end result set a new standard for programmatic employment

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3.10 Diller + Scofidio, Eyebeam rendering, 2001. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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3.11 Diller + Scofidio, Eyebeam model, 2001. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

of folded shapes. The blue “production” side and the “gray” presentation side each possessed a core at opposite ends, thus making it possible for one population “to pass through the other, acknowledging each other and communicating visually and sometimes physically.”44 Architect Greg Lynn, an influential designer and theorist of folding architecture, somewhat archly claimed that the Eyebeam “is a folded noodle like in every airport lounge in Europe” but conceded that it contained more architectural research than most other buildings.45 In their proposal, the architects assume the challenge of designing for a “perpetual newness”: Accepting the rapid obsolescence of new technologies, the building is conceived as a supple and spontaneous organism that can accommodate artistic and technological unpredictability. The ribbon is composed of two plies separated by an interstitial zone. A smooth concrete ply lines the exhibition levels while a ply of resin-coated, cast fiberglass panels line the production/education levels. Aside from the structural and mechanical systems, the interstitial zone houses the building’s nervous system. Open conduit troughs carry a variety

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3.12 Diller + Scofidio, Eyebeam rendering, 2001. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

of data and power lines to a grid of jacks at ceilings and floors throughout the building. These jacks are like “skin pores”—a system of miniature punctures in the building’s smooth surfaces that pass feeds from its innards to serve external equipment. The open infrastructure allows for continual adaptation of the building to changing technologies. The interstitial zone widens at upturned ribbon ends to become technical control rooms. To advance an awareness of the intelligent systems that drive new media art works, these spaces are visually accessible to the public.46 Having commenced their careers suspicious of the metaphor of architecture as a body, Diller and Scofidio cautiously adopt a vocabulary of organicism that allows them to describe the Eyebeam as an organism with a nervous system and skin pores but not, significantly, as human. A heat-seeking and camera-equipped robot in a spiderlike shape would cling to socket points on the exterior of the building, evoking the parasite much beloved by the architects, here ready to stalk

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twelve floors of culture-consuming prey.47 From signage and display integrated

all elements of the design sought to complicate distinctions between structure and infrastructure, form and program, so as to promote what the architects call “controlled contamination” of media and functions.

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in the floors to smart cards enabling the visitor and building to communicate,

If the “nervous system” of the Eyebeam was only partially revealed between its two-ply folds, which Scofidio regarded as approximating two separate buildings, the design announced a space that facilitated, indeed necessitated, movement. With its tubular ramp bar on the ground floor lobby that extended from the street, the building was linked by ramps, stairs, escalator, and elevator and outlined a system of circulation as rich and varied as the social and cultural activities it was intended to house. Updating concerns with the movement of bodies central to the Centre Pompidou of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (1976), the design had few contemporary peers. Henceforth, every public and institutional project by the studio would challenge and disrupt traditional patterns of circulation associated with a specific typology, such as that of the museum, the park, the library, or the university classroom building, an effort synonymous for the architects with breaking down recalcitrant modes of perception and expanding cultural possibilities.48 Exuding an openness that the architects, perhaps naively from a later, more jaundiced perspective, understood as “keeping with ethos of information technology,” it suggests an updated version of the Pompidou that sought to channel public space directly into its mediatheque, a synthesis of library, grand hotel, and cultural destination that dispensed altogether with an exterior plaza. Envisioned as a gathering spot for New York’s “digerati,” the design traded upon a then prevalent belief that New York’s “silicon alley” neighborhood in the West Teens and Twenties would emerge as a vibrant economic force. Renderings of the Eyebeam design are among the most persuasive D+S have produced. Matthew Johnson designed a digital animation with Dbox studio (featuring Douglas Cooper) that remains a model of the genre. Reviews of the design were glowing.49 Financial problems after September 11, 2001, prevented Johnson from developing the competition scheme. On October 24, 2003, the studio submitted three entirely new schemes for the concept/programming phase of the project that involved adding construction to the existing Twenty-First Street building, replacing it with new construction, or combining the existing building with a garage fronting Twentieth Street. Each included generous public space provisions and “mobile units” for creative activity that could be flexibly located within the space. Johnson subsequently decided to forgo construction of the museum and commit the resources of his foundation to a smaller-scale renovation, a disappointment for the studio and a setback for an emerging field.50

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Tw o -Way H ote l , WTC V i ew i n g P l atfo r m , a n d B AM M a ste r P l a n

That same year as the Eyebeam competition, the studio worked on three other projects with public space components, albeit each in different modalities. An unrealized design for the Two-Way Hotel, a 220-room luxury facility on Jiulong in Hong Kong Harbor, would have allowed each room to function as an independent unit that penetrated from front to back to provide views of the harbor. Most strikingly, the studio designed its rooms as independent units liberated from the matrix of a central building, akin to disaggregated cells of a honeycomb. Maintaining privacy, yet uncoupling the hotel room from building mass, each suite is a viewing capsule on display, as if to hold unrestrained voyeurism in check. Evoking distinctions between public and private, inside and outside, the rooms could be opened to allow for sleeping out of doors. D+S collaborated with architects David Rockwell and Kevin Kennon to realize the World Trade Center Site Viewing Platform in New York City that opened to the public on December 30, 2001. Constructed of plywood and metal scaffolding, the 30-foot-wide platform was 300 feet long and snaked past Saint Paul’s Chapel to a height of 13 feet to offer a 180-degree view of the ruins at Ground Zero. It was built in two weeks, thanks to unprecedented cooperation of city agencies. Rockwell raised $500,000 from donors and obtained in-kind contributions from contractors that allowed the project to be built without any municipal funding. The architects envisioned themselves as a “design swat team” that needed to act quickly so as “not to create something that would be there longer than necessary.”51 Kennon was at the time teaching at Princeton, where he and Diller had lunch soon after September 11 and agreed that a dignified architectural solution would be an improvement over the chaos and improvised police control of the crowds flocking to Ground Zero. At the same time, Rockwell was approached by NYC & Company, the official tourism promotion arm of the city, about designing a memorial for families and dignitaries to visit. He soon joined forces with Kennon, Diller, and Scofidio, and the architects proposed a viewing platform that would be open to the general public. Originally, they proposed four platforms, and for reasons involving logistics and the site, they settled on a single one next to Saint Paul’s, built under the supervision of Richard Sheirer of the Office of Emergency Management, in charge of the rescue and recovery effort. As Kennon observed, “We tried to exercise as much restraint as possible. It was important that there be no ornament whatsoever. We thought that would be inappropriate.”52 Although the architects studied memorials such as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, their project was explicitly designed to be antimemorial. Its plywood panels could be replaced when they had become full of writing, lending it the quality of a bulletin board and an implicit riposte to the antigraffiti stance of the administration of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. At a moment when developers and real estate interests in the city had begun planning for the future of the site, well in advance of any public debate, Scofidio

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noted, “We were shocked that it was happening so soon. People needed time to

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3.13 Kevin Kennon Architects, Rockwell Group, Diller + Scofidio, viewing platform, Ground Zero, New York City, 2001. Photograph © Blandon Belushin/Rockwell Group. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and the architects.

process intelligently what had happened. Our comment to a reporter at the time was, ‘Don’t erase the erasure.’”53 As Kennon recalls, the major contribution of Diller and Scofidio to the platform was a “moral and philosophical position” that granted weight and dignity to the idea of preserving the void.54 Having explored tourism, war, and temporary structures in their architecture, the couple was uniquely qualified to help realize a work of public architecture that promoted reflection, yet whose meaning was generated by the site and the occasion and received forty thousand people a day. The master plan for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) realized in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas/OMA was commissioned by the BAM Local Development Corporation as a means of creating an arts district with artist lofts,

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arts administration offices, and production facilities. At once a solution to the high rents and precarious space situations of Manhattan arts organizations, it also represented an attempt to intervene in the Fort Greene Historic District neighborhood by creating parks and public spaces without sacrificing its gritty character. In its combination and display of different phases of cultural production, the Mixing Chamber adumbrates later cultural and educational projects of the studio. Perhaps most suggestive of the plan is its emphasis upon retaining existing features of the neighborhood, which prefigures the rejection of “tabula rasa” modernist urbanism in the later DS+R redesign of the public spaces at the Lincoln Center. If a unique approach to the city had not yet completely emerged in the work of the studio, the architects’ next project would push their explorations of relations between figure and ground in an even more radical direction by constructing architecture from the atmosphere.

Bl u r

Conceived as an alternative to the nationalistic spectacles and commodity displays that traditionally dominate world exhibitions, the Blur building, the artificial cloud that Diller + Scofidio realized for the Swiss Expo 2002 in Yverdon-lesBains, was intended as an antidote to “visually obsessed, high resolution/high definition” culture. In an early programmatic statement, Diller + Scofidio outline the initial broad conception of the project: The media event is integrated with the enveloping fog. Our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other. Thus, architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space. Both would require sophisticated technologies that would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects.55 Rather than entirely dispense with images, Blur was designed to highlight and present them in a myriad of unusual contexts, beginning with the projecting of videos or films onto the fog during the evening hours, which suggests it as a variant of the multiple-screen forms employed in earlier projects by the architects.56 It was to be, as they suggest, a media event, a time-based work of continually changing manifestations that interacted with its immediate surroundings. Lenticular images embedded in buses, trains, waiting areas, and electronic LED signboards implanted in sidewalks would have conveyed information and a serialized novella whose installments visitors could follow along their travel routes. These plans, which might well have transformed the expo grounds into a twenty-first-century Gesamtkunstwerk, would have tapped every medium in which the architects ever worked, including architecture, video, landscape, literary narrative, sound art, and interactive media. Uniting their ideas was a concept of Blur 1 50

as an open set of experiences admitting no preferred viewing position or single

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3.14 Diller + Scofidio, Media Cut, installation at Swiss Expo, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002. Photograph © Yves André. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

message, a vision clearly indebted to the complex circulation of the Eyebeam design and the indeterminacy of Facsimile. Landscape in the surrounding expo was to have emitted sounds and smells intended to overcome distinctions between the “natural” and the “artificial.” Reductions in budget allowed Diller + Scofidio to realize only one ancillary project at Yverdon, Media Cut, a collaboration with Douglas Cooper (writer) and Diego Mariani (translator into Esperanto). Installed in a walkway tunnel located beneath a hill directly on axis with the cloud, the piece projected male and female lips engaged in a heated argument in an imaginary amalgam of European languages called “Europanto.” Palpably organic by virtue of its subterranean location and curvilinear walls, the dialogue in this “linguistic root cellar” quickly enters the arena of culture as the altercation turns to the relationship of the couple, shopping, and the social contract. Arguably the wittiest dialogue that Cooper ever wrote for Diller + Scofidio, the installation was orphaned at the exhibition, and its relationship to the artificial cloud probably eluded most visitors. According to the initial conceptions of Blur, copiously recorded in the combination of scrapbook and diary that the architects published after its completion, LED signboards inside the cloud would have allowed visitors to participate in a three-dimensional chat room using speech-to-text software.57 Language art fell victim to budgetary constraints, and apart from the sound installation by Christian Marclay (frequently inaudible beneath the actual sounds of pumps and the water nozzles), auditory stimuli disappeared from the cloud. Video pontoon boats with rear projection screens were to have cruised around the struc-

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c h a pte r th re e 3.15 Diller + Scofidio, rendering of sushi restaurant at Blur. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

ture to display individual or linked images, updating EJM and Moving Target for aquatic staging. And to further reshuffle perceptual orientations, the architects proposed a submerged sushi restaurant in which the eye level of the dining public would match the level of the water, allowing diners to observe the lake in cross-section. Through a series of focus groups with media artists and meetings with sponsors and expo management, Diller + Scofidio eventually narrowed the definition of Blur to five primary components that they shared in an e-mail to Ben Rubin on October 29, 2000: » artificial weather » an effect that limits vision and challenges the conventions of the “spectacle” » a visual interruption that produces difficulty in navigation » an environment that promotes crowd dispersion rather than congregation » a leveler: everyone wears the same coat and is barely visible in the fog, promoting

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3.16 Diller + Scofidio, construction photograph of Blur. Photograph © Ennio Bettinelli/Cighélio. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Diller and Scofidio reluctantly abandoned the blushing “brain coat,” which would have identified compatible visitors by changing color, upon losing sponsorship by the Swiss telecommunications group Sunshine after it failed to win a cellular service license and was taken over by a rival Danish firm.59 In ways no one possibly could have predicted, the funding for Blur registered the minute fluctuations of the global information economy in a new Europe. Exploring many media possibilities, Diller and Scofidio finally opted “to exploit the effect of nothingness,” an ironic choice given that Blur became the critical and popular success of the expo and furnished its most iconic image, if not the only one remembered after the event. The tensegrity architecture, inspired by Buckminster Fuller, was almost as challenging as the fog system it supported, and in perhaps their most nervewracking interaction with a client, the architects nearly quit after what they perceived as the unwillingness of the expo management to adhere to necessary technical standards. Much of their book narrates fights with the expo management, the Direction Technique, and chronicles the invaluable collaboration of

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c h a pte r th re e 3.17 Diller + Scofidio, aerial view of Blur, Swiss Expo, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002. Photograph © Beat Widmer. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Fujiko Nakaya, who first built an artificial cloud at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, and the nozzle manufacturer, Mee Industries.60 Looking back on the experience six years later, collaborator Dirk Hebel, one of the four team project managers in the office, recognizes the enormous risk the project entailed and the trust that was eventually obtained to overcome the reluctance of the expo management to spend twelve million Swiss francs on fog-generating technology that contained thirty-four thousand nozzles—ten times as many nozzles as Nakaya’s cloud contained—without any guarantee that it would work.61 Structure and atmosphere inseparably joined in the project, which could claim to being tectonic and scenographic—building and medium, enclosure and event—in equal measure. Widely photographed, Blur nonetheless was a visceral, corporeal (and wet) experience poorly conveyed by photographs. In the end, as Diller often noted, it offered nothing to see. For her and Scofidio, it was a logical culmination of three decades of research, a probing investigation of seeing like Duchamp’s Étant donnés, an elaborate mechanism to frame the viewing situation and allow spectators to perceive their own expectations. Commentators noted the romanticist antecedents of this artificial cloud, and of all the projects realized by D+S Blur has generated the most discussion and continues to inspire new interpretations.62

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Less noted but of equal significance to the visual dimension of the cloud was its

aspirations of 1960s conceptual art.63 No single metaphor or explanation sticks to Blur. It pushed architecture toward performance, for the building required the constant adjustment and tun-

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functioning as a water purification device evocative of the systems theoretical

ing of a musical instrument and no two visits to the cloud were ever identical. Diller + Scofidio had built a complex time-based technological system dependent upon temperature and wind, factors beyond human control. Yet the water bar on the Angels Deck (complete with taps so as to make architecture drinkable) confirmed their sense of humor. And the capability of the fog itself to promote a buoyant atmosphere among visitors suggests the architects had not lost their finesse in creating a vibrant public space. Was the project an attempt to maximize architectural control or an acceptance of unpredictability that implied a cessation of agency and a more fundamental openness toward the world? Blur remains a potent analogy for the flexible organizational structure of the studio capable of quickly responding to specific opportunities and constructing a building without walls. Emblazoned on sugar packets and umbrellas, published on the cover of countless newspapers and magazines, the cloud could easily be relegated to postmodern media spectacle or avant-garde architecture. Ambiguity permeated an experience and a work that could not be bought, sold, appropriated, or interpreted with certainty. D+S had realized a project whose thoughtfulness and playfulness countered most objections, including its cost, for Blur does not appear to have received any negative reviews.64 It provided the studio with a new degree of global visibility and consolidated its reputation as cultural commentators, adroit technological innovators, and tenacious designers. “Their work used to be indecipherable to all but the in crowd but all that changed with Blur. People were so excited to see it—they’d stand before it as if they’d been visited from outer space,” architect Nigel Coates later wrote in Vogue.65 With such a backhanded compliment the architects confronted the double bind of having to admit that everything they earlier had produced was recondite or accepting the label of populist sell-outs. The trope of Diller Scofidio + Renfro as the most highly intellectual of architecture studios just on the cusp of popular recognition may long cling to its work, for easily digestible media narratives dissipate more slowly than water vapor. Four years after their earliest sketches of an artificial cloud, Diller and Scofidio had built one, a remarkable feat given the setbacks and obstacles along the way and a reminder that few of their contemporaries in architecture possessed a similar skill set.

Scanning

News about the work of Diller + Scofidio reached New York throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even as most of the activities of the studio during those decades were realized elsewhere. This changed with their 2003 retrospective Scanning: The

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Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, held from March 1 through May 25, 2003, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. For the first time, a comprehensive selection of photographs, renderings, models, and videotapes appeared on display in Manhattan.66 A homecoming of sorts for Diller and Scofidio, the exhibition offered colleagues, friends, clients, students, and the general public an overview of their work, yet minimally engaged the specific spatial and architectural features of the Whitney galleries. Scanning demonstrated, perhaps more than even the architects had anticipated, the difficulty of exhibiting their projects in a museum. Architectural exhibitions are notoriously challenging to organize and often disappoint since even the most evocative renderings, photographs, and models are poor substitutes for the actual built environment. When the work is conceptual and site-dependent, the task may well be impossible. While Travelogues, Master/Slave, and the stereo photographs from The American Lawn capably filled the Whitney galleries, the models, renderings, and videos of Blur and the Slow House did little justice to this earlier work. The exhibit was at its liveliest when Diller and Scofidio were able to initiate new projects, such as the section of dry wall the architects had clandestinely smuggled into the Whitney from the Museum of Modern Art where a painting by Marcel Duchamp once rested against it.67 Organized by Aaron Betsky, then curator of design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and K. Michael Hays, adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney and a professor of architecture at Harvard, Scanning never entirely pleased the architects. Scofidio later conceded that “the only certainty I felt was that the old work felt mummified and the new work needed exposure.”68 Some of this disappointment clearly stemmed from the tension between the architects previously designing and curating their own projects and a clear discomfort in this instance with having their work curated by others. Reactions to the show in the press were generally positive, although a number of critics suggested buildings by the studio received short shrift.69 Together with the visually striking exhibition catalog, the first substantive overview of their work since Flesh, the most compelling legacy of Scanning was Mural, a robotically controlled electric drill that followed a track on the major walls of the subdivided fourth floor, in and out of every gallery. Having allowed the museum to separate the different elements of its practice, the studio then pierced the gallery walls full of holes, so as to provide an auto-critique of its re­trospective and frustrate a cohesive narrative of development about the “body” of its work.70 Except for a rectangular patch of a wall taken from the Museum of Modern Art behind which a work by Duchamp had been exhibited, and where it drilled in an orderly pattern of straight rows, the drill cut one-half-inch holes at random points along the walls. Honeybee Robotics, the engineering subcontractor responsible for Mural, claimed the design was more complicated than that of any of its other projects at the time, the Mars space probe included. Located across from Master/Slave, the robotic drill evoked a cross between a

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robot and a woodpecker. Although it introduced noise and spectacle into the

3.18 Diller + Scofidio, Mural, installation at Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, 2003. Photograph © Michael Moran. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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gallery, Mural was exhibited for too short a period to fully pulverize the walls and realize the “Sam Peckinpah” effect Diller and Scofidio had desired.71 Labor and hardware intensive as Scanning was, it did not travel after the Whitney, despite nearly a year spent by the studio reconstructing and preparing works for the exhibition. It was a major financial loss that established a pattern of spending design fees for temporary installations on fabrication and research, soon to be repeated.

Pure Mi x

Jumping from the Whitney Museum to northern Lapland proved a major challenge in 2004 as the studio realized a project called Pure Mix in Kemi, Finland. A collaboration with sculptor John Roloff installed at The Snow Show, an installation of works by artists and architects including Anish Kapoor, Zaha Hadid, Rachel Whiteread, Tadao Ando, Kiki Smith, and Lawrence Weiner, it returned to a familiar theme in its work: water.72 Predictably, most of the artist/architect teams assembled by curator Lance Fung realized structures of snow architecture: labyrinths, blocks, walls, blobs, and tunnels, through and around which visitors could move. Only a few, such as Kiki Smith and Lebbeus Woods, who realized a skating rink illuminated from below, worked with ice. Technically three dimensional, the project of Roloff/Diller+Scofidio extended down into the sea ice and could only be experienced as a flat surface, an ice-cube tray that visitors could never pry loose. As the architects later described it: The installation .  .  . is sited across from an active paper mill in the dead of winter. A mosaic of frozen designer water implants from international sources is cast into the sea ice .  .  . 81 international waters are temporarily entombed in the sea until the spring thaw when they are returned back to nature. The installation takes on the absurdity of water connoisseurship. Commercial logos are routed into the surface of each frozen specimen. Brooms are available for viewers to sweep away snow accumulation to view the brands.73 Pure Mix is media art, in fact another LED piece, and developed as an exploration of the visibility and light transmissive properties of ice as a medium. One of the studio’s earliest ideas was a “Drive-In Theater with aggressive ice screen .   .   . [within which] synchronized headlights create video projection [and] the spectacle is viewed in the comfort of well-heated automobiles.”74 Cars do not appear in the final version, yet projection through an ice screen does. Picking up on the idea of architecture as regulation of climate investigated in Blur, Pure Mix also explores architecture as destruction profiled by Mural. Like all projects in The Snow Show, it would cease to exist by the spring thaw in April. It featured signage that would melt and whose commingling of waters ironically critiques branding. Diller was particularly fascinated with the idea of the purity 158

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3.19 Diller + Scofidio and John Roloff, Pure Mix, installation at The Snow Show, Kemi, Finland, 2004. Photograph © John Roloff. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

of bottled water and the contamination entailed by introducing foreign fluids into the reservoirs cut out from the surface of the sea. Each one-meter block constructed out of 170 liters of water “cyclically transformed: natural water ‘purified’ by commerce, organized by ethos and sublimated by nature.”75 Geopolitical considerations and fantasies determined the positions of each national water. For example, those from the Middle East flowed into each other. Roloff worked closely with studio members Matthew Johnson and Gaspar Libedinsky. Installing the lighting proved a technical and financial challenge. The studio donated its honorarium in order to purchase the requisite number of LEDs. Once installed, they began to change color in response to the pressure of the water, a serendipitous and unanticipated effect before slowly fading to black.76

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Qu a d r a nt H o u s e , p h a nto m h o u s e , a n d Bo u l d e rs R e s o rt

Working in northern Finland put to rest any possible doubts about the ability of Diller Scofidio + Renfro to design in extreme climates outside of urban environments. If most of their earlier projects had involved cities, this changed in 2005 with the receipt of two commissions over the next four years in a landscape for which until then they had never designed: the American Southwest. Beginning with the Quadrant House in 2005, the architects faced the challenge of building in desert conditions and engaging an arid mountainous landscape in their architecture. Quadrant was a single-family house commissioned by Carl Kopp and Janis Leonard, to be located on the outskirts of Phoenix, with views of both its urban grid and the surrounding Camelback Mountains. Its location at the crossroads of culture and nature provided an inspiration for the program of the house, an uncommonly rigorous treatment of domesticity that hearkens back to the Slow House and to contemporary architecture, such as Rem Koolhaas’s Maison Bordeaux. Like the Slow House, the Quadrant was oriented around a view, in this case, two views, with the flat grid of Phoenix serving as culture to the nature of the mountains and boulders within which the house was wedged. The open disposition of the plan and its division into four programmatically equal components—living room, pool, lawn, and bedroom—functions as both a means of producing a contiguous indoor/outdoor space and provocative juxtapositions. A lawn introduces an element of parody to a design located on a hilly desert site far removed from the suburban domesticity treated in the CCA exhibition. The continuous S-shaped curve of the house that sweeps up from the guest room to form a cantilever over the living room recalls the vocabulary of the Brasserie, and the intent is not altogether different. For here, like in the res3.20 Diller + Scofidio, Quadrant House rendering. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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whose design follows from the vistas it provides. If the Quadrant House had a repressed dimension, it would likely have been the amount of energy it consumed and the costly infrastructure to connect it

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taurant, and in the Kinney Plywood House, the house is a machine for viewing

to the utility grid. Commissioned as a study project by the New York Times and published there on May 20, 2007, the Phantom House, based on a design possibility rejected by Kopp, directly addressed issues of energy and sustainability and once again provocatively set a single-family home in the desert. Collaborating with Atelier 10, the studio postulated a range of energy-saving and generating technologies for “a guilt-free sustainable luxury house that thrives on excess, and the couple, M. and J., who live in it.”77 Explicitly presented as a set of doubles, an indoor house and an outdoor one, it sought to “transform redundancy into efficiency .   .   . so that different household tasks can be performed in or outdoors, depending on the weather. Pleasure and sustainability converge: the inhabitants and the house form a feedback loop in which energy produced in everyday activities can be banked and later used to power home systems, and the house can anticipate the inhabitants’ needs as they move from room to room.”78 At once a summation of the energy-efficient technologies that contemporary architecture today is exploring, the Phantom House contained a strong dose of irony in its close identification of waste with pleasure and depiction of a model couple for whom conservation and sustainability appear the latest lifestyle enhancement. A final unrealized design in their desert trilogy was the 2008 expansion of the Boulders Resort in Scottsdale, whose most striking element is an inclined bleacher in the swimming pool that anticipates the grandstand in front of the final structure of Alice Tully Hall. In its next project, the studio would realize a “viewing machine” in an urban setting where water would, as in the Slow House, significantly impact the design.

ICA

After serving as project leader on the Brasserie renovation and working at length on Blur, Charles Renfro was promoted to partner in 2004, and the studio changed its name to Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston that opened to the public on December 10, 2006, was the first project the studio realized under its new name. Founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art and one of the oldest institutions devoted to contemporary art in the United States (it was the first to exhibit Picasso’s Guernica and works by Georges Braque, Oskar Kokoschka, and Edvard Munch), both the ICA and the New York Museum of Modern Art had their origins in the Harvard University Art Society. The ICA separated from MOMA in 1939 and acquired its current name in 1948. Since then, it changed locations ten times. Further growth was hampered by lack of storage space for a permanent collection, since for thirty-one years it inhab-

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ited Back Bay Police Station No. 16 on Boylston Street, converted by architect Graham Gund into a gallery in 1975. This space was so cramped it forced the ICA to close each time an exhibition was installed. In November 1999, the ICA won the Boston 2000 competition sponsored by Mayor Thomas M. Menino to allow a cultural institution to relocate to the South Boston waterfront. Thanks to this victory and its selection over an opera house and a theater, the museum was able to obtain a ninety-nine-year lease at a rent of one dollar per year on Parcel J, a three-quarters of an acre site on the 21-acre Fan Pier in South Boston. The land was donated to the city by the Pritzker family.79 Owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain and sponsors of the most prestigious award in architecture, the Pritzkers sought to create a cultural destination and planned for a $1 billion hotel, condominium, and office complex in the neighborhood to eventually comprise 650 residential units, 770 hotel rooms, and 107,000 square feet of civic and cultural space. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed in 1997, was doubtless a significant inspiration for this commitment to launch architectural tourism in Boston, a city in which no new museum had been built in nearly a century. The 60,000-square-foot four-story museum outlined by the ICA in the competition brief would have tripled its exhibition area and contained a rooftop sculpture garden, a 125-seat restaurant, a 400-seat theater, and bookstore.80 As a complex that would be open during the day and at night, it was viewed as an ideal magnet for development of Fan Pier, then a sea of parking lots. A key role in the process of selecting an architect for the building was retained by Nicholas Pritzker, who later served as the chair of the architecture committee of the ICA and whose family provided some of the funding for the Parcel J infrastructure. Yet the most significant force behind the construction of the new museum was Jill Medvedow, the director of the ICA, who raised most of the $41 million for constructing the building plus an additional $12 million for its permanent endowment. Medvedow brought in Sarah Goldhagen, architecture critic of the New Republic and then teaching architectural history at Harvard, as a nonvoting consultant to the committee. As Goldhagen later recalled, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and MVDRV were initial possibilities for Medvedow, until she convinced the director to use architects who were just emerging. Goldhagen and Medvedow went to Iceland to look at buildings by the Icelandic Studio Granda, and Medvedow was particularly impressed by their design of the city hall on Reykjavik Harbor. In January 2001, the short list of architects for the building was announced to the public, and on March 24 the four finalists presented their design philosophies before an auditorium of 650 people at Boston’s Copley Theater. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, Studio Granda, Office dA of Boston, and Diller + Scofidio composed the eclectic and hardly obvious group of finalists, whose common denominator was that they were all architects who had not realized buildings in the United States. Only Zumthor had previously designed a museum, the austere

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concrete and glass Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria (1997).

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3.21 Diller + Scofidio, models of Institute of Contemporary Art, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Diller + Scofidio.

Goldhagen recalls Zumthor was the clear frontrunner, and the commission was his to lose. After showing few images in his presentation and appearing arrogant in his discussion of the Berlin Topography of Terror Museum, from which he was fired because of his unwillingness to compromise on a less expensive design, he scared off the trustees.81 Although Diller Scofidio + Renfro had no experience designing museums, it had a larger portfolio than the local firm, Office dA, a better grasp of building in the United States than Studio Granda, and came with imagination and a sensitivity toward contemporary art that impressed Medvedow. Not having any of the funding yet in place, she nonetheless decided to commence building, a brave course of action given the historical lack of support for contemporary art in Boston. Renderings and client presentations that D+S began to produce in the summer of 2001 reveal the finished ICA as the outcome of a negotiation process driven by an extremely tight budget and the need to use space with maximum efficiency.82 The architects outlined the square footage requirements and costs of an ideal building on the 17,000-square-foot footprint of the site. D+S concluded that an optimal ICA would be 106,310 square feet, nearly double the 60,000 square feet allocated, and developed a series of options to reduce the size and expense of the restaurant, theater, exhibition areas, and administrative offices. One “Base Program” scenario proposed eliminating the restaurant and moving the administrative offices offsite. Others subjected the ideal program to 40 percent reductions throughout, or involved moving the theater to upper or middle levels and sacrificing the continuity of the gallery space or its

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c h a pte r th re e 3.22 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2006. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

natural light illumination. Renfro and studio member Deane Simpson produced more than fifty models of possible designs. The four models that the studio presented to the architecture committee of the ICA all featured cantilevers but varied considerably in their boxiness, spikiness, and spatial complexity. D+S proposed a range of alternatives—multiple cantilevers, a hole through the building, and a drawbridge and inlet—which would have broken up a single continuous space and made the museum a greater challenge to program, pushing it in an expressionist direction toward a complicated assemblage of shapes that challenged the more straightforward box eventually decided upon and built. Medvedow had originally hoped for a single continuous gallery space on the ground, an option that proved unfeasible because of the small size of the footprint of the site. By December, the architects had developed an alternate version of the design that found the greatest favor with the architecture committee: the “Tray” design with a cantilevered gallery, which included a double-row escalator in the

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center or at the eastern facade, and two glazed boxes that dropped from the top.

scheme, a space-sharing arrangement reached with the Boston Redevelopment Authority whereby in exchange for widening the 47-mile Harborwalk, the cantilever of the ICA would be allowed to dangle 30 feet beyond the footprint of the

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Renderings of January 28, 2002, introduced the boldest urban element of the

site. The wooden Harborwalk would extend to the building, form a continually 3.23 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Grandstand and Harborwalk of Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2006. Photograph © Nic Lehoux. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

accessible exterior public space, and wrap back over the top. DS+R describes the Harborwalk as metaphorically extended into the new building as primary architectural element. The Harborwalk becomes a pliable wrapper that defines the building’s major public spaces. It folds up from the walkway into a “grandstand” facing the water, it continues through the skin of the building to form a stage, then turns up to form the theater seating, then seamlessly envelopes the theater space, ultimately slipping out through the skin to produce the

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ceiling of the exterior of the public “room.” This ambiguous surface moves from exterior to into interior, transforming public into semi-public space. Above the wrapper sits the “gallery box”: a large exhibition space on one level that dramatically cantilevers over the Harborwalk toward the water.83 Although this solution can be understood as the culmination of a tendency toward “single surface” architecture of the fold evident in the Brasserie and the Eyebeam designs, it is more convincingly interpreted as a response to the challenge of the site and the program. Short of an additional 1,000 square feet required, Scofidio recalled, “We immediately thought, ‘A museum is a building that always wants to turn inward, yet here we are on a site that wants to turn outward. Can we reframe the deal?’”84 Their “Grandstand” that provides a seating area was the outcome of an agreement with the Boston Redevelopment Agency.85 Few visitors to the ICA probably realize the complexity of these negotiations, for the Municipal Harbor Plan Amendment necessitated filing for amendments to the Massachusetts Harbor Plan and the Consolidated Written Determination involving Fan Pier and obtaining a Massachusetts Waterways Act (Chapter 91) license. The final agreement allowed the fourth floor gallery of the ICA to cantilever over the Harborwalk, located the westerly grandstand within a 30-foot setback zone from the shoreline, and reduced the minimum footprint of the building by 500 square feet to 15,000 square feet. Working closely with the Boston Redevelopment Agency and the Boston Harbor Association the ICA developed a plan for the ground floor of the building that would provide the requisite 50 percent public space. Indeed, anyone may walk into the ICA, utilize the restrooms, sit in its lobby, and attend numerous free events on its grounds. Other elements that appeared in this 2002 design and in the built museum include the single gallery space on the top floor, initially provided with sliding walls and an escalator and stairs, later replaced by an elevator and stairs, and the Long Gallery, that later became the Founders Gallery, with mullionless windows. After the mayor visited the building while under construction and pronounced the unimpeded view optimal, Medvedow overruled the architects on the lenticular windows they had designed for the Founders Gallery. Although Diller, always inclined to question vision in architecture, believed “the valve turning on and off the context” was necessary to counter “too much of a good thing,” her client found an unimpeded view of Fan Pier irresistible.86 Canted toward the harbor, the Mediatheque appears in the 2002 design. With its 21' × 9.5' window cutting off the horizon line, it is the most dramatic and finely detailed space in the museum. Five rows of computer monitors slope from the entry doors toward the window. If every project by Diller Scofidio + Renfro contains a core design element about which they are most passionate, this was clearly that space (and the partners’ personal favorite) in the ICA. In a brilliant reversal of the traditional function of the window, the glazing at the terminus of the Mediatheque reduces, rather than expands, visual context. Many first-time

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visitors mistake it for one of the screen savers on the surrounding computers.87

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3.24 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mediatheque of Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2006. Photograph by Jesse Saylor. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Neither the excluded view of the surrounding city, nor the video monitors, nor the water of the harbor imply transcendence. The window does not celebrate urban civilization, technology, or nature and does not conceal its own materiality. Rather than suggest the replacement of reality by the computerized world, an easy postmodernist cliché, the Mediatheque posits architecture as the indispensable meeting point of physical space with virtual reality. Framing a scene and adopting an ironic (“you want water, here it is”) attitude is architectural act and cultural gesture, an assertion of agency in space making. Treating the ICA as a viewing apparatus, “a machine for seeing,” extends to the 166-square-foot glass elevator, in which the visitor can move through the building in section. Compared to many contemporary art museums, the ICA strikes an uncommon balance between generating visual and architectural drama, yet providing a quiet and nondistracting environment in which to view art in its fourth-floor galleries, divided into two rooms of 8,000 square feet of naturally illuminated space. In their presentation during the architectural competition, Diller and Scofidio spoke of trying to design a museum that was neither the

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3.25 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, interior of elevator in Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, with view toward harbor, 2006. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

icon of Gehry’s Bilbao nor the austerely minimum Sammlung Goetz of Herzog & de Meuron (1989–92), but rather was “more of an interface with the art.”88 Groundbreaking for the ICA took place in 2004. The museum opened to the public in December 2006.89 When one considers the absence of ceremonial space in the lobby, the minimal engagement of the building with the street front, and the spartan treatment of interior elements such as the stairway, the ICA is notably less flashy than many contemporary museums. Praise for the building and its contribution to the built environment of Boston came quickly, yet the museum also received mixed marks, paradoxically from critics who believed its galleries competed with the art, or perhaps inevitably given Bostonians’ love affair with their bay, did not sufficiently engage its harbor front location.90 Realized for $41 million, the building confirmed the skill of DS+R at wringing maximum value from a limited budget. Two years after the ICA was completed, in a lecture at the Getty Museum on December 16, 2008, Diller laid out what she thought to be the ideal principles of the contemporary museum: 1

Not play down to the audience it attracts.

2 Embrace the fact that art is only part of the museum’s offerings. 3 Aspire toward inefficiency. 168

4 Distribute unprogrammed space throughout.

6 Be easily rescripted. 7 Neither compete with nor only support the art it houses. 8 Recognize the architecture of the museum does not have to be the center of attention.

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5 Revoke rigid codes of conduct.

9 Accept the museum has a responsibility to new trends in art. 10 Expose the public to new ideas in art. To an admirable extent, the ICA that DS+R built attained these goals. Although the revitalization of Fan Pier remains far from complete and could well prove a casualty of the financial crisis, the studio produced a building with synergy that extended beyond its walls. Resuscitating public discussion of building ambitious contemporary architecture in Boston, the ICA became a successful cultural attraction and revealed that architectural distinction, an imaginative and ambitious private cultural institution, and cooperation among government agencies had transformed the city.91 These lessons would prove relevant to its next project realized on a far larger urban scale.

3.26 Renzo Piano, letter to Ricardo Scofidio on Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2007. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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L i n c o l n C e nte r

“Only in America—or possibly in Russia—could the concept of Lincoln Center have arisen. Only in America—or possibly in Russia—do men dream such grandiose ideas, and having dreamt them bring them to reality. It is, after all, a grandiose idea. Almost ridiculous in its conception. The biggest and most brutish conglomeration to devoted to culture, culture, and still more culture, that the world has ever seen,” noted Clive Barnes in 1968.92 More than an arts complex on the West Side of Manhattan, Lincoln Center was from its inception an ideological enterprise that fused urban renewal, cold war rhetoric, and liberal belief in the potential of music and the performing arts to realize social improvement. Architect Wallace Harrison, instrumental in convincing the Metropolitan Opera to move to the Upper West Side, asserted that the arts center “is a symbol to the world that we so-called monopolistic, imperialistic degenerates are capable of building the greatest cultural center in the world.”93 Even before a single architectural decision about Lincoln Center had been made, it exuded the contradictions of the American century. Emerging in the wake of the federal Housing Act of 1949, the enabling legislation of postwar urban renewal, Lincoln Center was realized through the efforts of Harrison, Robert Moses, and John D. Rockefeller III to induce in the words of the latter “a new kind of city therapy.”94 As the product of three separate decisions— the designation of Lincoln Square between Sixty-Second and Seventieth Streets as an urban renewal area by Moses and Mayor Robert Wagner and the decisions of the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic to build new venues at Lincoln Square—it exceeds even Rockefeller Center in area and cultural ambition.95 The story of Lincoln Center—the displacement of the residents of Lincoln Square, the political machinations and jockeying among its constituent organizations and architects, the transformation of New York’s Upper West Side, and its impact upon the performing arts—remains an object of enduring fascination and debate for architectural and cultural historians. From its centralizing the performing arts in a single campus, to the amalgam of neoclassicism and modernism in its architecture, to the expense of its operations, to its separation from the surrounding neighborhood and eventual gentrification of it, Lincoln Center is still controversial more than fifty years after its founding.96 Its buildings have found few admirers and never entered the canon of modernist masterworks. Yet the popularity of Lincoln Center among audiences and its economic significance to New York are as incontestable as its thorough transformation of cultural life in the city. Although the ICA was comparatively small, it familiarized DS+R with thinking on the scale of a city and negotiating with myriad clients and government agencies, as did work on several urban master plans. In 2003, the studio completed a speculative waterfront park with the Rockwell group that would have been located between the Staten Island Ferry and the Brooklyn Bridge on a land

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parcel cut off from the city by the FDR Drive. This proposal would have extended

grams into its northern and southern ends. A year later, the studio completed a master plan for Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen that sought to augment its southern perimeter and would have added 300,000 square feet of space for cultural

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the grid of the city into the East River and introduced economically viable pro-

and commercial facilities. Few would deny that Lincoln Center remains an urban icon, a key insight for DS+R as it worked on its largest and most complex urban commission and resisted the temptation to remake the campus so that it would be unrecognizable. In February 2003, the studio won the competition for an expansion of West Sixty-Fifth Street into a pedestrian friendly “street of the arts.” The project soon grew to include redesigning the North Plaza of the campus, designing the Lincoln Kirstein Wing of the School of American Ballet in the Rose Building, and the expansion and renovation of Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School of Music, as part of a $1.2 billion redevelopment of the cultural center. Next to the rebuilding of Ground Zero, it is the largest urban redevelopment project in New York City in the early twenty-first century. Competing against Richard Meier, Cooper Robertson and Partners, Santiago Calatrava, and Norman Foster, Diller Scofidio + Renfro acquired a client of daunting bureaucratic complexity and a commission that would consume much of the energy of the studio for the next eight years and boost the number of its employees to sixty by 2006. Twelve organizations (Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Juilliard School, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., Lincoln Center Theater, Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and School of American Ballet) and a roster of city agencies (Department of Cultural Affairs, City Landmarks Commission, and Department of Transportation) participated in the design process. Every decision required the unanimity of all the Lincoln Center organizations. This loose federation created in 1956 to preserve autonomy for artistic constituents immensely complicated large-scale architectural decision making. Diller and Scofidio spent many of their work days between 2003 and 2008 in planning meetings for the project, concurrent with a series of changes in the top management team of the arts center. Much of the final construction took place in a growing economic recession. By a wide magnitude, the conceptualization, design, and construction of the Lincoln Center redevelopment was the largest challenge the studio ever undertook, so much so that explaining its architectural, historical, and urban dimensions to varied constituencies strained conventional expository logic and required the architects to learn how to speak in a multitude of voices. By 2006 Diller had accumulated a large number of PowerPoint lectures that she presented to the constituent groups of Lincoln Center: the community, city government, professional associations, preservationists, and academics. Each emphasized the implications of the proposed DS+R design of greatest interest to a particular audience. On February 1, 2006, she assembled these different strands

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into the most detailed and sustained account of the design then provided by the studio, a lecture she presented at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University entitled “What They Forgot to Teach You in Architecture School.”97 Diller at last was directing the movie she had always wished, for in this lecture that she called “show and tell to the third power” she adopted the role of the narrator and showed herself presenting the design in completely different ways to diverse Lincoln Center stakeholders. The ten design elements of the 1 72

Lincoln Center project became characters with complex histories and person-

and repeating the same fifteen slides for each voice and audience became essential to articulating the issues embedded in the work and addressing them at every level. Her lecture cast new meaning

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alities of interest to specific groups. Speaking in multiple voices

on Giedion’s claim that “only film can make the new architecture intelligible,” for its shifting points of view suggested that the complexity of the urban commission exceeded a single standpoint and could only be presented through the language of cinema, the multiperspective medium par excellence. Initial presentations by DS+R to the constituents of Lincoln Center began with the phrase, “We propose to make Lincoln Center more Lincoln Center than Lincoln Center,” immediately signaling the difference between DS+R and the other firms that sought the commission. After winning the competition, Scofidio conceded that “we may have been the first—and only—architects to tell them that we liked Lincoln Center.   .   .   . Everybody else just wanted to tear it down.”98 Recognizing that replacing it with completely new architecture would impose a different but no less arbitrary starting point suggests an uncommon refusal of the megalomaniacal temptations of the architectural profession. Empowered by the new management team of Lincoln Center, Reynold Levy, president, and Bruce Crawford, chairman, the architects understood their design mandate as one of attracting a younger demographic (as of 2006 the current age of Lincoln Center patrons was sixty-five and climbing), making its architecture more transparent, opening the space to the surrounding community, and creating a cultural destination. Yet Diller had few illusions about the history of Lincoln Center, noting in her Columbia lecture, “Born of a 60s ambition of large-scale urban renewal, the project was too big, too compromised at the hands of too many architects whose strengths were in corporate work.   .   .   . To avoid obsolescence Lincoln Center needs a head to toe makeover.” To city agencies, DS+R emphasized the significance of Lincoln Center as a tourist attraction becoming less attractive with the passage of time and that thus required an identity shift. To residents of 3.27 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, LED riser steps and canopy, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2011. Photograph © Mark Bussell. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

the surrounding community, it proposed making the best qualities of Lincoln Center available in its public spaces that would become as much of a destination as Central Park. To preservationists, Diller proposed retaining the best aspects of Lincoln Center, such as the tranquility of Dan Kiley’s landscaping in North Court, while recognizing the changing needs of its constituents. Comparing Lincoln Center to a living body, Diller urged that it adapt and undergo “a gradation of surgeries from cosmetic, to reconstructive, to life sustaining implants” so as to regain its full health.

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Addressing professional groups, she stated what officials had known since the 1970s, namely, that “Lincoln Center is coming apart” and the time had come “to upgrade its infrastructure, repair its surfaces, expand its facilities, and invent new programming.”99 The scope of the project would require an effort “that dissolves boundaries between urban planning, architecture, landscape, and information design.” Most abstractly, to academic audiences, Diller spoke of wanting “to bring out its repressed desires .   .   . to integrate populations .   .   . to interleave culture with recreation and commerce” and to “accept [that] many simultaneous ideologies may appear mutually exclusive but perhaps can be synthetically combined.” Syncretism and bridging seemingly incompatible urban design philosophies was as crucial to the DS+R vision of the future of Lincoln Center as altering its physical plant. Despite its location at the Sixty-Sixth Street subway station and on several bus lines, arriving at Lincoln Center has always been complicated by the thirteen lanes of traffic formed by the intersection of Broadway and Columbus Avenue. Further confusing patrons, the campus lacked a facade, a buffer from the street, an effective grade change, and what Diller called “a dignified front consistent with other major civic and cultural buildings in New York City” and “a glamorous grand entrance for the theater of arrivals and departures.” To improve this “interface” with the city and “untangle the knot of people and cars,” DS+R designed a curbside drop-off for pedestrians and a submerged porte-cochère. They also created a “transitional zone” with a new stairway of “ethereal monumentality” whose LED risers (in the spirit of the unrealized Chicago MCA Ventilator project) display information about the current performances, dematerialize the stairs, and function as an electronic welcome mat. Diller summarized the fundamental strategy of the DS+R design in the analysis she offered in her lecture on the architectural form of the arts center: Lincoln Center was conceived as an urban acropolis, white and gleaming, raised off the ground on a plinth with classical aspirations. This plinth not only elevated culture to the heavens, it connected the discrete buildings to a common infrastructure below. The plinth’s symbolic function and service function collided at the outer periphery, at alienating opaque walls punctured by garage doors, loading docks, and ventilation louvres. The plinth must now be understood as a street facade that should represent Lincoln Center’s new aspirations of openness and engagement.   .   .   . In the context of a thriving city, the plinth represents the most arrogant form of modernist neoclassicism elevating culture above the street which is left to rot .  .  . The plinth must be retained as a remnant of its time. But it must be pried open for today’s politics of inclusion and accessibility. Undoing “an urban planning miscalculation” that separated the campus from its surroundings necessitated eroding the edges of the plinth and creating more access points. Making over Sixty-Fifth Street was to be nothing less than “displacing the center of gravity from the Fountain Plaza” and “utilizing optical rather

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than physical means” to bridge the north and south parts of the campus. This

Plaza (revealingly, the most radical demolition of the redevelopment involved destroying this generally reviled piece of infrastructure rather than a building), and its replacement by a transparent footbridge. It also involved lowering pedes-

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entailed the demolition of the bridge linking the two campuses, the Millstein

trian traffic to the street, whose width was narrowed and sidewalks expanded, and rerouting vehicular traffic to surrounding streets. A larger stairway with an LED wall provides information about activity within the center and connects SixtyFifth Street to the North Plaza.100 Transforming Sixty-Fifth Street into the new spine of Lincoln Center was the ultimate goal of these designs, whose aspiration to interweave spaces utilizing electronic media suggests earlier DS+R projects such as Eyebeam. Recognizing the failures of the North Plaza, the often empty spaces of Damrosch Park and the reflecting pool, Diller claimed “the de Chirico like sense of absence in the public spaces today can only be construed as a failure. Social fusion and alienation are both characteristic of Lincoln Center modernism but they have gotten out of balance.” Nowhere was this more true than in the tranquility and abstract simplicity of the design of the North Court by landscape architect Dan Kiley. Over the passage of time, the plaza lost its attraction as a public space and became an alienating expanse of hard surfaces. According to Diller, numerous alterations to Kiley’s original design, including the decay of the planters, the replacement of aggregate paving stones, the substitution of London plane trees by pear trees, and the variation of the original pool tile and depth made an effective restoration impossible.101 3.28 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, rendering of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts campus-wide dynamic signage. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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3.30 (below) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Hypar Pavilion with lawn roof and Lincoln Restaurant, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2011. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Attempting to preserve the original design intent of Kiley’s North Plaza, DS+R sought to transform it into a “social condenser” where it would be activated with permanent and temporary programming and joined by a campus green and a destination restaurant, in front of the Lincoln Center Theater (Eero Saarinen,

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3.29 (opposite) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, North Plaza of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Mark Bussell. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

1965).102 In a daring combination of programs, the saddle-form roof of the restaurant with views onto the plaza and sound buffer properties, would be made of grass (evoking the lawn roof in the unrealized 2004 design of the studio for the Lausanne Learning Center).103 The pool would exploit the gradual 18-inch grade change necessitated by waterproofing the site and would be slightly narrowed and lengthened, so as to cause the water to appear to defy gravity and rock half in and out. An underground planter would allow for a continuous bosk of trees reminiscent of Kiley’s original landscape architecture. Emphasizing architectural and urban changes that would connect Lincoln Center to the surrounding neighborhood, DS+R sought to make Lincoln Center “more of a visible presence on the street.”104 This became most architecturally evident in their $159 million renovation of Alice Tully Hall. Pietro Belluschi’s building, shared with the Juilliard School of Music, served as the home of the Chamber Music Society and the New York Film Festival, yet it never functioned effectively as an urban landmark. Visitors often complained about being unable

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3.31 (right) Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Pietro Belluschi, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010/1969. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 3.32 (below) Diller Scofidio + Renfro, interior café and lobby of Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro

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and what Scofidio dubbed “brutalism in drag,” it failed to connect with the surrounding city. Even Lincoln Center official Jane Moss described its sunken interior as a bunker.106 The acoustics inside

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to find it.105 Clad in travertine marble, an amalgam of neoclassicism

the hall struck many, especially performers on stage, as problematic. Alice Tully Hall closed for renovations in April 2007. When it reopened on February 22, 2009, Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with FXFowle provided it with a dramatic new glass entrance on Sixty-Fifth Street, over which a new dance studio in the Juilliard School cantilevered and was visible from the street. Shaped like the prow of a ship, the new facade was as extroverted and inviting to pedestrians as Belluschi’s hall had been introverted and forbidding. A glazed lobby created visual contact with the street. Its interior houses public seating and a café and bar with a 70-foot-long cantilevered bar made of Portuguese Azul Ataija blue limestone. Outside the entrance, an information grandstand displays news about events on video monitors and provides a perch from which to look 3.33 Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Pietro Belluschi, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010/1969. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

into the private function spaces on the second floor. Like the ICA, the renovated Alice Tully Hall constructed a public space where none had previously existed, yet wedged into the corner at Sixty-Fifth Street it proved a far greater design challenge. Newly created glazed walls along the street and on Broadway realized “an architectural striptease” by adding space and transparency to Belluschi’s building—by far the most functionally complex at Lincoln Center—but for DS+R the most internally focused and fortresslike.107 They designed the transitions between the expansion and the original structure so that the joint between them “blurs the moment of its execution,” not to hide their work or deny its newness but rather to elude the impasses of contextual or historicist approaches to preservation.108 Clad in travertine from the same quarry as the original, the expansion introduced a new window pattern on Sixty-Fifth Street that through a process of “morphing” neither imitates nor completely breaks with the older fenestration. Indeterminacy, a key value in the modernism of DS+R, here manifests itself in the rejection of simplistic differentiation between past and present in a building that has been renovated continually since its initial construction. Inside Alice Tully Hall, a single log of Moabi (African pearwood) covers the walls and the ceilings. The architects employed wood veneer joined to resin panels that allowed light to shine through the side walls in warm red tones, the product of a novel fabrication process whose technical perfection nearly derailed the opening concert.109 This shell distributed sound from the stage to the entire house. Two “nose cones,” the geometric conclusion to enveloping

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3.34 Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Pietro Belluschi, interior of Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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existing balconies and boxes within the shell, appear on either side of the proscenium and improved acoustics. Collaboration with the New York City Transit Authority to mount the tracks of express subway trains on vibration-dampening rubber pads further improved the sound quality. Diller observed of the original building that “not only was Tully cut off from the City and had a very, very minor entrance but it really had no identity. So what we did, very simply .   .   . we expanded the space, we encased it in glass and we just put everything on display.”110 Richard Peña, film program director of the New York Film Festival, which holds screenings in Tully Hall, notes, “I think

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro were extraordinarily responsive to our questions, needs and desires. I always found them welcoming in meetings; other architects have always struck me as ‘tolerating’ meetings with people like me, but not DS+R. I don’t think I could love [the renovated Alice Tully Hall] more. People uniformly rave about the comfort and beauty of the hall, and the sound problems for films have been almost completely eliminated. A very good screening space is now an excellent one.”111 If the renovated concert hall became a device for seeing (and listening), it also elicited bodily metaphors to describe the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro,

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beginning with the comparison of the new Sixty-Fifth Street to the “spine” of a renovated Lincoln Center. Architecture critic Nicolai Ourossoff found being in the new hall a womblike experience and praised the architects by noting, “With the precision of surgeons, they cut out ugly tumors and open up clogged arteries.”112 Even Diller claimed that “the re-imagined hall taps into the DNA of Lincoln Center, yet establishes a new design vocabulary that is more democratic in spirit.”113 In an age when genetic engineering, rather than prosthetics or plastic surgery, is the most radical means to transform the body, the new Alice Tully Hall underscores the facility of the architects at splicing the “good genes” of an older modernism into a building responsive to contemporary needs. Twenty years earlier it 3.35 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, School of American Ballet practice rooms, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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is unlikely that Diller and Scofidio would have spoken about DNA in relation to their work and conceded the imperviousness to change implied by the metaphor of architecture as a genetic code. Nor can one easily imagine their projects of the 1980s embracing transparency and curtain walls as architectural solutions. From an initial emphasis on the cultural construction of the built world, they have broadened their view of architecture to acknowledge the history of modernism and working at the scale of the city as sources of freedom no less than constraint.

public, such as the 45,000 square feet of new facilities and 50,000 square feet of renovated spaces that the Juilliard School gained, including a black box theater with the works of Shakespeare on its facade, an orchestra rehearsal space

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Many of the most arresting additions to Lincoln Center are less visible to the

and recording studio, a rare manuscripts reading room, and classrooms and administrative offices. The most ethereal elements of the renovation are the four new ballet practice rooms suspended in the Kirstein Wing of the School of American Ballet, which one student likened to dancing in a “snow ball without the snow.”114 Ballet bars mounted on the windows and the electronically controllable walls that can switch from transparency to opacity delineate an elegantly detailed space, awash with light, of breathtaking serenity and poise.115 Critical responses to the acoustics of Alice Tully Hall and the redevelopment of Lincoln Center generally have been enthusiastic.116 If the transformations disappointed the most ardent admirers of Belluschi and Kiley and hardcore preservationists who envisioned Lincoln Center as frozen in time, the strategies of display and transparency employed by DS+R undoubtedly have proven popular among visitors and made the campus more easily navigable and bestowed it with a new public face, much to the satisfaction of its management. Most of the design ideas proposed by the architects in 2004 were implemented, including the LED risers on Columbus Avenue, which met with initial resistance by the Department of Parks and Recreation and proved the greatest struggle in the approval process. Introducing text and information display on the campus has generated criticism, yet the size of Lincoln Center encourages multiple standpoints, and any visitor can find perspectives that unlock nostalgic memories or promote appreciation of the new architecture, an alternation of views not unlike the effect of a lenticular screen.117 Although Diller often quipped that “small gestures don’t work at Lincoln Center,” the renovation asserts itself without being imposing.118 Tucked into the North Plaza, the hyperbolic paraboloid (Hypar, for short) pavilion opened in 2010 as one of the final elements of the Lincoln Center renovation, an 11,000-square-foot space whose sod roof covers a 7,200-square-foot restaurant, like the High Line a fusion of landscape, architecture, and innovative planting infrastructure.119 Once again, DS+R worked with Valenti, this time designing a fully exposed kitchen that turns the preparation of a meal, rather than entering the space, into theater. The exterior twisting grass canopy provides a view where none before existed, and the building, the first freestanding structure by the studio in Manhattan, can be accessed from the plaza and the widened sidewalks on Sixty-Fifth Street. On the lower level, a 17,500-square-foot addition for the Film Society of Lincoln Center with an interior designed by David Rockwell and the Rockwell Group added two theaters, an amphitheater, and a café. A new footbridge connecting Juilliard to the North Plaza, the final element of the renovation, was completed in 2012. Constrained by poor subway access and its location in an ever more gentrifying Upper West Side, the new Lincoln Center suggests the possibilities and limits

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of cultural monumentality in the twenty-first century. To what extent the architectural strategies of displaying interiors and eroding boundaries can translate into increased ticket sales remains to be seen, even as the renovation appears both a popular and a critical success, a first for buildings that few people previously had truly liked. Lincoln Center has become more popular as a destination, and Alice Tully Hall has attained a new visual presence, achievements all the more remarkable for having been accomplished without any diminution of seriousness or crass commercialization. As the only Manhattan performance facility with a café on the street, Tully has been able to transform its programming and develop festivals that engage audiences in new ways.120 Given the constraints and complex client demands with which DS+R worked, it made the most of the opportunity and infused a New York landmark with its own optimism. Lincoln Center is likely to remain as influential on the design of new public cultural spaces in years to come as the next collaboration of the studio would be on the design of public parks.121

Th e H i g h L i n e

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations (FO; a landscape architecture firm headed by James Corner), and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf won the competition in 2004 for the design of the High Line, a park to be created on the site of an abandoned elevated railroad track that runs from Gansevoort Street in New York’s West Village to Thirty-Fourth Street. Returning to the West Chelsea neighborhood where Eyebeam was to have been constructed, DS+R now confronted the challenge of codesigning a second public space in New York. After winning the Lincoln Center commission, the studio had acquired an unmistakable association with remaking the built environment of contemporary New York. Shifting attitudes toward land use, preservation, gentrification, and architecture refract in the development of the park.122 The earliest strand of this history begins in 1847 when the city of New York authorized the Hudson River Railroad to lay tracks down the West Side of Manhattan to Canal Street. During the 1850s, trains ran day and night between Albany and Lower Manhattan, and a “Westside Cowboy” preceded them in Lower Manhattan, waving a red flag to warn pedestrians. In the 1870s, the railroad posted crossing guards at all intersections. By 1908, public protests grew against the fatal accidents on “Death Avenue,” the name used for parts of Tenth Avenue where the trains ran at grade. The New York Central Railroad and the city agreed to construct an elevated rail corridor from Fifty-Seventh Street to Canal Street and to cover the tracks north of Fifty-Seventh Street, creating a platform for Riverside Park. Delayed by the First World War, the New York City Grade Crossing Elimination Act became law in 1928, and freight lines disappeared from New York City’s 1 84

streets. New York City and the railroad agreed on an exchange of real estate and

of urbanists in separating pedestrian from vehicular traffic) from Canal Street north to Thirtieth Street. In 1929, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) approved a double-track viaduct. From Spuyten Duyvil in the north to its termi-

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easements for an elevated line (a solution that expressed the growing interest

nus at Spring Street, the total length of the railroad tracks was thirteen miles. At a cost then estimated by the New York Times to be $85 million, the elevated rail track opened on June 28, 1934. Citizens and journalists declared it among the greatest public improvements in the history of Manhattan, and it remained actively used up to the early 1960s, although its nickname, the High Line, did not enter common parlance until the 1980s. Freight traffic shifted from rail to truck during the decade, and utilization of the elevated track declined to the point where the city demolished it south of Bank Street. A final train, hauling three boxcars of frozen turkey, traveled on it in 1980.123 To transform unused rail lines into pedestrian or bike trails, Congress passed the National Trails Systems Act in 1983. Through this “rail to trail” legislation, land is banked for future transportation needs and held by a trust manager who may not be sued by former owners. Chelsea resident and railroad car aficionado Peter Obletz purchased the High Line in 1984 for his Westside Rail Development Foundation for ten dollars. Legal challenges by the Chelsea Property Owners Association (CPO), which sought to demolish the elevated viaduct, commenced. That same year, architect Steven Holl proposed a “bridge of houses” above the High Line, and Obletz held a slide show and lecture entitled “The Fight to Save Manhattan’s Forgotten Railroad.” Describing his experience of walking the High Line to a New York Times reporter, he effused, “It was terra incognita up there. Unrestricted space. Unimaginable tranquility.”124 Under pressure from the city and the administration of Mayor Edward Koch, the Interstate Commerce Commission nullified sale of the High Line to Obletz in 1987 (it found that he did not have the resources to run a railroad), and the first activist for the park eventually lost his entire assets in an unsuccessful legal fight against Conrail. The CPO filed a request in 1989 with the ICC to require Conrail, once again owner of the High Line, to involuntarily abandon and demolish it. Community Board 4, through whose jurisdiction it runs, adopted a resolution the following year supporting its preservation, pending a study of further uses. In 1991, the Rockrose Development Company successfully negotiated with the ICC to demolish the five southernmost blocks of the High Line, bringing its terminus to Gansevoort Street. A further request by the CPO for demolition was rebuffed. One year later, the ICC reversed itself and ruled that conditional upon the CPO funding the demolition over the $7 million contributed by Conrail and indemnifying the railroad against future claims, it could demolish the elevated tracks.125 The Promenade Plantée, a three-mile-long elevated midair park, subsequently cited as a precedent for the High Line, opened in Paris in 1998.126 Norfolk Southern and CSX Transportation merged and assumed control of Conrail in 1999. CSX commissioned a Regional Plan Association study entitled “What to

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Do with the High Line?” that recommended converting it for use as a light rail or a greenway. City Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose took issue with these conclusions and stated, “That platform has no right to be there except for transportation, and that use is long gone.   .   .   . This has become the Vietnam of old railroad trestles.” Jerry Gottesman, owner of Edison Parking, a large landholder in the area and a major participant in the CPO, sought permission to build a Federal Express depot on his property at Tenth Avenue and Eighteenth Street.127 Robert Hammond, a San Antonio, Texas, native and Princeton University history major turned writer and public relations consultant, and Joshua David, a freelance writer and editor for magazines such as Gourmet, Fortune, and Travel and Leisure, formed Friends of the High Line in the summer of 1999. Pentagram graphic designer Paula Scher created a logo and graphic identity for the group. Friends of the High Line submitted a proposal to the Design Trust for Public Space, which in turn awarded fellowships to architects Casey Jones and Keller Easterling in 2000 to investigate the conversion of the High Line into public space. Jones published his report as Reclaiming the High Line. Easterling created a website. That same year, the city building department cited CSX for sixty-three violations, including rusted rails and loose concrete. The Design Trust for Public Space held a conference in 2001 on the future of the High Line. Hammond and David commissioned photographer Joel Sternfeld, who previously had documented Roman ruins, to photograph it. Explaining their need to create an image useful for raising funds, they told him, “Give us the money shot.” Sternfeld requested a year of exclusive access to the abandoned rail line and later published his photographs in the New Yorker with an accompanying text by Adam Gopnik.128 His images proved so influential in conveying the beauty of a space that few people had ever visited that Hammond considers him the third cofounder of the project.129 An article on the High Line appeared in the Village Voice and quoted Hammond as saying, “The point is that a public reuse of the High Line could work along with development; it could actually increase property values.”130 On July 26, 2001, the Council of the City of New York passed Resolution 1747 in favor of reutilizing the High Line as a public space. It called upon the mayor, the governor of New York, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to obtain a certificate of interim trail use from the US Surface Transportation Board. Politicians (including Hillary Rodham Clinton), residents, community groups, and design professionals joined in supporting the project. Yet Mayor Rudolph Giuliani continued to side with the CPO and supported demolition of the High Line. All six of the candidates in the mayoral race, including the eventual victor, Michael Bloomberg, favored its preservation. Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, Friends of the High Line, and six neighborhood residents and businesses filed an Article 78 lawsuit claiming that Giuliani illegally by-passed the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) mandated by the city charter, in which significant land use initiatives are reviewed by the city council, the bor-

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ough president, community boards, and the Department of Planning.

filed a certificate of interim trail use request with the US Surface Transportation Board in 2002. A state supreme court justice ruled that the plans to demolish the High Line must undergo an ULURP review.131 The Preservation League of

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Reversing the position of the Giuliani administration, Mayor Bloomberg

New York State placed the High Line and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport on its list of seven artifacts most worth saving in the state, and the High Line obtained a boost from a growing concern with protecting twentieth-century monuments.132 Gallery owner Mary Boone became the first art world figure to support its conversion into a park. Reclaiming the High Line, an exhibition at the Municipal Art Society opened in February 2002. Martha Stewart, Robert A. M. Stern, Sandra Bernhard, and Kevin Bacon emerged as early prominent supporters of its preservation. Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and building stating the position of the Bloomberg administration, opined, “We think the High Line, ultimately converted into a park, will enhance the character of the entire far West Side.”133 Writing in its newsletter, “Money doesn’t grow on trees. And the last time we checked, it wasn’t growing in the weeds of the High Line, either,” the CPO continued to favor demolition.134 In 2003, Friends of the High Line sponsored a competition seeking visionary design proposals for its reuse. It received 720 submissions from thirty-eight countries, including ideas for windmill farms, a lap pool, an aerial tramway, cow pastures, and an amusement park with a Big Apple roller coaster. Gifford Miller, city council speaker (and former Princeton roommate of Hammond) announced that the city would contribute $15.75 million to its reuse. His news coincided with the exhibition of competition entries in Grand Central Station.135 Hammond observed that the High Line “was built to move eggs and butter in and out of the factories in New York City. Now it can be used to move people in and out of the galleries, restaurants, apartments, and offices that those warehouses have become.”136 He estimated its reuse would cost between $40 and $60 million. Deputy Mayor Doctoroff called the park a “critical element” in the revitalization of the West Side, which included the building of a stadium for the 2012 Olympics. To mollify the CPO, the Department of City Planning announced that it would allow land owners under the High Line to sell air rights of up to one million square feet along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues to residential developers.137 The agency created a redevelopment district along Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, between Sixteenth and West Thirtieth Streets, with height and setback provisions to protect open views along the line and preserve the former warehouses converted into galleries.138 City officials estimated that as much as one-quarter of the new housing would be at below-market rates for middle- and low-income residents. Urban historian Kenneth Jackson wrote in the New York Times, which now had warmed to the project, that “the High Line can be another story of the redemption of New York.”139 More critical media coverage also began to appear. Writing in the New York Observer, Choire Sicha mused,

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Is the shiny, enchanting High Line Park hypnotic enough to distract us from judging the city’s plan to install 50 times the number of current dwelling units in the 14 or so blocks of the small West Chelsea district? The High Line, after all, only stretches 1.45 miles. A survey describes it as 30 feet wide, which would make the total park-to-be a mere 5.27 acres. You could accommodate nearly 160 High Lines in Central Park. Even the East Village’s little Tompkins Square Park is nearly double the area.  .  .  . People’s deep attraction to the High Line must, I think, be partly a reaction to the stock sameness of the new constructions, the neighborhoods unfringed, the forlorn empty hype of movie set Manhattan. The High Line is distinguished as refugee and oddity: something special in the air, to coin a phrase.140 Friends of High Line and the New York City Development Corporation in 2004 issued a request for qualifications. They subsequently invited four finalists (Zaha Hadid; Steven Holl; Terra Gram Michael von Valkenburgh Associates with D.I.R.T. Studio and Beyer Blinder Belle; and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, and Piet Oudolf) to submit nonbinding requests for proposals. Robert Hammond claimed, “These design approaches show why the High Line will be this generation’s Central Park.”141 Celebrity architects began in 2005 to receive commissions to design buildings adjacent to the High Line. Andre Balazs hired Polshek Partners to design his Standard Hotel. Edison Properties hired Robert A. M. Stern to design a residential tower between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets. Georgetown Partners hired Frank Gehry to design a building between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. The Surface Transportation Board issued a certificate of interim trail use that allowed the High Line to be removed from the national railway grid. Twobedroom apartments in the Vesta Building at Twenty-Fourth Street and Tenth Avenue placed on the market for between $1.1 and $1.4 million sold out in thirtysix hours.142 Sternfeld evinced nostalgia for the once deserted landscape he had photographed: “Yes, no question about it. I feel really sad. It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was authentic. I wish everyone could have had the experience I had. But you can’t have 14 million people on a ruin.”143 Each of the four finalist teams in the High Line competition presented different visions for the new park. Zaha Hadid offered the most urban design with an elongated pathway that terminated in an elevated observation deck at Gansevoort Street. Michael van Valkenburgh and his Terragram team best preserved the wild character and overgrown of portions of the site in a plan that emphasized the walkway and groves of trees. Steven Holl proposed a plaza of steps leading to the walkway and an elevated security facility that he called “a translucent membrane bridge” at Eighteenth Street.144 The winning proposal by DS+R, FO, and Piet Oudolf “retained the sense of wildness and mystery of the original High Line landscape,” in the words of David and Hammond.145 As Hammond recalls, the selected team grasped that the High Line “wasn’t natural to begin with” and combined playfulness with “a design that could actually work.”146 Asked by Vishaan Chakrabarti, then director of the Manhattan

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office of the Department of City Planning, whether he wanted the High Line to be

collaboration would best realize the latter goal.147 For the next five years, DS+R worked closely with James Corner, Field Operations, and Piet Oudolf. Building on the fundamental experience of perceiving the surrounding city

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really good or really spectacular, Hammond concluded that a FO/DS+R/Oudolf

anew from 29 feet above street level, the designers sought to challenge definitions of nature. At the heart of their scheme is the “Agri-Tecture” system of precast concrete planks, the product of five years of research, that composes its walkway. Flexibly arrangeable in comblike configurations ranging from full paving to full vegetation, the planks with open joints and tapered edges and seams were intended, in Corner’s words, to promote “strolling ‘within’ and ‘amongst’ rather than distanced from” plant life.148 They also provided a cost effective design solution, and in the end the remediation of the site, rather than architecture, proved the major expense in realizing the park. Much as Blur sought to offer an alternative to the fixation of contemporary culture on visual acuity, the High Line was conceived by the design team “to decelerate the visitors’ urban pace.” In the words of Scofidio, “The Hudson River Park is a fast park. We envision this as a slow park.”149 Corner coined the slogan, “Keep it simple, keep it wild, keep it quiet, keep it slow.”150 Promoted by images such as Sternfeld’s photographs and the informative Friends of the High Line website, the experience of the space is notably low-tech and resistant to encapsulation in a single iconic image or viewpoint. Speed reduction begins with the Slow Stair at Gansevoort Plaza that distends the climb to the park and accentuates its distance from the street. Numerous terraces and seating alcoves encourage lingering and sitting, particularly the Sundeck Preserve between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets, equipped with moveable chaise lounges. Initially, it was not clear whether the High Line was the jurisdiction of the Department of City Planning, the Department of Transportation, or the Department of Building. Obtaining consensus among the clients, the Friends of the High Line, the Economic Development Corporation, the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Office of the Mayor occupied much of the time of the design team. At one point the Department of Transportation insisted upon constructing an eight-foot-high fence at every street crossing, as was standard practice for other elevated walkways or bridges over roadways. By claiming ownership and assuming liability, the city of New York prevented this outcome that clearly would have changed the character of the park. At the Gansevoort lookout point, a glass wall demarcates the beginning of the High Line. Evoking other DS+R windows, such as that in the ICA Mediatheque, it sets up a contrast between the promise of a frame and the relatively banal sight actually visible through the glass. Once again, transparency places what we see in quotation marks. Our expectations and the position of the wall/window (two functions merged) contribute to the meaning of the scene, within which visitors are participants and observers, seers and seen. This is also true of the Tenth Avenue Overlook and Square, a sunken plaza with steps leading to a glazed wall that frames a view of traffic heading north.151

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3.36 Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, High Line, Gansevoort Plaza and Lookout Points, New York City, 2009. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

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c h a pte r th re e 3.37 Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Tenth Avenue Square, High Line, New York City, 2009. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

It has become a popular spot for visitors to the High Line to photograph themselves and transforms the back wall of its amphitheater-like space into a proscenium facing a visually drab view of parking lots and low rise buildings, what West Chelsea looked like before the arrival of the High Line, yet it is neither celebratory nor elegiac. Are visitors here members of an audience gazing upon the city, or are they viewed as if under a magnifying glass? One can interpret the square either way. Like the Gansevoort lookout point, it marks a cut in the rail line that reveals structure and presents at street level an architectural sectionlike view of people above, much as the I beams become visible to viewers at the southern terminus of the park. The predilection of DS+R to create multiple positions in space enabling multiple points of view, as if to capture the act of seeing itself, has seldom been utilized to better effect. Revealing form through transparency found a correlate in the concerted effort of the design team to preserve the north-south sight lines, linear orientation, typical railings, and the industrial presence of the High Line. If the materi-

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ality and structure on display evoke the vocabulary of 1960s minimalist and con-

the park has nevertheless struck some commentators as an exercise in nostalgia, an industrial sublime ruin for a deindustrialized New York.152 Yet this judgment fails to recognize the kinetic aspirations of the architects: “The design creates

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ceptual art, the railroad tie or gravel projects of Carl Andre or Robert Smithson,

a sequence of varied environments within a cohesive and singular landscape. Access points are planned approximately every two blocks .   .   . for meandering unscripted movement.”153 It is fruitful to approach the High Line as analogous to a film composed of improvised scenes edited together in a loosely organized sequence. Although linear, it lacks a single defining image or story line and contains multiple points of entry and exit. Visitors select their trajectories and destinations, yet their experience is nonetheless cohesive. “Driven by images” whose editing and assimilation the park minimally prescripts, the High Line is a viable alternative to the more organized spaces of leisure and consumption in the contemporary city.154 If there is a paradox in the project, it resides in designing spaces to encourage new uses and generate surprise, a ludic agenda that evokes the tensions between architecture and spontaneity explored in the New Babylon (1959–74) by Constant Nieuwenhuys.155 Though not radically contesting property and social relations as did the unrealized designs of the Dutch architect, the High Line can be enjoyed here and now, a reminder that tangible urban improvements remain possible in an imperfect world and in a prosaic cityscape. This sense of possibility undoubtedly explains the enormous symbolic value the park has attained and the growth of the Friends of the High Line. Positive reviews of Section 1 of the High Line, which runs from Gansevoort to Twentieth Street and opened to the public in June 2009, and the sheer popularity of the park, which attracted two million visitors in 2010, suggest it has been a runaway success with critics and the public, as well as a motor for economic growth in the neighborhood.156 Fears that the agreement the city struck with property owners along the site in exchange for easements granting access to the property would lead to massive overbuilding have not proven justified.157 Undeniably gentrified and transformed into a major tourist destination, the High Line welcomes crowds as diverse as any in Manhattan, and though surrounded by upscale shops and restaurants, it contains little, if anything, to buy. The park was another clear triumph for the Bloomberg administration that also did much to facilitate redevelopment at Lincoln Center. Although a few spectacular elements, such as a Fourteenth Street wetland, exceeded budget limitations, DS+R, FO, and Oudolf realized most of the features contained in their original designs.158 Unlike Ground Zero a mile to the south, the High Line does not evoke contentious issues of collective identity and memory, nor did its construction displace neighborhood residents, factors that probably aided its realization and success. If the park constructed a brand as well as a physical infrastructure, few would deny that it exceeded the high expectations it generated, an uncommon occurrence in the often hyped world of architecture.159 Section 2 of the High Line,

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3.38 Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, High Line, New York City, Sundeck Preserve, 2009. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

from Twentieth to Thirtieth Streets, opened in June 2011. Among its dramatic features are the Flyover, which allows visitors to walk at the level of tree tops, and the Thirtieth Street Cut-Out, which exposes the supporting steel structure. On July 29, 2010, the city voted to authorize acquisition of the land for Section 3, at the West Side Rail Yards, between Thirtieth and Thirty-Fourth Streets, 30 percent of its total length.

Alongside large public projects such as the High Line, DS+R continues to produce smaller pieces for temporary installations, and during the summer of

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A r bo r e s L a eta e a n d I n sta l l ati o n W o r k

2008 it exhibited three of them in Europe. At the Liverpool Art Biennial, Arbores Laetae (Joyful Trees) opened on August 20, 2008. Located at the intersection of Parliament and Great George Streets, the small grove of seventeen hornbeam trees planted in a grid likely escaped the attention of many visitors. Those who paid more careful attention saw three trees slowly rotating on axis thanks to an elaborately constructed turntable system the architects developed with Arup engineering. At once recalling the unrealized experiments for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, if not the menacing quiet of Hyde Park in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1967), the effect was startling. Scofidio observed that trees in poems are beautiful objects, but they are also things that tap on your window at night and in many fairy stories are quite evil and dangerous. But these trees are like people. It’s nice being up here with them and they change your view and perception of the world. The other day when I arrived I was walking on the sidewalk and the tree was following me as I was walking along—it was quite strange. If you stand and look at the tree and the world starts spinning around you—it can be very disturbing.160 If Arbores Laetae evoked the rich tradition of the uncanny and anthropomorphism in stories by ETA Hoffmann and expressionist film, it also demonstrated the willingness of DS+R to introduce sophisticated technology into an untraditional setting and thus expand the definition of the park in the twenty-first century, as did the High Line. Hapless visitors pressed the button for the emergency brake and stopped the rotation of the trees. The architects redesigned it. Liverpool officials so admired the installation they agreed to maintain it until 2011 and are considering moving it to another location. Innovative digital technology made up the installation Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? in the exhibition YouPrison. Reflections on the Limitation of Freedom and Space, curated by Francesco Bonami at the Fondation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, and on view from June 12 to October 12, 2008.161 Originally envisioned as an opportunity for architects to ponder the future of the prison cell, the exhibition included works by Atelier Bow Wow, Bernard Khoury, Jeffrey Inaba, and Eyal + Ines Weizman, who utilized it as an opportunity to meditate on the nature of confinement and contemporary space. DS+R produced a touch-screen kiosk mounted on a rod and navigable to the right and left. A menu of ten different offenses ranging in severity from crimes against humanity to civil disobedience composed one dimension of their combinatory. Along three other axes of selection, opaque to transparent, hard to soft, and dumb to smart, the visitor could design his or her ideal carceral space. A prison cell could be completely dark, transparent, hard as a boulder, spongy, cut off from the external world, completely permeated by news and information, or

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c h a pte r th re e 3.39 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Arbores Laetae, Liverpool Biennial, 2008. Photograph © 2008 Jon Barraclough/Liverpool Biennial. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

any combination of these attributes. The installation software tallied choices and enabled the calculation of the median prison cell based on visitor preferences. Revealingly, each crime possessed an identical range of punishments, a suggestion that solitude, illumination, surface, and access to information constitute limit conditions for the body.162 In 2008, the studio produced two media installations for European cultural institutions that explored questions of globalization. Native Land: Stop Eject, a collaboration with Paul Virilio and French documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon, was on view at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris from November 21, 2008, through March 15, 2009.163 A film by Depardon, Hear Them Speak, and a video installation, Around the World in 14 Days (the former an investigation of endangered peoples in Chile, Ethiopia, France, and Bolivia, the latter a record of seven global metropoles), confronted visitors to the ground floor galleries with images of rural and urban space. DS+R collaborated with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin on designing Virilio’s contribution to the exhibition, installed on the lower level of the Cartier. Exits: Part 1 comprised forty-eight monitors suspended from the ceiling presenting news footage of global migration, parallel to a video of Virilio 1 96

welcoming visitors to the exhibition and explaining what they were seeing. Exits:

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3.40 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, rendering of Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? installation in YouPrison. Reflections on the Limitation of Freedom and Space exhibition, Foundation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, 2008. Reproduced by permission of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Part 2 was an immersive circular projection of maps, texts, and human trajectories of the political, economic, and environmental consequences of global migration. Most striking about this display of four animated maps with barely any text was its transformation of statistics about the flows of capital and refugees across national boundaries into a compelling visual narrative, as if updating 1950s Eames media projections, data illustrations by Otto Neurath, and the investigation of forensic evidence in Case # 00-17164/003841983. Representing the unrepresentable, a challenge that the studio embraced during the 1980s in relation to its projects exploring vision and culture, now involved making visible the dynamics of the world system. By assembling geocoded data sets that were usually separated, scrupulously evaluating their validity and citing their sources, utilizing this information to represent the actual movement of people, and taking the pixel as an irreducible unit of measure, the installation suggested the often-maligned database could serve a benign function, much as earlier projects by DS+R questioned clichés about surveillance technologies and the exercise of power. Their installation also challenged the technophobic thinking of Virilio. With an audience of mostly young people crowded at the center of its circular walls, around which images revolved, Exits: Part 2 suggested itself as a legitimate heir to the legacy of “whole earth” thinking, a big picture of and for its age.164 Diller Scofidio + Renfro consider it one of their best projects, and in its fusion of architecture, media, and research into representation, the concerns of the studio attain potent expression. In Chain City, on display at the 2009 Venice Architecture Biennial, the architects projected images of Venice filmed from a moving gondola on dual screens. Commentaries by three separate gondoliers (written by Douglas Cooper) accom-

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panied the images, which included scenes of the artificial Venices created in Las Vegas and Macau. Despite the regional differences each narrator evoked, ecological cycles and global tourism emerge as common themes in their accounts. Although Venice is a chain city, cloned and exported around the world like any other commodity, local conditions shape each of its instantiations. It was possible to watch the video without mourning the loss of a “real” Venice or celebrating its dissolution into images, even as one might question the simulation of cities in the age of postmodernism. Visitors obtained an enhanced understanding of the impacts of globalization on the ground as the installation pushed them to reach their own conclusions.

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Conclusion Diller and Scofidio quietly entered the fourth decade of their practice in 2009 without public celebration or a single news item in the press. When I suggested to Diller that a symposium or event be organized to commemorate this anniversary, she evinced little interest in revisiting the past. A moment in the spotlight and a chance to discuss the history of the studio mattered less to her, Scofidio, and Renfro than working on new projects without distractions. By the time I completed this book in the summer of 2011, DS+R were designing museums in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, and Berkeley and facilities for the art history department at Stanford and the medical school and business school at Columbia. The studio had survived the economic downturn of 2008 and was enjoying the success of Lincoln Center, the High Line, and a classroom building at Brown. Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro traveled constantly, at one point commuting between competitions in Western Australia and Brazil. Eighty-five employees were now on staff. Coverage of the studio in the media had become ubiquitous, and more commissions for international projects seemed imminent. Corporate architectural practice with its connotations of blandness, homogeneity, and predictable designs remains the negative role model against which DS+R continues to measure its activity, the structure its principals assiduously resist through an obsessive involvement with all phases of their architecture. It is a

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demanding and invariably exhausting mode of practice whose secret may have been neatly summed up by Mark Wigley when he suggested to Douglas Cooper that his friends “simply work harder than anyone you have ever met.”1 Finding and retaining talented young architects willing to match this intensity is perhaps the greatest challenge the studio now confronts. Being able to choose among projects has allowed it to define its own agenda, yet in so far as they remain committed to advancing the language of architecture, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro will always be their own most challenging clients. Having already designed museums, cultural facilities, public spaces, and restaurants, the studio now confronts its own history when clients commission these programs. Its record of not repeating itself and consistently proposing original solutions remains impressive and one with which only a handful of contemporary studios—Office of Metropolitan Architecture and Herzog & de Meuron—compete. Working on large buildings in the age of value engineering protocols that typically assign cost reductions greater weight than aesthetic considerations remains a formidable challenge for architects deeply committed to realizing thoughtful designs. Negotiating contracts, haggling over the square footage costs that determine whether a building can be more architectural than a generic “vanilla box,” and ascertaining how not to lose money on conceptually and materially innovative projects today consume more of the working energy of Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro than they did in the past, not always to their liking. Personal dedication and the size of the studio—still far smaller than global firms such as Gensler; Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum; and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill—only partially explain its success. Understanding architecture as a multidisciplinary endeavor has doubtlessly enriched the work of DS+R, brought it to the attention of a large public, and positioned it ahead of the cultural curve. While many of their colleagues during the 1980s and 1990s advanced theories of architectural autonomy or stylistic pastiche, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro investigated culture and the body in site-specific built forms constructed to scale in three-dimensional space. Driven by ideas, their work has never disappeared into cyberspace, become mired in style wars, or remained confined to paper. It has, however, always explored vision, for which reason it seems likely to maintain its purchase on a civilization whose obsessions with sight intensify daily. An ethical stance also remains central to DS+R, a sense of responsibility and a recognition of the stakes of building and intervening in space. At a moment when American society is deeply polarized about the status of images, fascinated by reality television and the Internet, or alternately prepared to identify visual representations, especially moving images, with manipulation, Diller Scofidio + Renfro refuse to conflate photography or video with truth or falsity, a position that redounds to their integrity. If DS+R is more sanguine about the possibilities of images than many critics of contemporary culture, a nuanced consciousness of agency nonetheless suffuses its work. Addressing her Princeton students in a course syllabus, Diller

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formulated the questions that she, Scofidio, and Renfro daily confront in their

greater extent than many architects, they have resisted the temptation to reply with a unified theory of their activity. Their ability to entertain and synthesize contradictory ideas and aspirations remains unusual. Modernism, mass cul-

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practice: “In what language could architecture speak? In whose voice?”2 To a

ture, fine art, technology, academic discourses, history, populism, avant-garde aesthetics, and an appreciation of craft coexist in the thinking manifest in their work. Making architecture that facilitates multiple viewpoints comes naturally to practitioners whose comfort with complexity exceeds that of most people. Not surprisingly, they are excellent listeners, and Jane Moss attributes their achievement at Lincoln Center to their lack of egomania and collaborative orientation.3 Clients praise the responsiveness of the studio and its genuine concern with designing imaginative solutions to their needs. Inventing a practice that understands working for others as a mode of engaging their own intellectual and cultural curiosity may well be the most significant design achievement of DS+R, a unity of commitment rather than style that permeates its activities. Writing of architectural modernity in the contemporary world, Anthony Vidler imagines “an approach to history that refuses closure and finalism .   .   . where disruptions from outside the field inconveniently questioned the verities of established practices; where the very forms in which we conceive of history itself have been put into question.”4 To a remarkable extent, Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro make good on this demand. They estrange the present by magnifying its contradictions, questioning its certainties, and discerning its opportunities. At a moment of economic contraction and political indecision, they insist on the value of thoughtful architecture and a robust public realm. If they cannot reverse the saturation of the built environment today by shoddiness and generic solutions, they have been able to design on a consistently high level and challenge complacency, resisting mediocrity and crassness and bridging the gap between experimental and popular culture with rare success. Pluckiness, a knack for enhancing the texture of the ordinary, and a commitment to an architecture that is playful yet dignified reinforce each other in the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a reminder that individuals and societies may choose to exercise more intelligence and imagination rather than less. What could be a greater gift than that?

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Acknowledgments Writing this book over the course of nearly a decade, I have incurred many debts, none greater than to Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro, who patiently answered countless queries, directed me toward sources, provided unrestricted access to their archives, and extended hospitality to me in their studio, where I conducted much of my research. Their friendship, generosity with their time, and trust in my ability to tell their story encouraged me on good days and buoyed my spirits when the going got tough. Having read the manuscript and corrected factual errors, they did not attempt to influence my interpretations, yet another instance of the integrity that permeates their work. DS+R studio members David Allin, Jhaelen Eli, Matthew Johnson, Laurel Lange, Jeremy Linzee, Philip Nuxoll, and Kevin Rice responded to questions and provided leads, as did their former colleagues Raphael Berkowitz, Rebecca Blakeley, Nicholas De Monchaux, Denise Fasanello, Reto Geiser, Dirk Hebel, Astrid Lepka, Paul Lewis, Gaspar Libedinsky, Ben Mickus, Amanda Penacchia, Lyn Rice, Deane Simpson, Eamon Tobin, Mark Wasiuta, and Victor Wong. Hervé de Chandès, Rolf Fehlbaum, Wendy Feuer, Lance Fung, Robert Hammond, Phyllis Lambert, Jill Manton, Jill Medvedow, Jane Moss, Richard Peña, Mary Rubin, Ilana Shamoon, Tom Tschoff, Nick Valenti, and Anne Wrinkle shared their perspectives as clients of the studio and sharpened my understanding of its

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working methods. Collaborators and colleagues of the architects, Stan Allen, Alan Burden, Marty Chakfin, Walter Chatham, Douglas Cooper, Thomas Fisher, Dan Gillham, Alexander Gorlin, Marianne Gray, Mark Hansen, Christine Hawley, Christian Hubert, Jim Holl, Kevin Kennon, Laura Kurgan, Sylvia Lavin, Vivien Li, Greg Lynn, Matthew Maguire, Robert McAnulty, Richard McGuinness, Mary McLeod, William Menking, Keith Mitnick, Susan Mosakowski, Joan Ockman, John Roloff, Alessandra Ponte, Anson Rabinbach, Stuart Romm, Ben Rubin, Kaylynn Sullivan, Lisa Switkin, Georges Teyssot, Carroll Todd, Michael Webb, Tod Williams, Lebbeus Woods, and Mel Ziegler, recounted their experiences of working with and near Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro. Former Cooper or Princeton students Richard Chandler, Paul Lewis, Jürgen Mayer, Alysa Nahmias, Garrett Ricciardi, Mark West, and Tamar Zinguer helped me to appreciate Diller and Scofidio as gifted teachers and to comprehend the synergy between their pedagogical activities and professional practice. For information and expertise, access to research materials, or arranging visits to buildings and exhibitions by the studio, I am grateful to Nicholas Baume, Giovanna Borasi, Irene Calderoni, Sorcha Carey, Mary Chou, Vuslat Demirkoparan, Dominic Espinosa, Douglas Fogle, Devin Fore, Sylvie Gilbert, Sarah Goldhagen, Gloria Gottschalk, Claudia Gould, Renata Gutman, Steven Hillyer, Koji Imanishi, Jeffrey Inaba, Natalia Lebedinskain, Elise Liftin, Doug Mandart, Jill Manton, Nicholas Olsberg, Cynthia Nelson, Tracey Perkins, Benjamin Prosky, Jeannene Przyblyski, Mary Rubin, Annis Whitlow, and Mirko Zardini. Karen Severns and Koichi Mori gracefully and efficiently translated texts from Japanese. At a moment when jackhammers next door threatened to derail my writing schedule, Esther Yau arranged for access to the serene Mary Norton Clapp Library of Occidental College. Outside evaluations obtained by the University of Chicago Press and a report by a member of its editorial committee offered advice that improved the manuscript. So did readings by Catherine Benamou, Robert Bruegmann, Keller Easterling, Ellen Grimes, Nicholas Olsberg, Dana Polan, Jed Rasula, and Anthony Vidler. Liz Kotz provided invaluable suggestions at a crucial moment. Invitations to speak at the American Academy in Berlin; the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; the Berlage Institute; the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Dessau Institute of Architecture/Bauhaus; the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin; the Oslo National Academy of the Arts; the University of Buenos Aires; University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Cologne; the University of Illinois, Chicago; the University of Manitoba; the University of Michigan; and the University of Montreal allowed key arguments in the book to obtain public hearings. Archivists, librarians, and staff at the Banff Centre, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art–University of Pennsylvania, the Museum of Modern Art, the Princeton

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University School of Architecture, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the San

rials. DS+R has been served well by the gifted photographers who have documented its work. I am grateful to them, to institutional copyright holders, and to the studio for permission to reproduce the images in this book. Numerous friends and colleagues have discussed the work of DS+R with me, listened to my ideas about it, and invigorated my life during this project

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Jose Arts Commission, and SITE Sante Fe generously provided access to mate-

by their clarity, their encouragement, and their own passions and commitments. They include Omar Ackbar, Alexander Alberro, Rachel Allen, Stan Allen, Nora Alter, Fred Amrine, Mauricio Ambiano, Marc Angélil, Emily Apter, Douglas Armato, Dana Arnold, Hilary Ballon, Mirjam Beck, Selma Becker, Barry Bergdoll, Catherine Benamou, Matthew Biro, Oliver Botar, M. Christine Boyer, Giuliana Bruno, Synne Bull, Stuart Burrows, John Cartwright, Edward Casey, Michelle Clayton, Beatriz Colomina, Caroline Constant, Margaret Crawford, Arthur Danto, Martina Dase, Penelope Dean, Thomas Demand, Wim de Wit, Keller Easterling, Stephanie Emerson, Philip Ethington, Robert Fishman, Kenneth Frampton, Penelope Dean, Salomon Frausto, Ursula Frohne, Coco Fusco, John Ganim, William Germano, Sarah Goldhagen, Maria Gough, Tom Gunning, Anthony Heilbut, Daniel Herwitz, Thomas Hines, Max Hirsch, Barbara Hoidn, Alexander Horwath, Alfred Jacobi, Martin Jay, Mark Jarzombek, Anton Kaes, John Kaliski, Leandro Katz, Thomas Keenan, Douglas Kelbaugh, Jeffrey Kipnis, Kent Kleinman, Gertrud Koch, Lauren Kogod, Sanford Kwinter, Phyllis Lambert, Sylvia Lavin, Liane Lefaivre, Lars Lerup, David Levin, Robert Levit, Greg Lynn, Pieter Martin, Reinhold Martin, Irwin Maus, Anna McCarthy, Dragan Miletic, Vedran Mimica, Christopher Mount, Helmut Mueller-Sievers, Eric Mumford, Dietrich Neumann, Nicholas Olsberg, Wendy Owens, Marit Paasche, Marjorie Perloff, Alessandra Ponte, Dana Polan, Alex Potts, Leah Pressman, Timothy Pylko, Dominic Power, Eric Rentschler, Howard Rodman, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jeffrey Schnapp, Jeff Schwartz, Vanessa Schwartz, Allan Sekula, Howard Shubert, Chas Sidipus, Richard Sieburth, Amy Sillman, Johanne Sloan, David Smiley, Terry Smith, Robert Somol, Michael Sorkin, Scott Spector, Sally Stein, Ralph Stern, Sharon Sterne, Noa Steimatsky, Will Straw, Georges Teyssot, Roscoe Tinsky, Nancy Troy, William Uricchio, Philip Ursprung, Roemer van Toorn, Anthony Vidler, Johannes von Moltke, Wilfried Wang, Mark West, Mark Wigley, Lorraine Wild, Mary Woods, and Sharon Zukin. Ernest Callenbach, Anne Friedberg, David Frisby, Miriam Hansen, Ralph Lerner, and Detlef Mertins, to whom I would have liked to present this book, animated my thinking and live on in my memory. Annette Michelson and Hayden White, mentors whose example I strive to emulate, are never far from my thoughts. Mitzi, Nutmeg, and Jake meowed, chirped, and trilled as I typed. Members of the FlashPoints book series editorial board, Ali Behdad, Judith Butler, Michelle Clayton, Catherine Gallagher, Nouri Gana, Susan Gillman, Jody Greene, and Richard Terdiman, make me proud to collaborate with them. After the University of California Press ceased publishing books in literary studies, Louis Warren and Mary Ann Smart, then chair and co-chair of the Press Faculty

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Editorial Committee, reminded me how the system of shared governance of the University of California and solidarity among its faculty matter more than ever if public higher education and scholarly publishing are to resist the siren calls of the free market. Henry Carrigan of Northwestern University Press will always enjoy my gratitude for giving FlashPoints a second life. While on the road, I enjoyed the hospitality of Anya, Sophy, and Steve Graubard and Elizabeth Knoll; Anton and Christine Kaes; Allen and Arianne Kassof; Richard Terdiman; and Stephen and Victoria Wegg-Prosser. In my academic home, the congenial Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, Chair Victoria Johnson facilitated my research, and Elizabeth Pace and Eva Yonas kindly processed reproduction fee payments. Awards from the UCI School of Humanities Research and Travel fund and the International Center for Writing and Translation enabled me to visit projects in Gifu, Liverpool, Turin, and Venice. The UCI Humanities Collective provided a publication subvention. Early in my investigations, a travel grant from the Taubman College of Architecture at the University of Michigan, facilitated by Melissa Harris and Tom Buresh, let me visit Yverdon-les-Bains. A grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, launched this study. Invitations from Garrett White and K. Michael Hays to contribute an essay to the catalog accompanying the first retrospective of work by Diller and Scofidio held at the Whitney Museum of American Art and from Kurt Forster to write for the Venice Architecture Biennial catalog convinced me to persevere. The University of California President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities allowed me to finish this book during a sabbatical. Much of it was written in the paradise for scholars that is the American Academy in Berlin. I thank its director Gary Smith, its librarian Yolande Korb, and press officer Malte Mau, who put me in contact with Kaye Geipel, editor of Bauwelt, who published my article on the High Line. I have learned a great deal from previous scholars, critics, and curators who have written on the studio or exhibited its work and wish to acknowledge the formative contributions of Richard Anderson, George Baird, Beatriz Colomina, Mildred Friedman, Kenneth Frampton, Lance Fung, K. Michael Hays, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin, Helen Malkin, Reinhold Martin, Robert McAnulty, Thomas McDonough, Matilda McQuaid, Don Meckley, Herbert Muschamp, Nicholas Olsberg, Patricia Phillips, Felicity Scott, Georges Teyssot, Henry Urbach, Anthony Vidler, Lynne Warren, Mark Wigley, and Sarah Whiting. Susan Bielstein of the University of Chicago Press has been everything a great editor should be and more. Her high standards, unstinting support, and wisdom about publishing and much else besides guided and inspired me. Anthony Burton expertly saw the manuscript through the review and production processes. Mark Reschke sensitively edited the typescript and made it better. Carrie Adams energetically devised the marketing and promotion plan for the book. Isaac Tobin realized a design as nuanced and playful as the architecture of Diller

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Every author should be so lucky as to work with a team of publishing professionals as nimble as this one. Anita Dimendberg provided the love only the best mother can and affably goaded me to finish the manuscript. I would not have done as well without her. My sister Deborah November and her husband, Michael November, let me

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Scofidio + Renfro. Rosine Busse and Stephanie Emerson proofread the galleys.

introduce my nieces, Hannah and Pauline November, to the High Line, and my nephew, Adam November, to the Whitney show of the studio. Lynne Berman, wife, dynamo, and post office impresario, whose aesthetic judgments I cherish and learn from, lived with me as I worked on this study and furnished our shared life with love and joy. I dedicate this book to her. Although I cannot imagine friends, scholars, and colleagues more perceptive than those who have helped me, I alone am responsible for any errors or limitations in the final product.

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4

Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Reinforced Concrete,trans. J. Duncan Barry (Los Angeles: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 176. Charles Renfro began to work with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in 1997. In 2004, he became their partner, at which point the studio name changed to “Diller Scofidio + Renfro.” I use “Diller + Scofidio” to refer to the studio with two principals. “Diller and Scofidio” indicates the two architects. Generally, I employ “Diller Scofidio + Renfro” or the acronym DS+R to designate work realized by the firm with three principals or a general approach to architecture linking the history of the studio before the arrival of Renfro to its present activities. These distinctions are not hard and fast, and do not address the contributions of many other members of the studio. Whenever possible, I name team leaders or particularly significant contributors to a project, yet a certain measure of imprecision is unavoidable. Researching the history of this group of architects poses challenges to the historian, for they did not consistently maintain records or images of their projects. They often drew by hand, and not all of these original renderings exist today. More recent software-produced designs also did not always survive. Richard Evans, “The Wonderfulness of Us (the Tory Interpretation of History),” London Review of Books, March 17, 2011, 12. Among the critical treatments of visual art projects by the architects are Hal Foster, “Architecture-Eye,” Artforum (February 2007), 246–53; Scott Rothkopf, “Diller + Scofidio,” Artforum 41, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 180; Jerry Saltz “Architectural Follies,” Village Voice, April 16–22, 2003, 51; Ellen Posner, “Architecture without Building, at

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MOMA,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 1989, sec. A, p. 8; and Joshua Decter, “Architectural Exhibition: Gallery Nature Morte, New York,” Arts Magazine 63 (November 1988): 112. 5 Q  uoted in Georges Teyssot, “Erasure and Disembodiment: Dialogues with Diller + Scofidio,” Ottagono 96 (September 1990): 44. 6 O  n the Eames films and installations, see Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); John Neuhart and Marilyn Neuhart, Eames Design (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989); and Beatriz Colomina, “Enclosed by Images: The Eames’s Multimedia Architecture,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 6–29. 7 T om Gunning, “Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity,” in Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photograph (Stanford, CA, and New York: Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University/Oxford University Press, 2003), 226. 8 S ome of the notable assessments include Anthony Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed, 161–78. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 161–78; Kenneth Frampton, “In (de)Nature of Materials: A Note on the State of Things,” Daidalos, no. 56 (August 1995): 16–18, (1988), 106–9; and Michael Sorkin “Minimums,” Village Voice, October 13, 1987. 9 O  xford English Dictionary, 1:167. Letter from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Carrouges (February 6, 1950), in The Bachelor Machines, ed. Jean Clair and Harald Szeemann (New York: Rizzoli, 1975), 49. 10 O  n Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, see Norbert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). His plans of particular resonance to the work of DS+R include constructing a screen on the exterior of the tower to display news reports and projecting words from the tower onto clouds. See Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962), 226. The Volharding Building is treated in Dietrich Neumann, Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building (New York and Munich: Prestel, 2003). Nitzchke’s Maison de la Publicité is treated in Matilda McQuaid, ed., Envisioning Architecture: Drawings from the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 80. For the National Football Hall of Fame, see Robert Venturi, “A Bill-Ding-Board Involving Movies Relics and Space,” Architectural Forum, April 1968, 14–17. On contemporary projects that employ digital display systems, see Mark Haeusler, Media Facades: History, Technology, and Content (Ludwigsburg: Avedition, 2009). 11 R  obert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

12

13 14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Revealingly, Venturi appears to have ignored the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, which proves as irreducible to his call for an architecture of display surface as it does to Kenneth Frampton’s influential appeal to a return to tectonics. See Kenneth Frampton, “Rappel à l’Ordre, the Case for the Tectonic,” Architectural Design 60, no. 3–4 (1990): 19–25. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres,” in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 19–35. Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980): 55–81. See Laurie Anderson, Works from 1969 to 1983 (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1983); Bruce Nauman: Exhibition Catalogue and Catalogue Raisonné (Minneapolis: Walker Arts Center, 1994); Nam June Paik, Video Time, Video Space (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993); and Dan Graham, Works: 1965–2000, ed. Marianne Brouwer (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001). See the essays collected in Architecture: Between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2008). Elizabeth Diller in Terrance Galvin, “Architecture as Probe: Elizabeth Diller in Conversation with Terrance Galvin,” Fifth Column 8, no. 2 (April 1992): 29. See Coop Himmelblau: Architecture Is Now; Projects, (Un) buildings, Actions, Statements, Sketches, Commentaries, 1968–1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983); Haus‑Rucker‑Co: 1967 bis 1983, ed. Heinrich Klotz (Braunschweig/ Wiesbaden : F. Vieweg, 1984); and Experiments in Art and Technology, Pavilion (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1972). See Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), esp. 162–89; and Kurt Forster, “Only Things That Stir the Imagination: Schinkel as Scenographer,” in Karl Friedrich Schinkel: The Drama of Architecture, ed. John Zukowsky (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994), 18–35. For a recent assessment of its legacy, see Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus, 1919–1933 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009). The most useful book presenting an overview of the early work of the architects remains their own Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). The two standard collections on their activities are Scanning: The Aberrant Architecture of Diller + Scofidio (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 2003); and Guido Incerti, Daria Ricchi, and Deane Simpson, Diller + Scofidio (+ Renfro): The Ciliary Function; Works and Projects 1979–2007 (Milan: Skira, 2007).

1 See  Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1986), 88–91. 2 See Martha Rosler, 3 Works: 1. The Restoration of High Culture in Chile; 2. The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems; 3. In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography) (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2006), 57–60. 3 The anthology most revealing of this moment is On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). 4 Alexander Alberro argues the publication of essays by Roland Barthes in English translation during the mid-1960s in the journal Evergreen Review was the channel of reception for his work by New York artists. See his Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 181. 5 For a brief overview of the early history of architectural semiotics, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 369–73. 6 Paradigmatic of this tendency are Amos Rapaport, House Form and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960); and Robert Sommer, Personal Space: The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969). 7 See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). 8 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, unpublished description in Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 9 A comprehensive presentation of these efforts is Soho: Downtown Manhattan (Berlin: Akademie der Künste/ Berliner Festwochen, 1976). The essays in Alternative Art New York: 1965–1985, ed. Julie Ault (New York and Minneapolis: Drawing Center and University of Minnesota Press, 2002), discuss the institutional context. 10 See Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974– 1984 (New York and New Haven, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2009); and Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s (London and Munich: Barbican Gallery/Prestel, 2011). 11 A significant point of entry for the discourse of semiotics and feminist film theory into the art world was the exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, curated by Kate Linker and Jane Weinstock

and presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York from December 8, 1984, to February 10, 1985. For a critical review, see Grace Glueck, “Art: ‘Representation and Sexuality’: Mixed Media Show at New Museum,” New York Times, January 4, 1985. Artists whose works were on view included Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, Mary Kelly, and Sherrie Levine. 12 Typical here is the work of avant-garde filmmaker Peter Gidal, who filmed blurred and indiscernible objects, a strategy intended to circumvent the objectification and projection of erotic fantasies he discerned in the representation of the human—but most especially the female—figure in narrative cinema. For a statement of this position, see his Structural Film Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976). 13 Structuralist binary oppositions are discussed by Bernard Tschumi,“Architecture and Transgression,” Oppositions 7 (Winter 1976): 61. 14 Dan Graham, Works, 1965–2000 (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001), 185. 15 Rosalyn Deutsche, Hans Haacke, and Miwon Kwon, “Der Bevolkerung: A Conversation,” Grey Room 16 (Summer 2004): 77. 16 Norval White and Elliot Willensky, AIA Guide to New York (New York: Three Rivers Press), 699. 17 Ricardo Scofidio and John T. Roberts, Green Camp Masterplan (Croton-on-Hudson, NY: Hudson River Group, January 1973). 18 The essential presentation of Hejduk’s early and midcareer is his own Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947–1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1984). For a useful overview of this period, see David A. Greenspan, “Medieval Surrealism,” Inland Architect 25, no. 2 (March 1981): 10–29. 19 Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Hejduk, Gwathmey, Meier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). A helpful assessment is Peggy Deamer, “Structuring Surfaces: The Legacy of the Whites,” Perspecta 32 (2001): 90–99. 20 Libeskind’s close connection to Hejduk is evident in the introductions he contributed to the two editions of Mask of Medusa. Hejduk’s concern with “giving form to the identity of man” (10) in Libeskind’s words was one from which Diller and Scofidio distanced themselves by the end of the 1980s. 21 The indispensable history of this period in Hejduk’s career is Alexander Caragonne, The Texas Rangers: Notes from an Architectural Underground (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 22 On the experience of studying architecture at Cooper, see Alexander Gorlin, “Passion Plays,” Metropolis, March 20, 2006. 23 Caragonne, The Texas Rangers, 194–95. 24 Timothy Love, “Kit-of-Parts Conceptualism:

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C h a pte r O n e

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Abstracting Architecture in the American Academy,” Harvard Design Magazine 19 (Fall 2003/Winter 2004): 5. Love understands the nine-square as most likely inspired by Palladio, whose villas architectural historian Rudolf Wittkower analyzed as a series of variations on a three-bay by three-bay diagram. Hejduk, however, denies the Palladian reference in his own design work. See Mask of Medusa, 35. For the most detailed visual presentation of the nine-square, see the drawings by Hejduk and Slutzky in Education of an Architect: A Point of View: The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), 23–50. 25 Caragonne, The Texas Rangers, 366. 26 See Tod Williams and Ricardo Scofidio, “Typology and Primary Elements,” Journal of Architectural Education 35, no. 2 (Winter 1982): 8–9. A revealing correspondence between them is published in the Kansas State University School of Architecture student publication Oz as “Letters,” Oz 4 (1983): 20–23. The best statement of Cooper architectural pedagogy in the 1980s remains Education of an Architect, ed. Elizabeth Diller, Diane Lewis, and Kim Shkapich (New York: 1988). See especially Ricardo Scofidio, “Conjugation,” 41–62, and Elizabeth Diller, “Architectonics,” 32–40. Scofidio also studied at Cooper and received a degree in architecture in 1955 and a second from Columbia University in 1960. 27 Mike Webb, interview, September 13, 2011. The two most extensive discussions of the personal histories of Diller and Scofidio are Justin Davidson, “The Illusionists,” New Yorker, May 14, 2007, 126–37; and Arthur Lubow, “Architects, in Theory,” New York Times, February 16, 2003. 28 Elizabeth Diller, “Cooper Union School,” Across Architecture (Architectural Association, London), (Spring 1985): 50. 29 In a later interview with Arata Isozaki, Diller noted, “I never explicitly intended to become an architect. My interest in architecture was a deviation from explorations in art school where I was studying film and photography. I somehow became seduced by John Hejduk into the study of architecture . . . I would say that when I was studying in the 1970s, the strongest influence on my work was from alternative forms of artistic production—installation art, video, performance art. When I was a student, I rejected dogma. Even though Cooper Union was an extraordinary school and John Hejduk was a great influence, I didn’t buy the modernist canon as it was presented to me. I was resistant to it, but at the same time, I gnawed at it secretly.” Conversation of September 7, 1994, in “Architecture That Redefines Architecture: New Strategies of the Body and Space,” Intercommunication 11 (1995): 72. 30 Tod Williams, interview, March 8, 2008.

31 Ralph Lerner, interview, March 6, 2008. 32 The catalog appeared as Detail: The Special Task; An Exhibition of Works by Women Architects (New York: Air Gallery, 1984). 33 Elizabeth Diller, “Autobiographical Notes,” in The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (New York and Cambridge, MA: The Drawing Center/MIT Press, 2001), 131. 34 Ralph Lerner, interview, March 6, 2008. 35 Elizabeth Diller, “Autobiographical Notes.” 36 “Winners in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition,” Japan Architect (International Edition) 51, no. 12 (December 1976): 26–27. 37 Ibid., 26. 38 Ricardo Scofidio, e-mail to the author, February 21, 2009. 39 The exhibition catalog was published as Window, Room, Furniture: Projects, ed. Tod Williams and Ricardo Scofidio (New York: Rizzoli, 1981). A positive review of the exhibition that does not, however, mention the piece by Diller was Paul Goldberger, “Design Notebook; Architects, If Left Alone, Begin to Probe Their Souls,” New York Times, December 10, 1981. 40 See Craig Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). 41 Paul Goldberger, “Design Notebook: Doing Conceptual Architecture as Play,” New York Times, May 28, 1981. Goldberger subsequently warmed to the architects, noting in 2003, “They’ve managed to create a position for themselves somewhere between architecture, conceptual art, and physical transformations of the environment. Their work is extraordinary and important—it questions architecture but also celebrates the potential of architecture.” Quoted in Elisabeth Franck, “The World of Diller + Scofidio,” Departures, March/ April 2003, 104. 42 Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony” (1919), in The Metamorphosis, in The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 191–232. 43 The earliest argument about the body in the work of Diller + Scofidio as a critique of Vitruvius and later humanist traditions was Robert McAnulty, “Body Troubles,” in Strategies in Architectural Thinking, ed. John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Richard Burdett (Chicago and Cambridge, MA: Institute for Architecture and Urbanism/MIT Press, 1992), 180–97. 44 Quoted in Lawrence D. Steefel, “The Position of La Mariée Mise â Nu par ses Célibataires, Même (1915–23) in the Stylistic and Iconographic Development of the Art of Marcel Duchamp” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Princeton University, 1960), 301, cited in John Golding, Duchamp: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 51.

the project. Jim Holl, e-mail to the author, November 18, 2008. 61 Interview with Kaylynn Sullivan, December 12, 2008. 62 Kenneth Frampton and Michael W. Kagan, Nouvelles Directions De L’Architecture Moderne (Paris: Electa Moniteur, 1985), 46. 63 Diller quoted in Andrew McNair with Justin Henderson, “A-Z on 40/40,” Interiors, September 1986, 167. 64 The phrase “medieval surrealism” is Hejduk’s own. See Mask of Medusa, 122. 65 It ran from July 7 to September 16, 1984. 66 Hejduk consistently explored voyeurism in his designs and writings, and it is plausible to understand this as a concern linking him with Diller and Scofidio. See Mask of Medusa, 135. 67 Matthew Maguire, “The Site of Language,” Drama Review 27, no. 4 (Winter 1983): 60. 68 “B” stage set for “The American Mysteries” in application to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 69 For reviews of the piece, see Amy Virshup, “The American Mysteries,” Other Stages 5, no. 11 (February 10–23, 1983); Robert Massa, “Theater,” Village Voice 28 (March 1, 1983); and Bennett Theissen, “Creation’s The American Mysteries” Drama Review 27, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 83–86; and David Hawley, “‘The American Mysteries’ Collaborates,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 26, 1984. The last review claims “the most startling feature of ‘American Mysteries’ is a remarkable set design by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.” 70 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 71 Matthew Maguire, “The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo,” unpublished proposal, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 72 Diller and Scofidio, unpublished proposal for “The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo,” Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 73 Ibid. 74 Matthew Maguire, e-mail to the author, July 14, 2008. 75 For a contemporaneous discussion of memory and forgetting in relation to the Holocaust, see the essays collected in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 76 Matthew Maguire, e-mail to the author, July 14, 2008. 77 Bridge project description in grant application to the New York State Council on the Arts, Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Maguire, e-mail to the author, July 14, 2008.

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45 “H. Plywood House for Doris Kinney,” grant application to the New York State Council on the Arts, Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 46 Patricia Phillips, “Hinged Victories,” Artforum, Vol. 26, no. 10, (Summer 1988): 106–8. 47 John Hejduk, “Kinney House: A Design by Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller,” Lotus 44 (1984): 58–64. This appears a rare instance in which Scofidio’s name precedes Diller in a project credit. Subsequently, the name of the studio becomes Diller + Scofidio. 48 Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 33. 49 Ibid., 235. 50 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Mircrosoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2008), 26–56. 51 See Donald M. Reynolds, “The Unveiled Soul: Hiram Powers’s Embodiment of the Ideal,” Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (September, 1977): 394–414. Hejduk’s understanding of the face as a surface revealing subjective interiority evokes that of film theorist Béla Balázs. See Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory, Visible Man, and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2010), esp. Visible Man, 10, 19. 52 Hejduk, “Kinney House,” 58. 53 See Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 166. 54 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Huntington Hartford’s Palatial New York Museum,” New York Times, February 25, 1964, 33. 55 These descriptions come from the studio website, www.dsrny.com, accessed October 4, 2009. 56 It ran from July 9 to September 25, 1983. Other participants included Ian Bader, Harriet Balaran, Johanna Boyce, Petah Coyne, Richard Flood, Tom Hatch, Brower Hatcher, Shelley Hirsch, James Holl, Nene Humphrey, Kathleen Ligon, Daniel McCusker, Tom Otterness, Geraldine Pontius, Kaylynn Sullivan, Billie Tsien, David Van Tieghem, and overall site architect Diane Lewis. 57 See Jennifer Dunning, “Dance: Art on the Beach,” New York Times, August 16, 1980, C16; Grace Glueck, “Sculpture on the Beach,” New York Times, June 25, 1982, and “Sculpture on the Sands of Battery Park City,” New York Times, July 13, 1984. 58 Interview with Kaylynn Sullivan, December 12, 2008. 59 Sentinel project description in grant application to the New York State Council on the Arts, Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 60 Holl does not remember Scofidio being involved with

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78 See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), esp. 30–42; and Benjamin Buchloh, “Construire (l’histoire de) la sculpture,” in Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne, ed. Margit Rowell (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1986), 254–74. 79 Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996). 80 See the catalog Il Progetto Domestico. La casa dell’uomo: archetipi e prototipi XVII Triennale di Milano (Milan: Electa, 1986) and the entry devoted to the project in its Progetti volume, 26–27. 81 The original English text was first published as Elizabeth Diller + Ricardo Scofidio, “Inside-Out: The Window on the Garden,” in Interior Landscapes, ed. Georges Teyssot (Milan: Electa/Rizzoli, 1987), 66. 82 J. L. Austin, “Performative Utterances,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Wanrock (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 249. 83 Diller and Scofidio do not share the concern of Louis Kahn for “what the building wants to be.” See his “An Approach to Architectural Education” (1956), in Louis Kahn: Essential Writings, ed. Robert C. Twombly (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 38. 84 To assist with realizing Three Windows, Diller + Scofidio hired Victor Wong, a Cooper student who became their first employee. He recalls Scofidio and Diller as inspiring teachers who taught a studio in which students were asked to select an architectural detail for one of the five senses. “It’s not the idea, it’s what you do with it,” Scofidio once told him. Wong later cofounded a company to sell architectural objects and collaborated with the architects on the No Means Yes perfume. Today he lives in Paris and straddles the roles of web designer, architect, and graphic artist. Victor Wong, interview, July 2, 2008. 85 Susan Mosakowski, interview, March 27, 2008. 86 Diller + Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass,” typescript, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York, 1. 87 Ibid., 3. 88 Diller + Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass,” Lotus International 53 (1987): 23. At least two translations of The Large Glass into dance pieces have been attempted. They include Walkaround Time (1968) with choreography by Merce Cunningham and sets by Jasper Johns and the She Was and She Is, Even (1991) by Jean Fabre. See Gabriele Brandstetter and Marta Ulvaeus, “Defigurative Choreography from Marcel Duchamp to William Forsythe,” Drama Review 42, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 37–55. Artist Hannah Wilke also performed behind the piece in 1976. 89 Diller + Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass,” typescript 1. E-mail to the author, September 16, 2009. For a recent assessment of Duchamp’s Étant donnés, see Holland Cotter, “Philadelphia, Surreal to Silly: Landscape of

Eros, through the Peephole,” New York Times, August 28, 2009, C17–18. 90 As John Golding notes, The Large Glass employs single point renaissance perspective in its depiction of the chocolate grinder and the oculist witness but also presents specific details, such as the capillary tubes, in plan. 91 Diller + Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass,” 23. 92 Rosalind Krauss, “Where’s Poppa?,” in The Definitively Unfinished Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 433–62. 93 Schlemmer’s emphasis upon the theater as a total work of art, especially in his 1922 “Triadic Ballet,” prefigures the performance aesthetic of Diller + Scofidio. See The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 127. 94 The first architectural critic to discuss the prosthetic turn in the work of Diller + Scofidio was Michael Sorkin in an essay he published in the Village Voice (October 13, 1987) entitled “Minimums” and reprinted in Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings (London: Verso, 1991), 242–47. 95 Susan Mosakowski, interview March 27, 2008. The architecture of the performance and its prosthetics were described by one reviewer as “a mesmerizingly mirrored set created by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio [that] offers a magician’s construct of simultaneous linear and geometric space. . . . Pieces of the mechanisms of daily life—whether a fragment of a dress form or a bicycle wheel—become human appendages.” Kathryn Helene, “Duchampiana: Going Around; Standing Still,” After Dark, October 21, 1987, 55. See also Stephen Holden, “The Stage: ‘Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate,” New York Times, June 18, 1987; Victoria Geibel, “The Rotary Notary and his Hot Plate,” Metropolis (November 1987); and Mike Steele, “Wit, Incisiveness Hit Peak in Last of Mosakowski Trilogy,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 24, 1987. 96 Although the formal language of Jean Nouvel’s Arab World Institute in Paris, completed the same year as The Rotary Notary, was decidedly not their own, its 240 remote-controlled mechanical apertures, the most advanced window technology of the day, is a useful reminder that other colleagues in architecture at the time shared the fascination of Diller and Scofidio with the regulation of vision through machines. 97 See Richard Whittaker, “A Conversation with Ann Hatch,” for a history of the Capp Street Projects. http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=63, accessed August, 16, 2009. 98 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994) provides a helpful overview of this history. 99 See also the remarks on incision by Diller and Scofidio.

107 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 108 See Allan Temko, “Cutting Up the House,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 3, 1987, 66. 109 See Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” Assemblage 8 (February 1989): 22–59, for an elaboration of this argument. 110 See The withDrawing Room, Capp Street Project Archive, http://www.cca.edu/library/capp/prop_ r87d001.pdf, accessed July 14, 2008. 111 Diller + Scofidio, Bodybuildings: Architectural Facts and Fictions (New York: Storefront for Art and Architecture, 1987). 112 E-mail to the author, October 9, 2008. 113 Edward J. Sozanski, “ICA Highlights Artists Who Are Conceptualists,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1988, E01. McAnulty interprets the work of the architects in relation to the “body without organs” propounded by Antonin Artaud, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. See his essay in the catalog Investigations 23 (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1988). 114 Joshua Decter, “New York Review,” Arts Magazine 63, no. 3 (November 1988): 111–12. 115 Ibid. 116 See http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2002/ projects/storr.html, accessed July 13, 2009. 117 Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 118 Matilda McQuaid, interview, March 31, 2008. 119 Application to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 120 One can profitably read Para-Site in relation to Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81. 121 Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 122 Para-Site strikingly prefigures the tendency to question unacknowledged features of the museum (such as its architecture, instructions to visitors, and pedagogical practices) that have led some scholars to discern in the work of artists Daniel Buren, Maria Eichhorn, and Andrea Fraser a tendency toward “institutional critique.” See Institutional Critique and After, ed. John Welchman (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006). 123 Ellen Posner, “Architecture without Building, at MOMA,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 1989.

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“The cut is a way of presenting and re-presenting the body. Dis-section leads to section cut. To make an abrupt transition from image to image, as in a film. To divide into parts, sever, make unstable. To interrupt the continuity of the whole. Consider a cut through the site of the body, a section cut through the body and through time, like a snapshot.” Quoted in Georges Teyssot, “Erasure and Disembodiment: Dialogues with Diller + Scofidio,” Ottagono 96 (September 1990): 78–79. 100 For a telling architectural example of a withdrawing room, see the online description of the John Marshall House at http://www.apva.org/marshall/house/ tour_wr.php, accessed August 16, 2011. 101 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “the withDrawing Room: A Probe into the Conventions of Private Rite,” AA Files 17 (Spring 1989): 21. 102 See the withDrawing Room, Capp Street Projects Archive, http://www.cca.edu/library/capp/prop_ r87d001.pdf, accessed July 14, 2008. 103 If this seems perverse, one might reflect on the difference between the recognition by the architects of affective fluctuation and Peter Eisenman’s House VI (1975), in which the design required a nonadjustable slot in a real bed in an actual summer house. See Suzanne Frank, Peter Eisenman’s House VI: The Client’s Response (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1994), 60. A suggestive precedent that the architects doubtless knew was Raimund Abraham’s Hinge-Chair (1970–71) that sought to “study the principal of the Hinge as a reconciliation of the cut.” See Raimund Abraham, [Un]built (Vienna and New York: Springer, 1996), 54–57. Significantly, it demonstrates the chair with a photo series of a naked woman, legs open to various degrees, that eroticizes the hinge and associates it with female sexuality, while the absence of a sexualized body in the project by Diller + Scofidio is striking. 104 Here I have learned much from the incisive analysis of Dan Graham, whose use of the phrase “probe” to describe the work of Gordon Matta-Clark may well be among the sources for its later appropriation by D+S. His suggestion that the conical incisions of the artist function akin to periscopes is also suggestive for later projects by Diller + Scofidio such as the Slow House. See Dan Graham, “Gordon Matta-Clark” (1983), in Rock My Religion: Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 194–205. See also the essays in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 105 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “the withDrawing Room: A Probe into the Conventions of private rite,” 23. 106 Ibid.

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Other published reviews include Dennis L. Dollens, “Para-Site,” Telescope 4 (1989): 21; Roberta Smith, “Architectural Gadgetry In Modern’s Installation,” New York Times, July 21, 1989; and anonymous notes in New York Post, July 28, 1989, and New Yorker, July 31, 1989. Smith was the most critical reviewer and wrote that “Para-Site indicates the extent to which the avant-garde tendencies of the 1970s have been rendered palpable and superficially accessible to a broad art-viewing public—and it’s not entirely a pretty sight . . . the piece . . . has a slick overdone quality that may come from too much time spent refining other artists’ ideas.” The review in the Post wrote of Diller and Scofidio that “their aim is a comment on MOMA itself, as renovated of late years ‘into a kind of mall’ more given ‘to a commercial than a cultural establishment.’ . . . They also say they wanted ‘to be aggressive, leak out, grab as much space as we could.’ They didn’t say they wanted to drive the rest of us crazy, but . . .” 124 Apart from this quotation and sharing its title, the installation by Diller + Scofidio seems minimally indebted to the book by French philosopher Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence Scher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), which for all of its discussion of culture does not mention architecture, urbanism, moving images, museums, or public space. 125 Elizabeth Diller, quoted in Nick Backlund, “Living Architecture: Diller and Scofidio,” ID, November/ December 1989, 18. 126 The most important summary of the Vertovian legacy remains Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 127 The idea of film as a system of notation is already present in the silent period. See Louis Haugemard, “The ‘Aesthetic’ of the Cinematograph” (1913), in French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 1:83. 128 See the entry on Nauman’s video installation in California Video: Artists and Histories, ed. Glenn Phillips (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 182, and Graham’s entry in Dan Graham: Beyond, ed. Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 147–48. Three video projects of the 1970s suggestively explored surveillance and prefigure Para-Site. Peter Weibel’s Observing Observation: Uncertainty (1973) positioned video cameras at the perimeter of a circle and trained them on the visitor, who could never see his own back. Nam June Paik’s Zenith (TV Looking Glass) (1974) pointed a single camera toward a building visible through the window of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Steina’s All Vision (1976) directed two cameras onto a rotating mirrored sphere. See CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas

Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 74–75; Nam June Paik, Fluxus/ Video, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1999), 189; and Edward A. Shanken, Art and Electronic Media Art (London: Phaidon, 2009), 31. Contemporaneous with Para-Site, Security by Julia (1989–90), by Julia Scher, utilized multiple video monitors and cast the artist as a security guard to investigate the workings of surveillance. See Shanken, Art and Electronic Media, 127. 129 Ricardo Scofidio, letter to Stuart Wrede, September 25, 1989, Projects 17: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Curatorial Exhibition Files, Exh. #1524, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. A reprise of Facsimile, altered by the use of a robotically controlled camera, took place in the 2006 performance at MOMA Who’s Your Dada?, which DS+R realized in collaboration with the Wooster Group.

C h a pte r Tw o







1 S ee William Menking, “Notes from New York,” Building Design, November 1989; and Nancy Princenthal, “Diller + Scofidio: Architecture’s Iconoclasts,” Sculpture Magazine (Winter 1989): 18–23. 2 Two relatively early European reviews of projects by Diller + Scofidio are “Casa Kinney,” Arquitectura 244 (1983): 62–63; and “Three Windows,” Domus 671 (1986): 62. Daily newspapers and monthly or quarterly publications about art and drama in the United States printed reviews of their early performances and installations, yet it was not until 1987 that they were treated in an American architecture magazine, Metropolis, and exhibited in an architectural context by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. See Victoria Geibel, “Harbingers of Change,” Metropolis, September 1987; and Bodybuildings (catalog) in Front 1, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, 1987. For two of the earliest texts on Diller + Scofidio by American architectural critics, see Michael Sorkin, “Minimums,” Village Voice, October 3, 1987, reprinted in Exquisite Corpse: Writings on Buildings (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 242–47; and Herbert Muschamp, “Outside the Avant-Garde,” Terazzo, 1988, 44–50. 3 Michael Sorkin, “Philip Johnson: The Master Builder as Self-Made Man” (1978), in Exquisite Corpse, 7–14. 4 Ralph Lerner, interview, March 6, 2008. 5 Ibid. 6 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 7 Architecture 503 “Probe” syllabus, fall 1990, Princeton University School of Architecture Archive. 8 Architecture 204 syllabus, spring 1995, Princeton University School of Architecture. 9 Architect Bernard Tschumi explored similar ideas

meaning that they did in the classical period because in the present, which I see as having no future, all we can do is make empty words.” The Charlottesville Tapes (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 145. 24 An early and later superseded design was for a “half house.” Hejduk produced an identically titled design, although it has little in common with that of the Slow House. See John Hejduk, “½ House,” in his Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947–1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 268–71. 25 Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, trans. George Hamilton Heard (New York: George Wittenborn, 1960). 26 Interview with Jürgen Mayer H., July 6, 2009. That Diller grew up speaking Polish and did not learn English until later in life may well explain her precise yet slightly distanced relation to the language. 27 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 224. The one biomorphic analogy the architects do provide involves the snail, about which they quote from Peter Greenaway’s 1985 film A Zed and Two Naughts, “Milo: Why do you like snails? Oliver: They’re a nice form of life. They help the world decay and they’re hermaphroditic. They can satisfy their own sexual needs.” Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “Reviewing,” Columbia Documents in Architecture and Theory 1 (1992): 30. 28 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McClintock. (London: Penguin, 2003). 29 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 225. 30 Felicity Scott calls attention to the striking prefiguration of the media component of the Slow House by the House of the Century designed by Ant Farm with Richard Jost (1971–73), in which a television is placed in front of a picture window looking out on a lake so as to allow someone washing dishes to switch attention between viewing scenery and a video image of it. Significantly, the element of recording and storing views important in the design by Diller + Scofidio does not figure in this earlier design. See Felicity Scott, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm; Allegorical Time Warp; The Media Fallout of July 21, 1969 (Barcelona: Actar, 2008), 153–54. 31 Diller + Scofidio, Slow House proposal (January 30, 1989), 1. Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 32 On the Beistegui Penthouse, see Manfredo Tafuri, “Machine and Memoire: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier,” trans. Stephan Sartarelli, in Le Corbusier, ed. H. Allen Brooks (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203–18. 33 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: semiotex(e), 1983), develops the idea of derealization.

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about the occupation of space by bodies in his essays of the 1980s. See his Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), especially the 1983 essay “Sequences,” 153–68. 10 Paul Lewis, interview, July, 8, 2008. 11 Georges Teyssot, interview, July 3, 2008. 12 A copy of this transcript is in the slide library of the Princeton University School of Architecture. 13 Georges Teyssot, interview, July 3, 2008. 14 See Mark Wigley, “Disciplining of Architecture,” 19–26; Anthony Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs: Domestic Prostheses from Salvador Dalí to Diller and Scofidio,” 37–55; and Georges Teyssot, “Erasures and Disembodiment: Dialogues with Diller + Scofidio,” 57–88; all in “Prostheses,” special issue, Ottagono 96 (September 1990). 15 Diller + Scofidio, “Pretext Machine,” in “Prostheses,” special issue, Ottagono 96 (September 1990): 89–104. 16 It is telling that the architects have not developed complex characters in their video works or, better put, one might claim that only a single complex character—architecture—appears in them. 17 See Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954); and The Bachelor Machines, ed. Jean Clair and Harald Szeemann (New York: Rizzoli, 1975). 18 For a review, see “Meta Maquettes,” Connaissance des arts 479 (January 1992): 18. 19 D+S later utilized this liquid crystal technology in the installation of “Reviewing the Slow House” in Tokyo. 20 The history and properties of various smart glass technologies are treated in Michelle Addington and Daniel Schodek, Smart Materials and Technologies in Architecture (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004), esp. 156–58; and Axel Ritter, Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), esp. 73–78. One of the more publicized architectural designs involving active display panel (ADP) glazing capable of presenting images was William Alsop and Jan Störmer’s unrealized Kauhauf des Nordens in Hamburg, developed in 1993. See William Alsop and Jan Störmer (London: Academy Editions, 1993), esp. 106–43. 21 Variable opacity was a property of earlier glass technologies important to twentieth-century modernists. See Arthur Korn, Glass in Modern Architecture of the Bauhaus Period (1926) (New York: George Braziller, 1968), esp. 132. 22 A reading of Door, 11 rue Larrey that resonates with the project of D+S is Francis M. Naumann, “Marcel Duchamp: A Reconciliation of Opposites,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 41–68, esp. 59–60. 23 Compare this with Peter Eisenman: “I don’t believe that words can contain the same mythology and

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34 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 248. 35 On nested windows, see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 36 “ The Slow House,” Progressive Architecture, January 1991, 88. For a slightly later discussion of the house in an academic architectural context, see Beatriz Colomina, “Domesticity at War,” Assemblage 16 (December 1991): 14–41. 37 “ The Slow House,” 88. 38 Thomas Fisher, interview, June 6, 2008. 39 The most complete presentation of the project is “SuitCase Studies: The Production of a National Past,” in Back to the Front: Tourisms of War, ed. Diller + Scofidio (Basse-Normandie: FRAC, 1994), 32–107. See also the dossier of the exhibition published as “Architecture Tomorrow,” Design Quarterly 152 (1991); and the announcement of the project in Joseph Giovannini, “Architects to Create Ivory Towers,” New York Times, January 21, 1988. 40 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 205. 41 It also underscores the legacy of the mapping and comparative analyses employed by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 42 The most significant intellectual point of reference for the architects as they thought about tourism appears to have been Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976). 43 Among the first critics to note Diller’s writing style is Val Warke. See his review of Education of an Architect, published in the Journal of Architectural Education 43, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 45–50, esp. 46. 44 Roland Barthes, “There is No Robbe-Grillet School” (1958), in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 92. See also “The Last Word on Robbe-Grillet?” (1962), 197–204. The architects mention Robbe-Grillet as their inspiration in the withDrawing Room for dust under the bed, and Diller included mapping his The Erasers as an assignment in her first Princeton studio. Hejduk, too, admired both Kafka and Robbe-Grillet. See his Mask of Medusa, 39. 45 Paradigmatic here is Jealousy (1957), which includes an architectural plan of the house in whose narrative it transpires. 46 Robert McAnulty, interview, June 10, 2008. 47 Lyn Rice, Victor Wong, and Paul Lewis were among the collaborators on the installation. 48 See Beatriz Colomina, “Domesticity at War.” 49 Besides the dossier on Tourisms and texts by other writers, the book contains a visual essay by the architects, “Hostility into Hospitality,” that anticipates the design and concerns of their book Flesh: Architectural Probes, published the following year.

50 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 220. 51 Ibid. 52 Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism” (1981), in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 153–68, 158. 53 Published reviews include those by Nancy Roth in Artpaper (March 1991); Brian McLaren in Architecture, March 1991; Jacqueline Hall in the Columbus Dispatch, March 1, 1992; and Robert Campbell, “People, Places, and Postcards,” Boston Globe, May 7, 1991, 61. Roth called the installation “clever, absorbing, and annoying work.” Campbell described it as “a subtle and brilliant meditation on tourism.” 54 Mildred (Mickey) Friedman, interview, June 7, 2008. 55 See Beatriz Colomina, “Suspended Architecture,” in From Here to Eternity: Fact and Fiction in Recent Architectural Projects (New York: Artists Space, 1986), 4–7. See the review by Simon Morrisey of the installation in Birmingham, England, “Diller + Scofidio—the Desiring Eye: ReViewing the Slow House,” Architects’ Journal, February 15, 1996, 203n6, 54–55; and the review of its exhibition in Bordeaux by Chantal Béret, Art Press (Paris) 175 (December 1992): 41. 56 Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box,” trans. George Heard Hamilton, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michelle Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 26–71. 57 Images of the project can be found on the studio website. 58 George Baird, e-mail to the author, July 5, 2008. One of the first artists to employ liquid crystal technology was Jenny Holzer in her project Laments (1988–89). Refinement of this technology to a technical standard suitable for liquid crystal display (LCD) television sets (today ubiquitous) did not occur until 1997. 59 On the history of P.S. 1, today run by the Museum of Modern Art, see http://ps1.0rg/about, accessed August 5, 2011. 60 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 138–39. 61 Scofidio, e-mail to the author, December 14, 2010. A suggestive frame of reference for Loophole is the installation by Flavin of a fluorescent light column extending from the ground floor to the glass ceiling of the Guggenheim Museum during his retrospective there from June 28 to August 27, 1992. 62 E-mail to the author, July 19, 2009. Published reviews include Garrett Holg, “For Armory Show, Artists Find ‘Territory’ to Relate Experiences,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 18, 1992, 7; Roberta Smith, “Art View: In Installation Art, a Bit of the Spoiled Brat,” New York Times, January 3, 1993; Christopher Knight, “A Parting Shot for Chicago’s Armory,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 1992; James Yood, “Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory,” Artforum (December 1992): 98; Allison Gamble, “Strategic Occupation,”

techniques, see Ilka Ruby, Andreas Ruby, and Philipp Urpsrung, Images: A Picture Book of Architecture (Munich: Prestel, 2004), esp. 125–31. A particularly striking analogue is the 1992 “24-hour diagram,” by Rem Koolhaas and OMA for the Yokohama Urban Design Forum, in which architectural programs for a single site are followed over the course of a day (128). 72 Diller + Scofidio, Ventilator project description, April 19, 2004, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. The architects proposed artists, writers, and curators be given access to the message broadcasting system, thereby making it a cultural ventilating system. On the architecture of the MCA, see Alan G. Artner, “Assessing the MCA after Its First Year,” Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1997, 1; and Blair Kamen, “The New MCA Building: A Fumbled Chance at Greatness,” Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1996, 1. For an overview of the history of light-emitting diode projects in visual art and architecture, see Jonathan Speirs, Anthony Tischhauser, and Mark Major, Made of Light: The Art of Light and Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006), 8–9. 73 On this topic, see Alexis Mainland, “Reading Underground,” New York Times, September 3, 2009. 74 See Paul Smith, “Bad Press,” Art in America 82, no. 5 (May 1994): 114; and Zvi Efrat, “Diller and Scofidio’s ‘Bad Press’: Unseemliness of the Fashionable,” in Architecture in Fashion, ed. Deborah Fausch (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 390–410. Smith complained that “Diller & Scofidio’s installation struck me as mere window-dressing for the shirts, each of which showed genuine individuality and wit.” The most detailed explanation of the project is that provided by Diller in an article published after the exhibition. See Elizabeth Diller, “Bad Press,” in The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, ed. Francesca Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 74–95. A suggestive precedent for the use of the man’s white shirt in an artwork is Rodney Graham’s White Shirt (for Mallarmé), Spring 1993, which was exhibited in 1992 in the display window of the clothing store Barneys in New York City. 75 Diller and Scofidio, Hard Pressed (Castres: Centre d’Art Contemporain, 1993). 76 See Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed., Architectural Theory: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870 (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 529–60, for a dossier of texts by Gottfried Semper and other German contributors to the theory of tectonics. 77 For a discussion of the poetics of tectonic detailing, see David Brett, Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 215–50. 78 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). On the discourse of the architectural fold, see John Rajchman, Constructions

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New Art Examiner, January 1993, 17–19, 44; and Susan Snodgrass, “Review from Chicago,” Art in America (July 1993): 53–55. Holg wrote that “Loophole . . . is by far the most challenging and sensitive use of the building’s space. . . . Surveillance cameras positioned in both towers monitor the exhibit’s visitors as they wind their way up and down the stairs. For a particularly impish twist, the artists have rigged these cameras to send images back and forth between the nearly identical towers, so that visitors may find themselves temporarily disoriented.” Knight described Loophole as “a quietly chilling surveillance environment, in which you can believe neither what you are seeing nor what you are being told.” 63 Diller +Scofidio, Flesh, 139. On the conceptual instability of architecture noted by proponents of deconstruction, see Mark Wigley, The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). Yet the work on display in the June 23–August 30, 1998, exhibition of deconstructivist architecture at the Museum of Modern Art suggests just how differently Diller and Scofidio understood their activities. See Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988). 64 For the urban development history of Times Square, see Lynne B. Sagalyn, Times Square Roulette: The Remaking the City Icon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Its cultural significance is treated in Marshall Berman, On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2006). 65 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 85–126. 66 Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York: Applause Books, 2005). 67 Interview with Calvert Wright, March 11, 2009. 68 Interview with Wright. Published reviews of Soft Sell include Herbert Muschamp, “High Brow Peepshow on 42nd Street,” New York Times, August 1, 1993, 34; and “In Times Square, Art Conquers Kung Fu,” New York Times, July 7, 1993, C7. 69 Muschamp, “High Brow Peepshow on 42nd Street.” 70 See also the review of Incorporations, in which Case was reprinted, Linda Brigham, “Academia Inc.,” Electronic Book Review, 1995. There she writes of the D+S portfolio, “The humanist assumptions built into questions like ‘What happened’ and ‘Who did it’ [are] exposed as superstitious. Science becomes ritual, and ritual is overwhelmingly aesthetic.” “Case # 00-17163,” in Incorporations (Zone 6), ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 344–61. www. electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/ polycorporeal (March 15, 1996), accessed April 2012. 71 For an overview of spatial and temporal mapping

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(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), esp. 11–36; and Greg Lynn, Folding in Architecture, rev. ed. (London: Academy Editions, 2004). Diller and Scofidio engage with both the ideas of Deleuze and Rajchman in Flesh. 79 Diller + Scofidio, Hard Pressed, 1. This bilingual publication accompanying the French exhibition of the installation is the only instance in which it was published with an alternative title. Its design evokes the famous artist book by Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), whose accordion fold extends to twenty-seven feet. 80 For an account, see Janet Abrams, “Cine City: Film and Perceptions of Urban Space,” Archis 7 (1994): 10–12. Film scholar Annette Michelson, present at the performance by Diller, noted the relation between Robbe-Grillet’s metonymic style and Overexposed. 81 The most detailed information on the building and its history is contained in the June 20, 1995, Landmarks Preservation Commission Report prepared by David M. Breiner with a contribution by Gail Harris, http // www.nyc.gov/html/lpc.downloads/pdf.reports/pepsibldg.pdf, accessed June 28, 2008. 82 See the text “In Plain View” and the descriptions of the office workers in ANY 18 (1997): 30–33. 83 On privacy Smart Glass, see http://www.ltisg.com/ ltiprivacy.php#, accessed August 4, 2011. 84 Stephen Koch argues that Empire strips architecture of metaphor and approaches a Duchampian cinema. See his Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films, 2nd ed. (London: Marion Boyars, 1985), 59–61. Warhol’s own comment, “if you look at something long enough, I’ve discovered the meaning goes away,” is also relevant here. See Gretchen Berg, “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory, ed. Michael O’Pray (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 61. The most architecturally astute analysis of the Tati film is Joan Ockman, “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction: Eight Takes on Jacques Tati’s Play Time,” in Architecture and Film, ed. Mark Lamster (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 171–96. 85 Quoted in Kyong Park, “Diller + Scofidio: The Architecture of Entrapment,” Flash Art (May–June 1996): 92. 86 Paul Lewis, interview, July 8, 2008. 87 These advertisements ran in Forum 38, nos. 1–2 (May 1995), on pages 25, 53, and 81. 88 Although not itself an advertisement, the cash register receipt published by Dan Graham as “Figurative” between an advertisement for tampons and brassieres in the March 1968 issue of Harper’s Bazaar is an early and significant instance of an artist utilizing the pages of a magazine as medium. 89 For a critique of Virilio’s employment of the notion of the screen see Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 182–189.

90 Diller + Scofidio, “The Fourth Window,” Forum 38, no. 1/2 (May 1995): 53. 91 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). For an insightful review of the book, see Michael Speaks, “Views of the Observer: Flesh: Architectural Probes” (Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation), Newsline 8, no. 1 (September– October 1995): 2, in which the author observes, “Diller and Scofidio . . . offer a far more accurate picture of the possibilities for architectural deconstruction than have the familiar twisted and contorted forms of deconstructivist architecture. . . . They have learned from deconstruction that no matter how innocent we may appear to be, we are always implicated in violent, proprietary relations.” 92 Some of the texts published outside the United States on D+S include Antonello Marotta, Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Il Teatro Della Dissolvenza (Rome: Edilstampa, 2005); Françoise Ducros, “Les architectures dissidentes de Diller + Scofidio” (Caen, France: Frac Basse Normandie, 1999); and Bart Lootsma, “Sneaky Architecture: Recent Work of Diller + Scofidio Archis (The Netherlands) 8 (1996): 45–53. An overview of the work of Barbara Kruger is found 93 in Barbara Kruger, organized by Ann Goldstein (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999). The books of Marshall McLuhan also suggest themselves as a precedent. See Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Adam Michaels, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan, Agel, Fiore, and the Experimental Paperback (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012). 94 The parallels between the project of Flesh and key tenets of European continental philosophies of the body are striking. One might plausibly read the book as a “phenomenological reduction” of embodied practices of daily life, understood alternately as enabling communication or as ideologically constraining. 95 Flesh project description, created August 27, 2007, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. A reader could digest the book carefully and still miss this explanation of its design genesis. The lack of any suggestion that the movement from anal to oral body parts implies progress could be seen as a rejection of the theory developed by Sigmund Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). See The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 6:12–248. 96 Georges Teyssot, “The Mutant Body of Architecture,” in Flesh, 9–35. 97 For example, Jan Tschichold, The New Typography (1928), trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 98 Like semiotext(e), published by the Department of French at Columbia University and which did much to introduce French semiotic and poststructuralist

Scofidio with Paul Lewis, asst.: Jennifer Lee, nd. Archive of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs. 111 Ibid. 112 Electronic artist Ben Rubin devised the technique for displaying each trailer in its entirety. 113 The most detailed discussions of the project are Indigestion, in Anybody, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 138–43; Indigestion, in Serious Games: Art, Interaction, Technology (London: Barbican Gallery, 1997), 31–37; and Indigestion, in Languages Games (Banff: Banff Centre, 1997). 114 Filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s 1971 Critical Mass comes to mind as a precedent. 115 See A. J. Greimas and J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary, trans. Larry Crist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 36–37, for a definition of the combinatory as a state resulting from the production of semiotic units. A suggestive precedent for Indigestion is “Dark Dogs: American Dreams,” a 1980 installation by Laurie Anderson at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York, in which visitors could choose from cassette tapes to hear different stories coded by images. See Janet Kardon, Laurie Anderson (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1983), 21–22. 116 Indigestion, project description, created February 6, 2006, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 117 Among the published reviews are Andrew Morley, “Serious Games,” Contemporary Visual Arts 15 (1997): 66–67; and Isabel Carlisle, “Games with a Magic Edge,” Times (London), June 26, 1997, 39. Carlisle wrote of Indigestion, “It’s ingenious, if finally stultifying—but then, that’s life.” 118 Valerie Lamontagne, “Interview with Douglas Cooper,” Parachute, September 1999. Cooper praises Diller and Scofidio for being “surprisingly open to real contributions” by their collaborators and expanding his role in their projects. While working on Indigestion, he assigned them the task of designing a murder weapon for the piece. Interview with Douglas Cooper, July 20, 2011. 119 See Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 240–51, for the history of this project, which suggestively prefigures some of the technological and legal challenges Diller + Scofidio later would encounter with Facsimile. Dara Birnbaum offers her perspective in “The Rio Experience: Video’s New Architecture Meets Corporate Sponsorship,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (San Francisco: Aperture, 1990), 189–204. 120 The most detailed description of the project is Diller + Scofidio, Romm + Pearsall, “CNN Center Proposal,” Art Papers (March/April 1996): 26–27. Diller and Scofidio

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theory to the American academy, Flesh also represented a way of “doing theory,” what the founding editor of the journal, Sylvère Lotringer, later called an awareness that “things can exist together, each can remain what it is in its singularity, its own temporality, each preserving a life of its own while interpenetrating the other in a richer, more complex way.” Sylvère Lotringer, “Doing Theory,” in French Theory in America, ed. Lotringer and Sande Cohen (New York: Routledge, 2001), 129. Flesh was not widely reviewed but see Michael Speaks, “Views of the Observer: Flesh: Architectural Probes,” 2; and Lynette Widder, “Against Self-Disciplining,” Daidalos, no. 56 (August 1995): 35–47, for two reactions to it. 99 Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 71. 100 Raphael Berkowitz, interview, June 30, 2008. The cover display of the architects’ buttocks at a time when the AIDS crisis was decimating their profession may well have comprised a gesture of solidarity. That their field was losing talented practitioners to the disease is made clear in an article published not long before the book appeared: David W. Dunlap, “AIDS and the Practice of Architecture,” New York Times, April 3, 1994. 101 Representative here is Bernard Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox” (1975), in Architecture and Disjunction, 27–52. 102 Diller + Scofidio, Flesh, 39. 103 Cold War project description, created April 19, 2004, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 104 Broward County Civic Arena: Feasibility Study for Hockey Rink Video Image, October 9, 1996, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 105 Paul Lewis, interview, July 8, 2008. 106 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 107 As Maguire recalls of the set by the architects, “Their excitement was in what would happen to the rooms when the moving walls (which were rear projection screens on casters) would shift position. They loved the paralaxis created in the extreme positions, and they loved the change while the walls were manipulated by the cast.” E-mail to the author, July 14, 2008. A precedent for the use of the zigzag screen is the 1982 film Metropotamia by Leandro Katz. 108 Urban Design Review Board memorandum, April 4, 1994, the Redevelopment Agency of the City of San Jose. 109 Urban Design Review Board memorandum, May 5, 1994, the Redevelopment Agency of the City of San Jose. 110 Jump Cuts, schematic proposal for installation, UA Cineplex Theatre, San Jose, Elizabeth Diller + Ricardo

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also worked with Romm on an unrealized design modification of the Atlanta Braves stadium. 121 Request for Qualifications for George R. Moscone Convention Center Expansion Project Public Art Program, 1996, San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Archive. 122 Interview with Lyn Rice, September 24, 2008. 123 Letter of Ricardo Scofidio to Jill Manton, February 24, 1998, SFAC Archive. 124 “Diller+ Scofidio Proposal for Moscone Expansion 5/27/98,” SFAC Archive. 125 Earlier titles for the project include Skin Job and Dead Air. A key precedent for the alternation of live surveillance images and television and prerecorded video is Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle (1968). See Edward A. Shanken, Art and Electronic Media Art (London: Phaidon, 2009), 100, and in the same volume Jud Yalkut, “Parts I and II of an Interview with Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider” (1969), 215–17. 126 Alan Burden, e-mail to the author, August 26, 2008. 127 Matthew Johnson, memo to George Pappas, May 31, 2003, SFAC Archive. One might note the sentence in the second version of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image [Bild], or, better, in a facsimile [Abbild], a reproduction” as a reference of the title. See The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Essays on Media, ed. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Tom Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 23. Diller and Scofidio list the anthology containing this essay (admittedly its first version with the crucial term Abbild translated as “likeness”) as one of their top ten favorite books. See Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books, ed. Jo Steffens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 58. 128 Minutes of SFAC Visual Arts Committee, July 17, 2002. 129 “Matthew Johnson, Project: Moscone: Facsimile,” November 7, 2002, 2, SFAC Archive. 130 Dan Gillham, e-mail to the author, August 21, 2008. 131 Letter of Adine K. Varah (Deputy City Attorney) to State Board of Equalization, November 8, 2002, 5, SFAC Archive. 132 Letter of Chris A. Schulz (State Board of Equalization) to Adine K. Varah, May 30, 2003, SFAC Archive. 133 E-mail of Adine K. Varah to Jill Manton, April 21, 2003, SFAC Archive. 134 San Francisco traditionally has provided artists with an uncommonly tolerant environment in which to install video art with controversial messages. The example of the 1998 project by artist Andy Cox, Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, broadcast on train platform announcement boards in BART stations, suggests a broad commitment to public cultural expression in the city. Anna McCarthy perceptively analyses this

case in Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, 231–40. Significantly, the expense of renting time to display the message “Capitalism Stops at Nothing” proved so expensive it was only on display for a month. On Facsimile as public media art and the maintenance issues such projects present, see Steve Dietz, “Interactive Publics,” Public Art Review 15, no. 1, issue 29 (Fall/Winter 2003): 23–29. 135 E-mail of Jill Manton to Rita Bruns (Multimedia), January 30, 2004, SFAC Archive. 136 Interview with Jill Manton, July 22, 2008. 137 Minutes of the SFAC Visual Arts Committee, October 19, 2005, www.sfgov.org/site/fac, accessed July 19, 2008. 138 Minutes of the SFAC Visual Arts Committee, February 15, 2006, www.sfgov.org/site/fac, accessed July 19, 2008. 139 Minutes of the SFAC Visual Arts Committee, February 20, 2008, www.sfgov.org/site/fac, accessed July 19, 2008. 140 For examples of the today ubiquitous media screen, see the projects presented in Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, eds., Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009). As of September 2011, Manton had obtained about $75,000 of free rigging, welding, and crane work to realize the retrofit. A new local mechanical engineer was working on the system, and one of the original system designers was working on the LED screen. The screen was moving with some difficulty, a consequence of cable tension changes from the heat level. The system hard drive died and several of the video display modules were not working. E-mail to the author, September 13, 2011. 141 Yalkut, interview with Gillette and Schneider, 217. 142 E-mail to the author, July 14, 2008. 143 Michael Bo, “Pro-Forma Gala: A Coup de Theatre,” Politiken (Denmark), August 12, 1996; Stina Nylen, “Nothing Is What It Pretends to Be in Monkey Business,” Kristianstadsbladet (Sweden), August 13, 1996; Per Theil, “Musical for the Money,” Berlingske Tidende, August 12, 1996. Bo called the performance “minimalistic, grandiose, vibrant, and vegetating at one and the same time.” Nylen wrote that “at times it is impossible to take all this in. It is overwhelming and the images almost too glaringly sharp.” All translations appear in a dossier of published reviews in the archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. For another project by Dumb Type, the 1990–93 performance ph, an investigation of the posthuman and commodity aesthetics, see Shanken, Art and Electronic Media, 148. 144 On the introduction of video into dance performance in the 1990s by Wim Vandekeybus and others, see Steve Dixon, Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007): 183–

Fusco shared Becker’s enthusiastic reaction. E-mail to the author, June 28, 2008. 155 Naomi Klein, No Logo (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999). 156 Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “Utopia’s Subtext (Subtopia),” in The Mirage City: Another Utopia (Tokyo: NTT Publishing, 1998), 215–28. I am grateful to Karen Severns and Koichi Mori for translating this text from the Japanese. 157 The most extensive documentation, including dialogue and set descriptions, of Jet Lag appear in éc/art S no. 1-99 (1999) and aciones 5 (1999). An excerpt from the performance is included on the DVD issued with the book by Guido Incerti, Daria Ricchi, and Deane Simpson, Diller + Scofidio + Renfro: The Ciliary Function Works and Projects, 1979–2007 (Milan: Skira, 2007). A helpful discussion about the collaboration on the project remains “A Conversation about Jet Lag,” between Diller + Scofidio, Jessica Chalmers, and Marianne Weems, ed. Jessica Chalmers, Performance Research 4, no. 2 (1999): 57–60. Published reviews include D. J. R. Bruckner, “Technology as a Setting for Isolation and Defeat,” New York Times, January 14, 2000; and Herbert Muschamp, “Exploring Space and Time, Here and Now,” New York Times, February 6, 2000. Bruckner noted that “what is surprising is that the actors, directed by Marianne Weems, can turn a spare, deft script by Jessica Chalmers into a play that transforms the technological wizardry into human passion, elation, delight, wonder, and understanding. It’s enough to make you toy with extending your potential by merging with a machine.” 158 The standard history of this saga is Nichols Tomalin and Ron Hall, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (New York: Stein and Day, 1970). At least two artists, Tacita Dean and Bas Jan Ader, also produced work about Crowhurst. 159 Diller+ Scofidio, “Jetlag,” a+u Architecture and Urbanism 5, no. 344 (June 1998): 44. 160 Teyssot describes his initial discussion with Lambert in his acknowledgments at the beginning of the catalog. See The American Lawn, ed. Georges Teyssot (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), vii. 161 Earlier exhibitions in the American Century exhibition were devoted to European modernist receptions of America, the theme park architecture of Disney, the landscape of Frederick Law Olmsted, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s wilderness projects of the 1920s. 162 Letter from Georges Teyssot to Phyllis Lambert, January 3, 1993, Archive of The American Lawn exhibition, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 163 Ibid. 164 See Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America, ed. Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 391. 165 Georges Teyssot, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, February 25, 1994, memo in Archive of The American

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208; and Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 59–101. 145 This recalls the abstraction of limbs of the Tiller Girls dancers that Siegfried Kracauer famously analyzed in his essay The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–88. 146 On the relation of work of D+S to the surrealist fascination with “intra-uterine” existence and spaces of the uncanny, see Vidler, “Homes for Cyborgs.” 147 Published reviews include “The Last Target of Frederic Flamand,” BalletTanz, (April 1996): 44–47; and Bernard Marcelis, “Virtual Imagery, Real Tension,” Art Press, April 1996, 70–71. 148 See The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, trans. Kyril FitzLyon, ed. Joan Acocella (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000), the first unexpurgated translation that restores much of the erotic content omitted from the 1936 publication of the diary. One can only speculate about how Moving Target might have been different and perhaps more erotically charged if its authors had been able to read this edition. 149 This scene recalls the sequence of a grimy male ballerina filmed from underneath in Entr’acte (Rene Clair and Francis Picabia, 1924), as it does the foot fetishism in L’Age d’or (Luis Buñuel, 1930). 150 Quoted in http://www.londondance.com/content, accessed July 14, 2008. The dance performances of Merce Cunningham, especially his 1974 collaboration with video maker Charles Atlas, Westbeth, suggest themselves as key precedents for the collaborations of Diller + Scofidio with Flamande. See Roger Copeland, “Merce Cunningham and the Aesthetic of Collage,” Drama Review 46, no. 1: 11–28. 151 See Arnd Wesemann, “Images Dance Better: Frederic Flamand’s EJM1 and EJM2,” Ballet International/ Tanz Aktuell no. 11 (November 1998): 46–47; Anna Kisselgoff, “Discovering a Cool Esthetic for Burning Issues,” New York Times, September 24, 1998, E1; Dominique Frétard, “Frederic Flamand, l’obsédé des corps mécaniques,” Le Monde, September 18, 1998. Frétard called the work of D+S “travail impeccable.” Kisselgoff wrote of EJM 1 that “it is easier to admire than to like” but warmed up to EJM 2 and noted “a high-tech production that questions high-tech has its virtues, even if it goes on too long.” 152 The work of Marey is admirably treated in Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 153 See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), esp. 93–108. 154 See Carol Becker, “The Second Johannesburg Biennial,” Art Journal, (Summer 1998): 92. Artist Coco

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Lawn exhibition, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 166 Plans for lawn literature listening stations were also scrapped. March 4, 1994, memo describing stories by Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Spalding Gray, Gary Indiana, and Patrick McGraw. 167 Interview with Nicholas Olsberg, July 6, 2008. 168 Nicholas Olsberg, memo of August 8, 1995, in the Archive of The American Lawn exhibition, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 169 Teyssot and Lambert, The American Lawn, x, xii. 170 Elizabeth Diller, “The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life,” in The Art of Architecture Exhibitions, ed. Kristin Feireiss (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001), 42. 171 Mark Wasiuta, interview, July 14, 2008. 172 Helen Malkin, interview, June 21, 2008. 173 Stereoscopic views of tourist scenes and distant lands, two common genres, add a further ironic dimension to the use of the stereoscope as a means of representing the prosaic lawn. On the tension between the visual and haptic in stereoscopic views, see David Trotter, “Stereoscopy: Modernism and the ‘Haptic,’” Critical Quarterly 46, no. 4 (December 2004): 38–58. 174 See Herbert Muschamp, “Looking at the Lawn, and Below the Surface,” New York Times, July 5, 1998, sec. 2, 1.32; “The Meaning of Mowing,” Economist, 348, no. 8078 (July 25–31, 1998): 82; Calvin Affleck, “National Velvet: The Canadian Centre for Architecture Locates the American Eden in a Patch of Grass,” Metropolis 18, no. 3 (November 1998): 121–23; Sara Blair, “The Grass Is Always Greener,” Preservation, January/February 1999, 78–79; Reinhold Martin, “The American Lawn: Surface of Everyday Life,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 2 (June 1999): 196–98; and Robin Veder, “Working the Techno-Lawn,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 2000): 344–63. Martin noted that “not the least was the very question of what, in the end, the exhibition itself was about. The American Lawn raised the stakes of architectural display, in the sense that it did not allow us to take for granted the didactic or interpretive functions of museum exhibitions in general . . . and . . . recognized the lawn as an indisputably historical phenomenon, although the particular history to which it belongs was left forever in doubt.” Veder wrote, “the installation’s provocative play with the relationship between form and content was so refreshing, so suggestive of the aesthetic makeover that history exhibits need” (345). 175 www.fondation.cartier.com/exhibitions, accessed on September 1, 2008. See also the exhibition catalog 1 Monde Réel (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and Actes Sud, 1999). 176 See Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), trans. Claudia Novack-Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2004).

177 For a discussion of the significance of transparency in the project, see Anthony Vidler, “Robots in the House: Surveillance and the Domestic Landscape,” Daidalos 73 (June 1999): 78–85. In what remains the most thoughtful discussion of the installation, he observes that “through the gentle irony of its subject—the broken toy—it defuses much of the hysterical hype that sees in this new surveillance culture something entirely without precedent, and fails to understand its deep roots in the earlier modernist culture of modernism” (84). On the Fehlbaum robots, see Dan Simmons, Robots Collection Rolf Fehlbaum (Paris: Actes Sud, 1999). 178 Quoted in Eames Demetrios, An Eames Primer (New York: Universe Publishing, 2001), 147. 179 E-mail to the author, July 9, 2008. 180 Interview with Douglas Cooper, July 20, 2011. 181 Arden Reed, “Looking for a Place: SITE Santa Fe’s Third International Biennial, the Off-Site Venues,” THE Magazine, (September 1999): 57. 182  MacArthur Fellows: The First 25 Years; 1981–2005 (Chicago: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, 2005), 98, 299.

C h a pte r Th r e e

1 For Renfro’s interests and thinking about architecture, see Charles Renfro, “Undesigning the Art School,” in Art School: Propositions for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 159–76; “Reinventing the Skyline: A Conversation with Architect Charles Renfro,” SOMA 23, no. 8 (December 2009/January 2010); and “The Naughty Architect: Charles Renfro, Mastermind of the Broad Museum,” New York Observer, January 12, 2011. 2 Interview with Ben Mickus, July 31, 2008. 3  Describing their studio working process and methods of collaboration, the architects observe, “Our full-time staff can come into the dialogue because these are hand-picked people; their orientation is already similar. We like to open up the conversation, but . . . We are control freaks. We are . . . Staff and outside people are really uncomfortable with the way we work. It’s a dysfunctional family. . . . Our ideas cross over and grow in similar directions. Our work is in the same trajectory; our arguments are over nuance. Our temperaments complement one another. We fill in the crevices of the other’s deficiencies.” Diller and Scofidio quoted in Louise Harpman, “Drawing the Line: Live Together/ Work Together,” Practices 5/6 (1997): 68–69. 4  Interview with Mark Wasiuta, July 14, 2008; interview with Lyn Rice, August 22, 2008. 5  Ricardo Scofidio quoted in Guido Incerti, Daria Ricchi, and Deane Simpson, Diller + Scofidio + Renfro: The



























“Floats” by Robert Breer exhibited at the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair. See Michelle Kuo, “Everything Goes: An Interview with Robert Breer,” Artforum 49, no. 3 (November 2010): 214–21. 19  For a classic assessment of the Seagram Building, see William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972), 221–78. 20  Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 348. 21  Sabine von Fischer, “Im Seagram Building,” Bauwelt 27 (July 27, 2001): 12–15. 22  Quoted in Meryl Gordon, “Table Stakes,” New York Magazine, January 10, 2000, 37. 23  Mimi Sheraton, “From Haute Cuisine to Brasserie Style,” New York Times, January 30, 1981. 24  Interview with Phyllis Lambert, June 19, 2008. 25  Ibid. 26  Gordon, “Table Stakes,” 37. 27  Quoted in Peter C. Jones, “Killer Diller: Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio bring Brasserie Back to Life,” Shuttle Sheet, June 2001, 18. Phyllis Lambert notes that Johnson himself understood the Seagram Building as a Gesamtkunstwerk. See her “Stimmung at Seagram: Philip Johnson Counters Mies van der Rohe,” Grey Room 20 (Summer 2005): 38–59. 28  “ The Four Seasons,” Interiors 119 (December 1959): 82, 86. 29  Brasserie tear sheet, Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects. This description evokes the argument of Gottfried Semper that the wall evolves from textiles. It also anticipates his tectonic theory and its emphasis upon architecture as dressing (Bekleidung). See Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), esp. 242–50. 30  Interview with Nick Valenti, June 7, 2011. 31  Suggestive precedents are the aspirin-shaped bar stools Damien Hirst designed for his restaurant Pharmacy that operated in London from 1997 to 2003. 32  As suggested by the numerous reviews posted on www.yelp.com. 33  “Why aren’t the various video projections, visible at this time only to those in the restaurant itself, available on the Internet? Since Diller + Scofidio have used this strategy before, what are they waiting for? The short leap to the Internet would not only raise the glamour level of the Brasserie—it would transform the restaurant into a fascinating global stage.” Jan-Willem Poels, “15 Minutes of Fame,” Frame 14 (2000): 95. 34  Perhaps the most effusive was by Paul Goldberger, “Comfort Zone,” Metropolis, May 2000, 139–40, all the

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Ciliary Function; Works and Projects 1979–2007 (Milan: Skira, 2007), 51. 6  Interview with Douglas Cooper, July 20, 2011. 7  Arata Isozaki, “The Kitagata Housing Complex, Gifu,” Lotus 100 (March 1999): 40–46. One might note the receptivity of this region of Japan to cultural experimentation as indicated by the opening in 1995 of artist Shusaku Arakawa’s Site of Reversible Destiny–Yoro Park. 8  Christine Hawley, interview, May 17, 2011. 9  See Ann Waswo, Public Housing in Postwar Japan: A Social History (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); and Hisaakira Kano, “Public Housing in Japan,” Annales of Public and Cooperative Economics 30, no. 1 (1959): 76–80. 10  Kano’s discussion of the steel frame and reinforced concrete structure in these buildings with main beams at every third floor sheds light upon Isozaki’s criticism of them. 11  Isozaki, “The Kitagata Housing Complex,” 45. 12  See Kazuyo Sejima in Gifu (Barcelona: Actar, nd). 13  See Diller + Scofidio, “Slither Housing—Kitagata Apartment Reconstruction Process, Gifu,” Dialogue 40 (September 2000): np. 14  Statement on Slither, nd, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 15  Interview with Paul Lewis, July 8, 2008. 16  Already in a fax to Koji Itakura of May 24, 1996, they allude to these difficulties: “We are having great bureaucratic nightmares with the housing project and we are coming [to Japan] to rescue a little architecture for our project, as the government is eliminating it all piece by piece.” Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. Few discussions of Slither have been published, but see Arian Mostaedi, New Apartment Buildings (Barcelona: Instituto Monsa de Ediciones, 2001). 17  From original research conducted by journalist Emiko Wada in June and July 1998 with thirty-six residents of Slither. Portions of this quote appeared in Wada, “Gifu Hi-Town Kitagata Housing Project: Living Style Research,” 10 + 1 (Tokyo: Inax, 2002), 107–13. Translated by Karen Severns and Koichi Mori. 18  The architects developed six other installation proposals for the Philadelphia Museum, which included a video screen in the central pediment, a printed and molded rubber carpeting in the main stair, a two-sided “mirror wall” across the museum courtyard, mobile vitrines on the main stairway, multiscalar projection screens in front of its main facade, and message-bearing helium inflatable balloons tethered to the building. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Centenary Installation Proposals, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. A suggestive precedent for the motorized grass rounds that Diller and Scofidio eventually proposed are the self-propelled fiberglass

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more striking given his earlier criticisms of work by the architects. 35 Travelogues description, www.dsrny.com accessed July 2009. An early alternate title was In Evidence. 36  Wendy Feuer, interview, July 16, 2010. For a review of the piece, see Celestine Bohlen, “Being Met at the Airport by New Art; Big, Bold Installations for a Rebuilt Kennedy Arrivals Terminal,” New York Times, May 24, 2001. 37  Project description, DS+R website. 38  For an overview of the organization and the competition, see www.eyebeam.org, accessed August 29, 2008. 39  On the competition, see Marc Kristal, “Measuring the Competition,” Metropolis (November 2002): 96–99, 128–31. 40  Phase 3 brief, fax from Eyebeam to Diller + Scofidio, June 21, 2001. Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 41  John S. Johnson, letter to Diller + Scofidio, March 8, 2002, archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 42  Cyril M. Harris, Dictionary of Architecture and Construction (New York: McGraw Hill, 4 ed. 2005), 1046. 43  Likely in dialogue with the 1998 design by Rem Koolhaas for the extension to Museum of Modern Art in New York. 44  Ricardo Scofidio, e-mail to the author, December 28, 2011. “Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology,” Architecture, January 2003, 76. 45  On this tendency in contemporary design, see Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn (London: Architectural Design, 1993). Diller offers her perspective on the copying of architectural designs in Fred A. Bernstein, “Hi, Gorgeous. Haven’t I Seen You Somewere?,” New York Times, August 28, 2005. 46  Eyebeam proposal, archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects. 47  A suggestive precedent for this spiderlike robot is The Senster (1969–71) by Edward Inhatowicz. See Edward A. Shanken, Art and Electronic Media Art (London: Phaidon, 2009), 141. 48  Among the unrealized projects by the studio that suggest these aspirations are the Wooster Group Theater (2002); Biblioteca de Mexico Jose Vasconcelos, designed in collaboration with TEN Arquitectos (2003); the Liauning Collection (2004); the Learning Center (2004); the Russian Jewish Museum (2007); the Staedel Museum Expansion (2008); the Hudson Railyards (2007); the Aros Sky Space (2007); and the Taekwando Park, designed in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates (2008). 49  Most ebullient in his review of Eyebeam was Muschamp: “Diller and Scofidio’s project is Olympic class. The most fully developed piece of architecture their office has produced thus far, the design extends into durably











built form the conceptual elegance of the ‘alternative’ architecture for which Diller and Scofidio are best known. . . . Diller and Scofidio have rendered Eyebeam’s Utopian outlook into concise urban form. No architects today can match their elegance in translating social analysis into space.” “An Elegant Marriage of Inside and Outside,” New York Times, October 2, 2001, 34. See also Nina Rapaport, “The Gallery: Visions of a Shapeshifting Museum,” Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition),  October 10, 2001, A14; Julie V. Iovine, “An Avant-Garde Design for a New-Media Center,” New York Times, March 21, 2002, B1, B5; Shonquis Moreno, “Rewriting the Museum,” Frame 24 (January–February 2002): 118– 26; and Douglas Davis, “Museum of the Third Kind,” Art in America (June 2005): 75–81. For the most detailed published version of the design, see Keith Mitnick, ed., Diller and Scofidio: Eyebeam Museum of New Media, Michigan Architecture Papers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2004). 50  In the first, new construction would be added to the existing Twenty-First Street structure. The second scenario envisioned a new building. And the third proposed combining the building with a garage fronting Twentieth Street. All emphasized flexibility and proposed different sets of spatial attributes—quasi methodologies—for realizing the program. Although less widely known than the competition entry, these proposals are equally rigorous and suggestive of considerable research. Deane Simpson and Dirk Hebel worked on them. 51  See the interview with David Rockwell on the design and construction of the viewing platforms, http:// www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_rockwell_ builds_at_ground_zero.html. See also Herbert Muschamp, “A Nation Challenged: An Appraisal; With Viewing Platforms, a Dignified Approach to Ground Zero,” New York Times, December 22, 2001, who writes: “But the design does hold meaning. It embodies stoic principles. It treats the need for design as a reduction to essentials. The result has substance. Stop the mystification, the grandiosity, the use of architecture to disconnect our history from ourselves. These ideas deserve to outlive the limited duration of the platforms themselves.” 52  Quoted in John Leland, “Letting the View Speak for Itself,” New York Times, January 3, 2002. 53  Quoted in ibid. See also the interview in Incerti, Ricchi, and Simpson, Diller + Scofidio + Renfro: The Ciliary Function, 126–27. 54  Interview with Kevin Kennon, May 20, 2011. For a review of the platform, see Joshua Decter, “A Strangely New New York,” Flash Art (March–April 2002): 53–55, who praises it for not competing with Ground Zero and being humble and provisional. 55  Diller + Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 44. This book remains























Project” in which the studio proposed purifying the water of a Venetian canal and drinking it as espresso. 64  For a representative review see Ned Cramer, “All Natural,” Architecture, July 2002, 53–65. 65  Vogue, September 26, 2006, 554. This enthusiasm was echoed by other reviewers. “The Cloud is . . . a great place to chill out in the current heat wave. Its bar has some 20 kinds of bottled water, a nice idea. If only the rest of the arteplage were as cool.” Ed Ward, “Have They Gone Cuckoo? Swiss Expo .02 Proves Bizarre,” Wall Street Journal Europe, June 28–30, 2002. 66  For a checklist of the exhibition, see the catalog Scanning (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 169–70. 67  On the transportation of the Duchamp Wall from the Museum of Modern Art and its clandestine inclusion in the Whitney show, see Arthur Lubow, “Architects, in Theory,” New York Times Magazine, February 16, 2003, 36–41. Although it did elude the check list of the Whitney, the wall also provided tremendous publicity for the exhibition once written about in this article and undeniably gave the architects greater control over their retrospective. 68  Patricia C. Phillips, “A Parallax Practice: A Conversation with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio,” Art Journal 63, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 64. 69  See Noah Chasin, “Blurring Boundaries: The Whitney Showcases Cutting-Edge Architects Diller + Scofidio,” Time Out New York, March 13–20 2003, 72, who laments the minimal attention given the ICA and Eyebeam. Herbert Muschamp criticizes the subtitle of the show, the didactic wall texts, and the absence of computer models of Lincoln Center. His overall reaction to the show was ebullient: “Our time has been rich in cross-disciplinary encounters between art, architecture, photography, fashion, and computer imaging. Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio are the major connectors. No one has conducted traffic between these productive zones more skillfully than they have.” “The Classicists of Contemporary Design,” February 28, 2003, B41. A more critical assessment by Scott Rothkopf, which chastised their interest in Duchamp, appeared in Artforum 41, no. 10 (June 2003): 180. By far the most negative response was Jerry Saltz, “Architectural Follies: Second Hand Conceptualism at the Whitney,” Village Voice, April 18–22, 2003, 51. For Scofidio, Saltz’s review confirmed the border wars between art and architecture were far from over. 70  Elizabeth Diller, “Mural,” unpublished ms., nd. 71  In May 2010, the piece was reinstalled at the MAXII art museum in Rome, this time as a printing device that drilled a large image of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with the words “Drill Baby Drill.” 72  For an overview of the project, see The Snow Show, ed. Lance Fung (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

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the most extensive discussion of the project. For an overview of the Swiss Expo, see Imagination. Das offizielle Buch der Expo .02 (Zurich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2002). 56  Projecting text onto clouds was proposed by Vladimir Tatlin in a design for his 1919–20 Monument to the Third International. See Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), 226. 57  Diller + Scofidio, Blur, 162–63. 58  Ibid, 204. 59  Ibid. One might note Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek’s 1999 SoftSite project in which the form of skyscrapers emerges in response to information and visitor behavior as an intriguing precedent for the brain coat. 60  For the reaction of one member of the Direction Technique to the design process, see Henri Rochat, “Eine künstliche Dunstwolke,” Schweizer Ingenieur und Architekt 33/34 (August 22, 2000): 12–16. For an account of the 1970 Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at the Osaka Expo ’70 that prefigures Blur, see Fujiko Nakaya, “Making ‘Fog’ or Low-Hanging Stratus Cloud,” and Thomas R. Mee, “Notes and Comments on Clouds and Fog,” both in Experiments in Art and Technology, Pavilion, ed. Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972), 207–27. 61  Interview with Dirk Hebel, September 1, 2008. 62  Most notable perhaps was the article by Hubert Damisch, “Blotting Out Architecture: A Fable in Seven Parts,” Log 1 (Fall 2003): 9–26, in which he investigated the structure and materiality of the cloud. Also notable is Mark Dorrian, who analyses the history of the figure of the cloud in recent architecture via its manifestations in the work of Gehry and Coop Himmelblau and reads the piece as “a new development in the sociopolitical history of air conditioning— which takes the form of a localized air conditioning of environmentally manipulated zones, no longer encapsulated within building envelopes, secured against a generally degrading environment.” See “Clouds of Architecture,” Radical Philosophy 144 (2007): 32–38. Carey Wolfe analyses the cloud utilizing the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, to suggest how it subverts traditional mass-mediated communication. See his What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 203–38. Philipp Ursprung interprets Blur as a species of event architecture that resists the logic of commodification. See his “Weisses Rauschen. Elisabeth Diller und Ricardo Scofidios Blur Building und die räumliche Logik der jüngsten Architektur,” Kritische Berichte 3, no. 29 (2001): 5–15. 63  It is likely through their familiarity with the work of Hans Haacke, who himself realized works involving the pumping of water, including the 1972 “Rhine Water Purification Plant.” Visitors breathing the filtered Swiss lake water in Blur prefigures the unrealized 2008 “PH

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73  Description of Pure Mix, www.dsrny.com, accessed July 28, 2010. 74  File on The Snow Show, Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 75  E-mail from John Roloff to Lance Fung, January 22, 2004. 76  For a thoughtful reviews of The Snow Show, see Tom Vanderbilt, “The Unsettling Art of Building a Snow House: Lessons from Lapland,” ID, June 2004, 62–69; and Douglas Cooper, “Ultimate North: Lapland,” Travel and Leisure, November 2004, the latter available online at http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/ ultimate‑north, accessed August 16, 2011. Justin McGurk praises Pure Mix by claiming “but for all of its cleverness the best thing about it is the way it looks like a graveyard during the day and then turns into a 1970s disco floor at night” in his essay “Marble Dust Crunches Underfoot, Frost Is Forming on Your Eyelashes, and You Can’t Feel Your Thumbs,” Icon 11 (UK), April 2004, 80–84. 77  “An Eco-House for the Future,” New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2008, 85. This project is also reproduced in Elizabeth Diller, “Phantom House: Sustaining the American Dream,” in Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass, ed. Michael Bell and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 250–55. 78  “An Eco-House for the Future.” 79  See Ayan Sen, “Private Capital for Public Benefit: Strategies in the Real Estate Development of Fan Pier, Boston,” MA dissertation, MIT, 2001. 80  Patti Hartigan and Anthony Flint, “City Selects ICA’s Museum Proposal” Boston Globe, November 11, 1999, A1. 81  Sarah Goldhagen, interview, April 15, 2008. See also Geoff Edgers, “The New ICA: How They Did It,” Boston Globe, December 6, 2006, K6, and the DVD Making the ICA (Branka Bogdanov, 2006). 82  For a reading of the aesthetics of the ICA interior that emphasizes the agency of the architects in the face of budgetary constraints, see Sylvia Lavin, “Peripatetic Invisibility, or Not Enough Ado about Nothing: ICA/ Boston,” Harvard Design Magazine 28 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 86–89. 83  Diller + Scofidio, ICA Final Concept Phase, January 28, 2002, np. 84  Vernon Mays, “The Art of Building for Art: Diller Scofidio + Renfro Traded One Side of the Gallery Wall for the Other at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston,” ARCHITECT Magazine, March 12, 2007, www. architecturemagazine.com/curtain-walls/the-art-ofbuilding-for-art.aspx, accessed August 28, 2008. 85  On this agreement, see the memo “Authorization to Submit an Amendment to the South Boston Waterfront District Municipal Harbor Plan for the Development of the Institute of Contemporary Art,”









from Rebecca Barnes, chief planner; Kairos Shen, director of planning; and Richard McGuinness, senior waterfront planner to Mark Maloney, director, Boston Redevelopment Authority (November 14, 2002), Boston Redevelopment Agency. I am grateful to Richard McGuinness for making a copy of this memo available to me. 86  See www.fanpierboston.com for a potent example of the rhetoric of the waterfront view (accessed August 28, 2008). For a criticism of the decision by the ICA to omit the lenticular glass window from the building, see Jeffrey Kipnis, “Director Medvedow, PUT BACK THAT SCREEN!!! ICA/Boston,” Harvard Design Magazine 28 (Spring/Summer 2008): 90–94; Sarah Amelar, “Boston ICA,” Architectural Record, Mary 2007, 109–15; and Edgers, “The New ICA.” 87  The members of the architecture committee expressed initial concern that the pitch of the design might induce vertigo in the visitors. “Issues and Questions Concerning the New ICA Conceptual Design (Questions for both ICA and/or for Design Team), January 31, 2002.” Archive of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, New York. 88  Quoted in the DVD of the ICA competition. 89  On the construction of the ICA, see Michelle Hillman, “New ICA, Ex-builder Tangle over Construction,” Boston Business Journal, October 12, 2007, www. boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2007/10/15/ story3.html, accessed August 3, 2010; Ted Smalley Brown, “Boston’s ICA Still a Work in Progress,” Architectural Record, February 28, 2008, http:/ archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/ archives/080225boston; and Geoff Edgers, “Museum to Pay $2.2m to Builder Who Sued,” Boston Globe, December 5, 2007. 90 For a more critical view, see Hal Foster, “Architecture Eye,” Artforum (February 2007): 247–53. Foster wonders, “How will art fare in a museum that makes such an insistent claim on our visual attention? Although the galleries are given pride of place in the cantilevered pavilion, they might seem secondary to other space-events of the building . . . and as artists explore the building as stage and/or site, might they also feel a little subordinate to it?” See also the discussion of the ICA in Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011), 87–103; and Antonello Marotta, Diller + Scofidio: Blurred Theater, trans. Christine Tilley (Rome: Edilstampa, 2011), 66–71. In the citation for the award of the Boston Society of Architects 2007 Harleston Parker Medal, the jury noted, “The decision to recommend the ICA for this award was a polarizing one for the committee. The dissenting voices found the building to be an unnecessarily showy effort that happened to benefit from a beautiful site. The galleries, which were purposely understated to avoid competition with the art, were perceived by some jurors as lost opportunities. Nevertheless, the

































“Lightness of Being,” Newsday, April 14, 2004, A8. 99  On the deteriorating infrastructure of Lincoln Center as a prime motivation for the redevelopment project, see Ralph Blumenthal, “Midlife Hits Lincoln Center with Calls for Rich Face Lift,” New York Times, June 1, 1999, A1. 100  2 × 4 contributed the building signage, way-finding, and website menus. 101  For an argument in support of the restoration of North Court, see Nina Rappaport and Ken Smith, “Modern Landscape Architecture, a Forgotten Art: The Case of Lincoln Center,” Future Anterior 2, no. 11 (Spring 2005): 50–57. The controversy about preserving the North Court is described in Alex A. Ulam, “Saving an Altered Landscape,” Landscape Architecture, May 2001, 28–38. 102  On the notion of the social condenser associated with Soviet constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg, see Victor Buchli, “Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow: Contesting the Social and Material World,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57, no. 2 (June 1998): 160–81. 103  The library at the Technical University in Delft (1997) by the Dutch firm Mecanoo is another precedent for a lawn roof, one with which DS+R was doubtless familiar. 104  Quoted in Richard Lacayo, “Looking Around: Reflections on Art and Architecture,” www.lookingaroundblogs.time.com, accessed February 18, 2009. 105  See Meredith Claussen, Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 257–59, 326–33, for a more positive assessment that cogently argues for the functional sophistication of the building. 106  Jane Moss quoted in Jeff Lunden, “Music Returns to Renovated Alice Tully Hall,” www.npr.org/templates/ story, accessed February 27, 2009. 107  For the most thorough discussions by the architects of the expansion of the Belluschi building, see “Morphing Lincoln Center: Interview with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio by Jorge Otero-Pailos,” Future Anterior 6, no. 1 (Summer 2009): 84–97; and the interview with them by Stefano Casciani in Domus 926 (June 2009): 26–27. 108  “Morphing Lincoln Center.” 109  Elizabeth Diller, “Two Thoughts,” Log 10 (Fall 2007). 110  Jeff Lunden, “Music Returns to Renovated Alice Tully Hall.” 111  E-mail to author, November 4, 2009. 112  Nicolai Ourossoff, “Boxy to Bold: A Concert Hall Burst Out,” New York Times, February 19, 2009. 113  Quoted in Sheila Kim, “Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Alice Tully Hall Opens,” www.interiordesign.net/index, accessed February 23, 2009. 114  Interview with Tom Tschoff, July 31, 2008.

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building’s powerful relationship to the water and its inventive economy of means give it a special quality.” “2007: The Year in Review,” Architecture Boston 11, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 25. 91  The fact that Boston had recently spent $25 billion improving its highway and transportation infrastructure through the so-called Big Dig tunnel and I-90 extension making Fan Pier more accessible and the city less gridlocked must also be understood as a key prerequisite for the successful redevelopment of Fan Pier. Interview with Richard McGuinness, October 3, 2008. As Vivien Li of the Boston Harbor Association notes, the ICA was also the fortunate beneficiary of the political acumen of Bob Dorran, then secretary of environmental affairs in Massachusetts. Interview with Vivien Li, October 3, 2008. 92  Clive Barnes, “Lincoln Center,” Holiday 44 (September 1968): 36–44, 92–96, quoted in Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960, 716. 93  Wallace Harrison quoted in Wesley R. Janz, “Building Nations by Designing Buildings: Corporatism, Eero Saarinen, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts,” Working Monographs in Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, August 1995, 6, quoted in Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 178. Zipp’s book provides the most detailed reconstruction of the cold war context of Lincoln Center. A useful general overview of the project is found in Stern, Mellins, and Fishman, New York 1960,, 674–724. For accounts by those involved in its realization see Edgar B. Young, Lincoln Center: The Building of an Institution (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980); and Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970), 513–33. A recent history commissioned by Lincoln Center is Stephen Stamas and Sharon Zane, Lincoln Center: A Promise Realized, 1979–2006 (New York: Lincoln Center and John Wiley, 2006). 94  John D. Rockefeller III, quoted in “The Rockefeller Touch in Building,” Architectural Forum 108, no. 3 (March 1958): 90–91, quoted in Zipp, Manhattan Projects, 161. 95  For assessments of the role of Moses, see Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson, Robert Moses and the Transformation of New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 279–89; and Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Vintage, 1975), 1013–16. 96  For a recent critique of its centralization of the performing arts, see Anthony Tommasini, “Lincoln Center: Mixed Reviews,” New York Times, May 10, 2009. 97  All quotations come from the DVD of this lecture that Benjamin Prosky kindly made available to me. 98  Ricardo Scofidio, quoted in Justin Davidson,

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230

115  See Robin Pogrebin, “More Room to Pirouette at Lincoln Center Studios,” New York Times, January 19, 2007. 116  On the acoustic richness of Alice Tully Hall, see Barrymore Laurence Scherer, “Alice Tully’s Pleasing Makeover,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2009, D7; and Ellen Lampert-Greaux, “Alice Tully Hall Acoustics Win Rave Reviews,” Live Design, March 2009. For a critique of its sound as dry and without reverberation, see Allan Kozinn, “Tully Hall Makeover, Warts and All,” New York Times, July 2, 2009. Praise for the renovation as a “bold operation with bravery, skill, and panache” is found in the review by Suzanne Stephens, Architectural Record, June 2009, 63–66. Paul Goldberger writes, “It’s somewhat amazing that Lincoln Center hired Diller Scofidio + Renfro, instead of opting for any one of several starchitects who were shortlisted . . . they have turned out to be just what the place needed.” “Center Stage,” New Yorker, February 2, 2009, 74–75. For a compendium of negative criticism of the renovation, see Carter B. Horsley, “Bad Cosmetic Surgery at Alice Tully Hall,” http://www. thecityreview.com/atully.html, accessed September 14, 2011. 117  Nicolai Ourossoff calls the LED risers “distracting and pointless” and sees the project as “an unwitting metaphor symbol of an atomized culture.” See “The Greening of Lincoln Center,” New York Times, May 21, 2010, C19, 22. 118  See http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1880668,00.html. 119  For a review, see Linda C. Lentz, “Lincoln Center Restaurant Pavilion & Lawn,” Architectural Record, June 2011, 46–53. On the turf roof at Hypar, see Robin Pogrebin, “New Art at Lincoln Center: Lawn Care,” New York Times, April 27, 2011. Designed as a completely rational structure without any curved elements so as to simplify the installation of finishes and infrastructure, the lawn was tested in a mock-up in a Jersey City parking lot in 2005. 120  Interview with Jane Moss, July 11, 2011. 121  Observers of public architecture in Washington, DC, have already registered the accomplishments at Lincoln Center. See Philip Kennicott, “Kennedy Center and Others Should Take Note of Lincoln Center Redesign,” Washington Post, January 10, 2011. 122  Two overviews of this history on which I have depended are Robert Hammond and Casey Jones, “Reclaiming the High Line,” www.thehighline.org; and Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street (New York: Friends of the High Line, 2008). A useful account is also found in Karen E. Steen, “Friends in High Places,” Metropolis, December 2005, 118–23, 149–57. For an indispensable history by the founders of Friends of the High Line, see Joshua David and Robert Hammond, High Line: The Inside Story















of New York City’s Park in the Sky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 123  Andrea Lynn, “Chelsea: The Greening of the High Line,” Community Gazette for District 3, March 10, 2004. 124  John Freeman Gill, “The Charming Gadfly Who Saved the High Line,” New York Times, May 13, 2007. 125  Between 1979 and 1982, Steven Holl designed a “Bridge of Houses” intended for construction over the High Line. As Amy Sillman brought to my attention, the abandoned railway inspired many student design projects at Cooper Union during the 1980s. 126  See Anne F. Garreta, “The Secret Garden,” New York Times, August 21, 2005. 127  J. A. Lobbia, “One-Track Mind,” Village Voice, December 27, 2001–January 2, 2002. 128  Adam Gopnik, “A Walk on the High Line,” New Yorker, May 21, 2001, 44–49. The essay later was reprinted in Joel Sternfeld, Walking the High Line (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2001). Sternfeld’s photographs are available on the High Line website, http://www.thehighline.org/galleries/images/joel‑sternfeld, accessed September 13, 2011. 129  Interview with Robert Hammond, June 21, 2011. 130  J. A. Lobbia, “One-Track Mind.” 131  Elizabeth Brennan, “Judge Rules against Demolition Plans for New York’s Historic Elevated Rail,” Preservation Online, March 14, 2002. 132  Michael Killeen, “Seven to Save,” Metropolis, February 2002. 133  David W. Dunlap, “On West Side, Rail Plan is Up and Walking,” New York Times, December 22, 2002. 134  Ibid. 135  David W. Dunlap, “Millions Set for Public Space,” New York Times, July 10, 2003. 136  “Effort to Turn Old Rail Line into ‘Park in the Sky,’” transcript of radio broadcast aired on 1010 WINS, New York, July 17, 2003. 137  Anne Michaud, “City Announces High Line Plan,” Crain’s New York Business, September 24, 2003. 138  New York City, Department of City Planning, Special West Chelsea Rezoning District, http://home2.nyc. gov/html/dcp/html/westchelsea/westchelsea3c/ shtml, accessed April 12, 2008. 139  Kenneth T. Jackson, “From Rail to Ruin,” New York Times, November 2, 2003. 140  Choire Sicha, “Hanging Garden of Bable-On,” New York Observer, March 28, 2008. 141  Luiz Perez, “Bold Visions for Rusty Icon,” New York Newsday Online, July 16, 2004, accessed April 2, 2008. 142  Ibid. 143  Adam Sternbergh, “The High Line: It Brings Good Things to Life,” New York, April 30, 2007. 144  On the entries to the competition, see Justin Davidson, “Remaking Tracks,” Newsday, July 29, 2004; and Gavin Keeney, “The Highline and the Return of





















Reminder of the Impermanence of New York City,” New York Post, June 19, 2011. The $2 billion in private investment around the park is discussed in Patrick McGeegan, “The High Line Isn’t Just a Sight to See; It’s Also an Economic Dynamo,” New York Times, June 6, 2011. 157  Although less recognized than the physical structure of the High Line, the rezoning of West Chelsea facilitated by Amanda Burden, director of the New York City Department of City Planning, that created a 30-foot easement around the rail track, was an essential element in the realization of the park. On the High Line as a vehicle of gentrification, see Kim Moody, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (New York: New Press, 2007), 228. That David, Hammond, and community members implemented the project from the bottom up, against the Giuliani administration and initially in conflict with neighborhood property owners, discredits this analysis. 158  For a Marxian analysis of the Bloomberg administration in relation to the politics of neoliberalism, see Julian Brash, Bloomberg’s New York: Clash and Governance in the Luxury City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Sharon Zukin recognizes the virtues of the High Line as a public space while citing it as an instance of the privatization of public parks since the Reagan era. See her blog http://blog.oup. com/2010/09/high‑line/ (accessed June 10, 2011) accompanying her book, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 159  See http://pentagram.com/en/new/2011/06/ the‑high‑line‑case‑study.php (accessed June 22, 2011) for a discussion of the design of the High Line logo. 160  Ricardo Scofidio, “These Trees Are Like people,” www. biennial.com/content/LiverpoolBiennia12008MA, accessed January 3, 2009. Abigail Doan wrote, “The installation included rotating trees that engage viewers in a totally eerie spin on human nature, emotions, and choreographed interaction.” Inhabitant, October 18, 2008. Oliver Basciano claimed, “The effect is subtle, contemplative, and almost magical,” in his review “The New Face of Liverpool,” September 28, 2008, Www.artinfo.com/news.story/28731/the-newface-of-liverpool/?page=1. 161  See the catalog YouPrison. Reflections on the Limitations of Freedom and Space (Turin: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2008). 162  Coincidentally, around this time a private corporation involved with the construction and running of correctional institutions approached Diller Scofidio + Renfro with the invitation to design an actual prison. Finding incarceration an unacceptable strategy for addressing social problems and the space of the prison cell architecturally limited, they declined the invitation.

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the Irreal: A Second Competition for a Real Project,” Competitions 14, no. 4 (Winter 2004/05): 12–19. 145  Designing the High Line, 7. 146  Interview with Robert Hammond, June 21, 2011. 147  Ibid. 148  James Corner, in Designing the High Line, 7. Although invisible to visitors, the infrastructure of the High Line, especially its drainage, planting, and lighting systems, are the most complicated and innovative elements of the project. The design team included lighting specialist L’Observatoire International and structural engineers Buro Happold, whose work included stripping the industrial contaminants in the railway bed, introducing new soil, and replanting much of the original vegetation in the High Line, some of which included plant species not native to New York introduced by seeds spread by railroad cars. On Piet Oudolf’s contribution to the landscaping of the High Line, see Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury, Landscapes in Landscapes (New York: Monacelli Press, 2011), 188–215. 149  Lisa Le Fevre, “Rail Revival: Designs for New York’s High Line Unveiled,” New York Times, April 15, 2005. 150  Justin Davidson, “Abandoned Rail’s an Urban Dream: A MoMA Exhibit and a New Website Dare to Envision an Oasis That Meanders Down the West Side,” New York Newsday.com, April 21, 2005. 151  Hammond recalls that High Line donor Mike Novogratz immediately grasped the relationship between the spaces of the ICA Mediatheque and the Tenth Avenue Overlook. See David and Hammond, High Line, 104. 152  See Hugh Hardy, “The Romance of Abandonment: Industrial Parks,” Places 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 32–37. For an assessment of the High Line as “postindustrial” park, see Nicolaus Mills, “New York City Reclaims Its Ruins,” CNN Opinion, June 10, 2011. 153  Designing the High Line, 38, 118. 154  Ibid., 7. 155  See Mark Wigley, Constant’s New Babylon (Rotterdam: 010, 1999). 156  For representative reviews, see Karrie Jacobs, “Beyond the Hype,” Metropolis, June 2009, 58, 60, 62; Steve Cuozzo, “High Line,” New York Post, June 9, 2009; Justin Davidson, “The Twin Pleasures of the High Line: A Petite New Park, and a District of Lively Architecture,” New York, June 15–22, 2009, 134–37; Jeff Byles, “Spur on the High Line,” Architects Newspaper, April 15, 2009, 5. Nicolai Ourosoff, in “On High, a Fresh Outlook,” New York Times, June 10, 2009, called the park “one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York in years.” Cuozzo summarized the praise by noting, “Everyone loves the High Line—Its fabulousness has been proclaimed by architects, landscape designers, and by just about every human being who’s walked upon it.” in “A Walk among the Dead: High Line Is a

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163  The exhibition catalog was published as Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio, Native Land, Stop Eject (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2008). 164  For a transcript of the installation, see “Exits: Texts and Maps by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin,” in Urban China Bootlegged for Volume by C‑Lab, ed. Jian Jung, Mark Wigley, and Jeffrey Inaba (New York: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, 2009). Reviewer Violaine Boutet de Monvel thought the first installation “lacks the strength of Virilio’s discourse” but praises the second “as absolutely fascinating.” See her review in Art Review (London) 30 (March 2009). More negative was the assessment of Vicky Richardson who found “there is nothing challenging or informative about the display. It is simply shocking that the curators and designers should present such a dim view of humanity and fail to see any potential in the act of migration, which after all, represents human beings trying to make a better life for themselves.” See her review in Blueprint, February 2009. Michel Guerrin claimed the circular video installation was as beautiful as a film by Georges Lucas. See his review in Le Monde, December 16, 2008.

C o n c l u s i o n



1  Interview with Douglas Cooper, July 20, 2011. 2  Elizabeth Diller, Architecture 503B Syllabus, Fall 2002, Princeton University School of Architecture. 3 Interview with Jane Moss, July 11, 2011. 4  Anthony Vidler, “Architecture after Modernism: Post-Modern or Post-Histoire,” in Die Revisione der Moderne. Postmodernism Revisited (Frankfurt: German Architecture Museum/Junius, 1984), 59.

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Index

The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. A Delay in Glass, or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate: design details, 40–43; Duchamp and, 7; prevailing themes, 40, 41; set design, 39f, 40–41; text on the project, 37–38, 40; use of prostheses, 41–42, 214nn94–95 Abraham, Raimund, 18, 19, 28, 215n103 Acconci, Vito, 8 active display panel glazing, 217n20 Addington, Michelle, 217n20 Ader, Bas Jan, 223n158 Agrest, Diana, 14 Agri-Tecture system, 191 “AIDS and the Practice of Architecture” (Dunlap), 220n100 Alberro, Alexander, 211n4 Alice Tully Hall: bodily metaphors used to describe, 181–82; design details, 179; design’s contribution to the commercial success of the site, 184, 230n121; expansion of the Belluschi building, 179, 229n107; goal of the design, 177, 179; historical indeterminacy of addition, 179; photos, 178, 179, 180–81, 182; visual and acoustic accomplishments, 179–81, 183, 230n116, 230n117 All Vision (Steina), 216n128 Alsop, William, 217n20 Alternative Art New York (Ault), 211n9 Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Spaces (McCarthy), 221n119, 221n134 American Century exhibition, 114, 223n161 American Lawn: Surface for Everyday Life, 4, 51; architects’ role in, 114, 116–17; design details, 117–20, 224n173; design proposal, 114, 116, 224n16; location, 113–14; prevailing themes, 119; reviews of, 224n174; Teyssot’s aim for the proposed project, 114 American Mysteries, 30–31 Anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, 32 Anderson, Laurie, 8, 221n115 Ando, Tadao, 158 Andre, Carl, 193 Anemic Cinema (Duchamp), 41 Ant Farm, 217n30 ANY (journal), 137 Arab World Institute, Paris, 214n96 Arakawa, Shusaku, 225n7 Arbores Laetae, 195, 231n160 architecture of Diller + Scofidio: addressing the image culture of global capitalism, 109–10; architecture as a regulation of climate (see Blur; Pure Mix); attempts to leave the gallery and move to the urban environment, 81; basis of according to the architects, 5, 6, 9–10, 35, 56, 90, 214n83; broadening of the definition of architecture, 8; buildings used as display surfaces, 7 (see also Facsimile); com-

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mentary on themes in architecture, 85–87; critical treatments of their work, 209–10n4; culture of the lawn exploration (see American Lawn: Surface for Everyday Life); Diller’s interest in movie making, 3–4; dominant themes in their projects, 8–10; earliest written mention of a space with multiple perspectival modes, 32; elevations and sections investigated in designs, 20–21, 45–46, 66–67; fascination with tourism, 71–73, 140–42; first foray into commercial display, 51; first interior space without client restrictions (see withDrawing Room, the); first project employing liquid crystal technology, 65; first project together, 20–21; folded architecture in Eyebeam, 143–46; gains from exploring performance, 43; Hejduk’s review of Kinney House, 23–25; inspiration of culture and nature in Quadrant House, 160–61; installations and performances exploring bodies and motion, 105–13; merging of architecture and theater at the Brasserie, 138, 140; modernism and (see modernism); motion simulation in Jet Lag, 112–13; motorized trees designs, 135, 195; opportunity to work in a city space (see Jump Cuts); raising of issues of uniformity in the built environment, 109; “reductive binaries” in Indigestion, 94–95; retrospective exhibit of their projects, 82, 155–58, 227n67, 227n69; reviews of projects, 216n2, 221n118, 222n143, 223n151, 223n157, 224n174, 227n69 (see also specific projects); revisiting an unrealized commission, 73–75; unconventional nature of their work, 21–22, 212n43; understanding of the relations among architecture and moving images (see Facsimile); use of duality, 19–20, 65, 67, 76, 138, 161, 217n23; vacation house exploration of domestic space (see Slow House); verbal language employed as architectural form in Tourisms, 72, 218n43; Vidler’s analysis of, 64–65; vision for the American Mysteries piece, 31; water motif in their work (see Blur; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Pure Mix); windows, recurring theme of (see windows); writings about, 11, 210n20 Architecture Tomorrow, 71 Armstrong, Tim, 89–90 Art and Electronic Media Art (Shanken), 221n125 Art at the Armory: Occupied Territory exhibit, 75–76 “Art on the Beach” exhibition, 26–27, 213n56 Artsis, Steven M., 91 Atelier 10, 161 Atelier Bow Wow, 195 Atlas, Charles, 223n150 Attatürk Airport, Turkey, 109 Ault, Julie, 211n9 Avery, Paul, 101 Baan, Iwan, 10, 164f, 177f, 178f, 180f, 182, 190f, 192f Bad Press: Housework Series, 8, 82–84, 219n74, 219n79 Baird, George, 14, 75 Balance, 31 Balázs, Andre, 191 Ballet Opera, Lyon, 107 BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), 149–50 BAM Local Development Corporation, 149 Ban, Shigeru, 16 Banff Centre for New Media, Canada, 94 Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, 75 Barnes, Clive, 170 Barraclough, Jon, 195f Barthes, Roland, 13, 72, 211n4 Bauhaus, 11 Belluschi, Pietro, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 221n127 Berke, Deborah, 25 Berkowitz, Raphael, 90, 220n100 Berlin, Valérie, 122f, 124f Berman, Roberts, & Scofidio, 15 Betsky, Aaron, 155 Bettinelli, Ennio, 153f Beyer Blinder Belle, 190 Birnbaum, Dara, 96, 221n119 Blois, Natalie de, 85–86

Bloomberg, Michael, 186, 187, 194, 231n157 Blur: architectural vision and, 1, 31; conception of the project, 150–51, 227n56; conflicts with expo management, 153–54; contribution to Diller and Scofidio’s reputation, 155; definition of, 152; design proposal, 151–53, 227n59; interpretations of, 154–55, 227nn62–63; photos, 153, 154; public reaction to, 155, 227n65 Bo, Michael, 222n143 Body Buildings, 50 Bolchover, Joshua, 141f Bonami, Francesco, 195 Boone, Mary, 187 Borden, Janet, 111f Boulders Resort, Scottsdale, 161 Boutet de Monvel, Violaine, 232n164 Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (Rosler), 13 Boyer, M. Christine, 62 “brain coat,” 153 Brasserie, 84; architect selection process, 136–38; background, 136; design details, 139–40, 225n29, 225n31; emphasis on theatricality, 140; gender relations and, 8; patron reaction to the camera, 140, 225n33; prevailing themes, 138–39, 225n27; reviews of, 138, 140, 225n34; tectonics of, 139, 225n29; video monitor use, 139–40 Breer, Robert, 225n18 Brigham, Linda, 219n70 Broadbent, Geoffrey, 14 Bronfman, Samuel, 136 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 149–50 Brown, Denise Scott, 7, 218n41 Bruckner, D. J. R., 223n157 Brush, Fred, 136 Buchli, Victor, 229n102 Buijs, Jan, 7 Builders Association, 111 buildings: Alice Tully Hall (see Alice Tully Hall); Brasserie, 84, 136–40; Colorlab Building, 22; Delsener Office, 22; Duffy House, 22; High Line (see High Line park); Hochman House, 22; ICA (see Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston); Kinney Plywood House, 22–25; Lincoln Center (see Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts); Quadrant House, 160–61; Slither, 84, 129–34; Slow House, 65–71; Two-Way Hotel, 148; WTC viewing platform, 148–49, 226n51 Bunshaft, Gordon, 119 Burden, Alan, 98 Burden, Amanda, 231n157 Buro Happold, 231n148 Bussell, Mark, 177f Bye, A. E., 16 CAC (Contemporary Arts Center), Cincinnati, 113, 120 Calatrava, Santiago, 171 Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal, 113 Ĉapek, Karel, 121 Capp Street project. See withDrawing Room, the Carlisle, Isabel, 221n117 Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, 9, 121, 196 Case # 00-17164/003841983, 80, 219n70 Castleman, Riva, 52 Centre d’Art Contemporain de Castres, France, 82 Centre Pompidou, 147 Chafkin, Marty, 139 Chain City, 197 Chair, Loosely Termed, 19f, 20, 21 Chakrabarti, Vishaan, 191 Chalmers, Jessica, 111 Champ, Heather, 89 Charleroi Danses, Belgium, 106, 107 Chatham, Walter, 25 Chelsea Girls, 79 Chelsea Property Owners Association (CPO), 185, 187

Dadaism, 7 “Dark Dogs: American Dreams” (Anderson), 221n115 David, Joshua, 186, 191, 230n122 Dbox studio, 113, 147 Dean, Tacita, 223n158 deconstructivist architecture, 219n63 Deleuze, Gilles, 84, 143 Delsener Office, 22 De Monchaux, Nicholas, 128 Denari, Neil, 143 Depardon, Raymond, 196 DePasquale, Enno, 139 Derrida, Jacques, 7 Design Trust for Public Space, 186 Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House, The, 73–75, 113 Detail: The Special Task, 19 Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, 211n11 Diller, Elizabeth: approach to explaining the Lincoln Center design, 171–73; biography, 2; Chair, Loosely Termed, 20; contribution to architectural pedagogy at Princeton, 20, 64; doubles theme in her work, 19–20, 67, 110, 138, 161; fascination with film, 4; Hejduk and, 18, 212n29; interest in movie making, 172, 173; interest in the study of architecture, 212n29; move to Princeton, 61–62; philosophy of teaching, 62–63; review of her chair by Goldberger, 21, 212n41; text on the

concept for A Delay in Glass, 37–38, 40; Twin Houses for One Resident, 19. See also Diller + Scofidio Diller + Scofidio: accusations of being absorbed by the art world, 80; broadening of their view of architecture over the years, 182; choice of control versus ample commissions, 16, 60; collaborations abroad, 105–11; comments on the Slow House, 66, 217n27; Cooper Union and (see Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art); dedication to an undefined design signature, 11–12, 60; design of projects that comment on viewing positions and mass culture, 91–92; Diller’s interest in movie making, 172, 173; Diller’s move to Princeton, 61–62; distancing of themselves from the celebrity culture of architecture, 20; Duchamp’s influence on, 7, 34, 37, 40; early assessments of their work, 6, 210n8; emphasis on second chances in their work, 67; expansion of their practice in late 1990s, 127–28; fake ad campaign, 87, 219n88; fascination with media transmission, 96; favorite books, 221n127; financial stability difficulty, 6, 15–16, 59, 60, 158; Flamand’s view of their conception of architecture, 107, 223n150; goal of exploration of architecture’s relation to cultural institutions, 56; influence of Graham, 15; legacy after first decade, 57; MacArthur Foundation award, 126; missing historical documentation on, 11; new direction of investigating standardization, 81–84; range of engagement with audiovisual culture, 5; relationship with Hejduk, 16–18; reputation, 3, 201; response to criticism that their architecture overindulged in detailing, 84; selfdescribed basis of their work, 5, 6, 9–10, 35, 56, 90, 214n83; start of their practice, 22; success in postmodern world of architecture, 60–61, 216n2; texts about, 219n92; theory of the visual, 37; view of architecture, 90; water motif in their work, 67 (see also Blur; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Pure Mix); workspace, 15 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: bodily metaphors describing Alice Tully Hall, 181– 82; commitment to their principles, 199–201; ethical stance toward architecture, 200; making visible the dynamics of the world system, 197; media work by the studio, 4; moving screen use, 7; name change to, 161; partnership, 2, 5–6, 209n2; reputation as collaborators, 201; studio culture, 128–29, 224n3; understanding of architecture, 10–11; view of their classification as architects, 9–10; works in progress, 199 Direction Technique, 153 D.I.R.T. Studio, 190 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 49 Doctoroff, Daniel L., 187 Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?, 195–96, 231n162 Domestic Project exhibition, 34 Domestic Prophylactics, 9f Door, 11 rue Larrey (Duchamp), 65, 217n22 Dorran, Bob, 229n91 doubles theme: in Brasserie, 138; instances of doubling in Diller’s work, 161; in Loophole, 76; in Quadrant House, 161; in Subtopia, 110; “Twin Houses for One Resident,” 19–20 Dow, Jim, 118f, 119 Drexler, Arthur, 16 dualism theme, 110 Duchamp, Marcel, 4, 7–8, 34, 37, 40, 41, 65, 154, 155 Duffy House, 22 Dumb Type, Kyoto, 105–6, 222n143 Dunlap, David W., 220n100 Dysfunctionalisme, 82 Eames, Charles and Ray, 5, 124, 210n6 Easterling, Keller, 186 Edison Properties, 191 Education of an Architect, 18, 212n26 Educatorium (Rem Koolhaas/OMA), 143 Eisenman, Peter, 16, 18, 25, 215n103, 217n23 EJM 1 and EJM 2, 5, 107–8, 223n151 Empire (Warhol), 85, 219n84 Étant donnés (Duchamp), 154 “Europanto,” 151 Evans, Richard, 3 Exits: Part 1 and Part 2, 196–97

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Cighélio, 153f Clean Body/Dirty Mind soap, 65 CNN Center, 96 Coates, Nigel, 155 Cold War, 91–92 Colomina, Beatriz, 62, 114 Colorlab Building, NY, 22f Colquhoun, Alan, 14, 62 Coma, 31 competition entries: Eyebeam entry, 143; Facsimile, 96; High Line park, 184, 191; ICA, 167–69; Lincoln Center, 171, 173; for Nature Morte Gallery, 51; Traffic, 25–26; Villa Rotunda, 20–21 Conrail, 185 Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, 113, 120 Conversation, The (film), 126 Cooper, Douglas, 94, 125, 147, 151, 197, 200, 221n118 Cooper, Peter, 16 Cooper Robertson and Partners, 171 Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: Diller’s and architectural pedagogy at the school, 20; Hejduk’s influence on architecture, 16–17, 211n18, 212n24; Hejduk’s nine-square problem, 17; Hejduk’s view of architecture, 17–18; relation of Diller and Scofidio to Hejduk, 16–17, 18; Scofidio’s impact as a teacher, 18; sociopolitical influences on Hejduk’s direction for the school, 19; as a vantage point to view architecture, 14 Coop, Himmelblau, 10, 14 Corner, James, 184, 191, 192, 231n148 Cotter, Brendan, 89 Courtés, J., 221n115 Cox, Andy, 221n134 CPO (Chelsea Property Owners Association), 185, 187 Crary, Jonathan, 62 Crawford, Bruce, 173 Creation Company, 37 Creative Time, 26, 75 Crewdson, Gregory, 119 Critical Mass (Frampton), 221n114 Crowhurst, Donald, 111, 223n158 Crutch Lamp, 113 CSX Transportation, 185, 186 Cugnac, Fabien de, 105f Cunningham, Merce, 214n88, 223n150 Cuozzo, Steve, 231n156

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Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 10 Eyal and Ines Weizman, 195 Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology: adoption of a vocabulary of organicism, 146; cancellation of the project, 147; commission award, 143; design proposal, 143, 144f, 145–46; photos, 144, 145, 146; prevailing themes, 147, 226n48; reviews of, 147, 226n49 Fabre, Jean, 214n88 Facsimile: awarding of the commission to Diller and Scofidio, 97–98; challenges from, 7; design iterations, 100f, 221n125; filming of the office scenarios, 4, 101–2; installation and operation problems, 103–4, 221n140; legal standing as an art installation, 102, 103; potential impact of the piece, 104–5; relations among architecture and moving images in, 96; screen and camera positions and use, 99, 101; technical challenges, 98–99 Family Game (film), 130 Fan Pier, 162, 166, 169, 229n91 Farber, Manny, 79 Feed, 81, 82f Fehlbaum, Rolf, 121, 125 Feuer, Wendy, 142 Field Operations (FO), 184, 190 Fields, C. Virginia, 186 Filmmakers Cinematheque, 79 Final Frontier, The, 80 First National City Bank, 119 Flamand, Frédéric, 106, 107, 223n150 Flavin, Dan, 77, 218n61 Flesh: Architectural Probes: aesthetic credo, 89–90; contents organization, 88–89; cover and layout description, 88, 220n100; design details, 87–88; first opportunity to work with the printed page, 87; positioning as an architectural monograph, 88; prevailing themes, 219n98, 219nn94–95; reviews of, 219n91; use of media imagery, 89 “Floats” (Breer), 225n18 Fondation Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, 195 Fort Greene Park, NY, 15, 150 Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, 114 Foster, Norman, 171 Foto Opportunity: Eight Strategies of Niagara Falls, 75 Foucault, Michel, 49 Four Seasons, 138, 139 “Fourth Window, The,” 86–87 Frampton, Hollis, 221n114 Frampton, Kenneth, 28 Freud, Sigmund, 219n95 Friedberg, Anne, 24 Friedman, Mildred, 71, 114 Friends of the High Line, 186, 187, 190, 230n122 Fukuzawa, Emi, 129 Fuller, Buckminster, 153 Fuller, Samuel, 79 Fung, Lance, 158 FXFowle, 179

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Gallery Ma, Tokyo, 73–75 Gandelsonas, Mario, 14 Gansevoort lookout point, High Line, 193 Garden Club of America, 119 Gate, 28–30 Geertz, Clifford, 7 Gehry, Frank, 61, 191 Gelfand, Howard, 112 gender: bride and bachelor in A Delay in Glass, 41–42; depicted in Sentinel, 28; exploration of relations in the built environment, 8; presentation in Soft Sell, 78; shared sink in Brasserie restrooms, 8; unisex space in the withDrawing Room, 45 George R. Moscone Center Convention Center, San Francisco, 96–97 Georgetown Partners, 191

Ghirri, Luigi, 37f Gidal, Peter, 211n12 Giedion, Sigfried, 1 Gillette, Frank, 221n125 Ginzburg, Moisei, 229n102 Giuliani, Rudolph, 186 Goldberger, Paul, 21, 212n39, 212n41, 225n34, 230n116 Goldhagen, Sarah, 162 Golding, John, 214n90 Goldstein, Ann, 219n93 Gopnik, Adam, 186 Gottesman, Jerry, 186 Graham, Dan, 8, 14–15, 56, 215n104, 219n88 Graves, Michael, 16, 61 Green Camp, NJ, 16 Greimas, A. J., 221n115 Grimes, Ellen, 77 Ground Zero, 148, 194 Growing Concern (Ziegler), 120 Guerrin, Michel, 232n164 Guggenheim Museum, 218n61 Gunning, Tom, 5 Gwathmey, Charles, 16 Haacke, Hans, 13, 15 Hadid, Zaha, 106, 158, 190, 191 Hall, Ron, 223n158 Hammond, Robert, 186, 187, 190, 191, 230n122 Hansen, Mark, 99, 196 Haraway, Donna, 215n120 Harborwalk, 165 Harrison, Wallace, 170, 229n93 Hatch, Ann, 43 Haus-Rucker-Co, 10, 14 Have You Ever Been Mistaken For?, 142 Hawkinson, Laurie, 16 Hawley, Christine, 129, 130 Hays, K. Michael, 155 Hebel, Dirk, 154, 226n50 Hejduk, John: exploration of voyeurism in his architecture, 213n66; half house, 217n24; influence on architecture, 16–17, 211n18, 212n24; Kinney Plywood House comments, 23–25; nine-square problem, 17; relation of Diller and Scofidio to, 10, 16–17, 213n66; sociopolitical influences on his direction for the school, 19; view of architecture, 17–18 High Line park: commission award, 191; deliberate slow experience of the space, 191–93; design details, 191–93; history of the site, 184–86, 230n122, 230n125; infrastructure and plant preservation, 191, 231n148; ownership of the project, 193; photos, 188–89, 190; preservation movement, 186–87, 190; prevailing themes, 193–94; reviews of, 194, 231nn156–58; selection of proposals and architects, 190–91; windows in the design, 193 Hilberseimer, Ludwig, 129 Hirst, Damien, 225n31 His/Hers towels, 65 Hochman House, 22 Hoesli, Bernard, 17 Holl, Jim, 27, 28, 213n60 Holl, Steven, 185, 190, 191, 230n125 Holzer, Jenny, 218n58 Honeybee Robotics, 227n71 Horace Trumbauer, 135 Horsley, Carter B., 230n116 Hotel Pro Forma, Copenhagen, 105–6 House of the Century, 217n30 Hubert, Christian, 25 Huntington Hartford Museum of Art, 26 Hypar Pavilian at Lincoln Center, 177f, 183, 230n119

Jackson, Kenneth, 187 Jealousy, 218n45 Jencks, Charles, 14 Jet Lag: design details, 112–13; prevailing themes, 112; reviews of, 223n157; stories told, 111–12 John F. Kennedy International Airport, 140 John Marshall House, 215n100 Johns, Jasper, 214n88 Johnson, John S., 143, 147 Johnson, Matthew, 101, 147, 159, 221n127 Johnson, Philip, 18, 25, 60, 136, 138, 225n27 Jones, Casey, 186, 230n122 Jost, Richard, 217n30 Juggler of Gravity, 32f Juilliard School of Music, 177, 183 Jump Cuts: opportunity to work in a city space, 92; plan for the project, 92–93; realization of the project, 93; technical complications, 93–94 Jussieu Library (Rem Koolhaas/OMA), 143 Kagan, Michael, 28 Kapoor, Anish, 158 Kauhauf des Nordens (Alsop and Störmer), 217n20 Keathyley, Gwynne, 128 Kenneth Rodrigues and Partners, 92 Kennon, Kevin, 148 Khoury, Bernard, 195

Kiley, Dan, 173, 175, 177 Kinney Plywood House: design details, 22–23; Hejduk’s review of, 23–25; interpretation of its use of windows, 24; potential of contemporary architecture and, 25 Kitagata Public Housing Project, 129 Kitchen, the, NYC, 15 Kleihues, Josef Paul, 76 Klein, Naomi, 110 Klüver, Billy, 10 Koch, Stephen, 219n84 Koolhaas, Rem, 70, 88, 219n71 Kopp, Carl, 160 Korab, Balthazar, 119 Kozinn, Allan, 230n116 Kracauer, Siegfried, 106, 223n145 Krasnoff, Sarah, 112 Krauss, Rosalind, 128 Kruger, Barbara, 87, 219n93 Kunsthaus, Austria, 162 Kurgan, Laura, 196

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IBM Research Building, 119 ICA. See Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission), 185 Imanishi, Koji, 129 Inaba, Jeffrey, 195 Indigestion, 94–95, 221n115, 221n117, 221n118 Inhatowicz, Edward, 226n47 installations: American Lawn (see American Lawn: Surface for Everyday Life); Arbores Laetae, 195, 231n160; Bad Press, 82–84; Body Buildings, 50; Chain City, 197; Does the Punishment Fit the Crime?, 195–96, 231n162; Exits: Part 1 and Part 2, 196–97; Have You Ever Been Mistaken For?, 142; Indigestion, 94–95; Interclone Hotel, 109; Investigations, 50–51; Jump Cuts, 92–94; Loophole, 59; Master/Slave, 9, 121–25; Media Cut, 151; Native Land: Stop Eject, 196–97, 232n164; Pageant, 109–10; Para-Site (see Para-Site); Pure Mix, 158–59; Rapid Growth, 135; Room 120, 125–26; Skin, 105; Soft Sell, 4, 78–79; Subtopia, 110; Television, 51; Tourisms: suitCase Studies, 71–73; Traffic, 25–26; Travelogues, 5, 140–42; the withDrawing Room, 43–49; X,Y, 110–11 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 25 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, 3, 11; architect selection process, 162–63; background to building project, 161–62; design details, 165–67; design proposal, 163–66, 228n82, 228n87; prevailing themes, 167–69; reviews of, 228n90, 229n91; success of the project, 169 Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 50 Interclone Hotel, 109 Interiors (magazine), 138 International Center for Communications Gallery of the NTT, Tokyo, 110 intersections and separations: in the design of Villa Rotunda, 20–21; elevation changes in Slow House, 66–67; exploration of in the withDrawing Room, 45–46, 214–15n99 Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), 185 “Interview with Douglas Cooper” (Lamontagne), 221n118 Investigations, 50–51 Investments, 105 Ireland, David, 43 Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, 16 Isozaki, Arata, 110, 129 Istanbul Biennial, 109 Itakura, Koji, 65–66, 110 Itten, Johannes, 11 Izenour, Steven, 218n41

La MaMa Experimental Theater Company, 37 Lambert, Phyllis, 114, 116, 136, 138, 223n160, 225n27 Laments (Holzer), 218n58 Lamontagne, Valerie, 221n118 Lampert-Greaux, Ellen, 230n116 Large Glass, The (Duchamp), 37, 40, 214n88, 214n90 Lavin, Sylvia, 228n82 lawn roof, 177, 229n103 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Brown, Izenour), 218n41 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 10 LED text-display projects: American Lawn, 119; at Lincoln Center, 173f, 174, 175, 183, 230n117; Pure Mix, 158–59; Second Skin, 98; Ventilator, 81 Leeser, Thomas, 143 Legendre, Michel, 115f, 116f, 117f, 118f Leonard, Janis, 160 Lerner, Ralph, 19, 62 Levine, Sherrie, 4 Levy, Reynold, 173 Lewis, David, 16 Lewis, Paul, 16, 81, 86, 127, 218n47 Li, Vivien, 229n91 Libedinsky, Gaspar, 159 Libeskind, Daniel, 16, 211n20 light and shadows: in Alice Tully Hall, 179, 183; in American Lawn, 116f, 118; defined in relation to windows, 34; in Diller’s teaching of architecture, 62; in Diller’s Twin Houses for One Resident, 21; exploration of ice as a medium, 158; LED text-display projects, 81, 98, 119, 158–59, 173f, 174, 175, 183, 230n117; in Soft Sell, 78 Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, NYC, 2, 11; Alice Tully Hall (see Alice Tully Hall); background, 170–71, 229n93; complexity of the commission, 171–73; design mandate, 173–74; design process participants, 171; design’s contribution to the commercial success of the site, 183– 84; fundamental strategy of the design, 174–75; North Plaza redesign, 175, 176f, 177, 229n101; vision for the redevelopment, 173–74, 229n99 Lippold, Richard, 136 liquid crystal technology, 218n58; first project employing, 65; smart glass and, 217nn20–22; used to engage an architectural space, 75–80 L’Observatoire International, 231n148 Loophole: design details, 76–77, 218n61; doubles theme, 76; location, 75–76; prevailing aesthetic, 78, 219n63; reviews of, 77, 218–19n62; title explanation, 76 Lotringer, Sylvère, 220n98 Love, Timothy, 211–12n24 Ludlam, Charles, 79 Lynn, Greg, 143, 145

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MacCannell, Dean, 218n42 MacLean, Alex, 119 Maguire, Matthew, 30, 32, 91, 105, 220n107 Maison de la Publicité (Nitzchke), 7, 210n10 Malkin, Helen, 118 Malmö Musical Theatre, Sweden, 105–6 Mann, Anthony, 79 Man Ray, 141 Manton, Jill, 102 Marclay, Christian, 151 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 108 Mariani, Diego, 151 Martin, Meredith, 221n140 Martin, Reinhold, 224n174 MassMoca, Massachusetts, 111 Master/Slave, 9; design details, 121–24; photos, 122–23, 124; transparency and surveillance themes in, 121, 124–25, 224n177 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 46–47, 215n104 Maxwell, Robert, 62 Mayer, Jürgen, 16 McAnulty, Robert, 50–51, 212n43, 215n113 McAuley, Skeet, 119 McCarthy, Anna, 221n119, 221n134 McGurk, Justin, 228n76 McLeod, Mary, 25, 128 McLuhan, Marshall, 219n93 McQuaid, Matilda, 53 McQuire, Scott, 221n140 McShine, Kynaston, 52 Mecanoo, 229n103 Media Cut, 151 media in projects: breadth of use of, 2–3, 9, 11; incorporation of video into designs (see video monitors/surveillance); investigating relations among spatial interiority and exteriority, 6–7 Medvedow, Jill, 162 Mee Industries, 154 Meier, Richard, 16, 171 Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo, The, 32–34 Metropolis, 216n2 Meyer, Hannes, 11 Michael von Valkenburgh Associates, 190, 191 Michelson, Annette, 219n80 Mickus, Ben, 128 Milan Triennale, 34 Miller, Gifford, 187 Mirage City, The: Another Utopia, 110 Mirror Piece with Backing Rubbed Off Half, 34, 35f Misaki Design and Architects, 129, 134 Miyawaki, Aiko, 129 modernism: commentaries on, 34, 85, 90; grasp and execution of, 9, 201; indeterminacy and, 179; influences on Diller and Scofidio, 2, 4, 6, 7–8, 11; Lincoln Center and, 171, 175, 182; in Master/Slave, 121; postmodernism and, 61, 95 Monkey Business Class, 105–6 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 7 Moran, Michael, 8f, 10, 78f, 131f, 132f, 134f, 137f, 157f Mosakowski, Susan, 37 Moses, Robert, 170 Moss, Jane, 179, 201 motion in installations and performances: exploring bodies and motion, 105–13; in Jet Lag, 112–13; motorized trees, 135, 195 Moving Target, 106–7, 223nn148–49 Multitasker, 142 Mural, 156–58, 227n71 Muschamp, Herbert, 60, 79, 226n49 Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, 75–76, 219n72 Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 52 Muybridge, Eadweard, 5, 108

MVDRV, 143 Mylar screen, 43 Nair, Mira, 142 Nakaya, Fujiko, 154 National Football Hall of Fame (Venturi and Scott Brown), 7, 210n10 National Trails Systems Act, 185 Native Land: Stop Eject, 196–97, 232n164 Nature Morte Gallery, NY, 51 Nauman, Bruce, 8, 56 Neocon fair, Chicago, 142 New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC, 80 Niederer, Sabine, 221n140 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 194 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 223n148 nine-square problem, 17, 31, 212n24 Nitzchke, Oskar, 7 No Logo (Klein), 110 No Means Yes perfume, 65 Nouvel, Jean, 106, 121, 214n96 Novogratz, Mike, 231n151 Nylen, Stina, 222n143 Obletz, Peter, 185 Observing Observation: Uncertainty (Weibel), 216n128 Ockman, Joan, 25, 219n84 Office dA of Boston, 162, 163 Okreglak, Les, 98 Olsberg, Nicholas, 116, 118, 119 OMA, 219n71 Omni Center, 96 1 monde réel, 121 Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors in Time Delay (Graham), 56 Oppositions, 25 Osaka World’s Fair, 154, 225n18 Ottagono, 64 Oudolf, Piet, 184, 190, 191, 231n148 Ourossoff, Nicolai, 182, 230n117, 231n156 Overexposed: commentary on transparency in architecture, 85–86; design details, 3–4, 84–85; location, 84, 219n80, 219n81; technical challenges during assembly, 86 Pageant, 109–10 Paik, Nam June, 8, 216n128 Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, 37 Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, 105 Palladian architectural style, 20–21, 212n24 Palumbo, George, 32 Pappas, George, 99, 221n127 Para-Site, 3; design details, 53–55, 215n120, 215n122; exhibit location, 52–53; investigation of the blind spot as the limit of total seeing, 55; prevailing themes, 54, 55; published reviews, 55, 215–16n123; purpose for using video surveillance, 56, 216nn127–28 Parasite, The (Serres), 216n124 Park, Kyong, 50 Pasanella, Klein, Stolzman, and Berg, 137 Peña, Richard, 180 performances: American Mysteries, 30–31; A Delay in Glass, 37–43; EJM 1 and EJM 2, 5, 107–8; exploring bodies and motion, 105–13; Eyebeam, 143–47; Flesh (see Flesh: Architectural Probes); Gate, 28–30; Jet Lag, 111–13, 223n157, 223n158; Monkey Business Class, 105–6; Moving Target, 106–7; Overexposed, 84–85; Sentinel, 26–28 Phaedra, 91–92, 220n107 Phantom House, 161 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 37, 135, 225n18 Piano, Renzo, 147 Play Time (Tati), 85, 219n84 Pleasure/Pain, 65

Quadrant House, 160–61 Ralph Applebaum and Associates, 128 Rapid Growth, 135, 225n18 Rauschenberg, Robert, 10 Reality Properties: Fake Estates (Matta-Clark), 47 Reclaiming the High Line, 187 Reiser + Umemoto, 137, 143 Rem Koolhaas/OMA, 143, 149 Renfro, Charles, 2, 128, 224n1. See also Diller Scofidio + Renfro Rialto Cinema, 78 Ricci, Vito, 41 Rice, Lyn, 128, 218n47 Richard Anderson Gallery, NY, 82 Richardson, Vicky, 232n164 Ridiculous Theater Company, 79 Rietveld, Gerrit, 131 Rinder, Larry, 51 Ritter, Axel, 217n20 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 49, 72, 218n44 Robert Poeschl Architecture, 92 Roberts, John T., 16 robots in an installation: Master/Slave, 121–24; robotic drills in Scanning, 156–58 Rockefeller, John D. III, 170 Rockwell, David, 148, 183 Rogers, Richard, 147 Roloff, John, 158, 159 Romm, Stuart, 95–96 Room 120, 125–26 Rose, Joseph, 186 Rosler, Martha, 13 Rossi, Aldo, 25 Rotary Glass Plates (Duchamp), 41 Rowe, Colin, 17 Roy, Lindy, 16 Rubin, Ben, 99, 139, 152, 196, 221n112 Rubio, César, 93f S,M,L,XL (Koolhaas), 88 Saarinen, Eero, 119 San Francisco Art Commission (SFAC), 96 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 82 San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, 92 Sansone, Robert, 119 Santos, Adele, 68 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14 Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, 82, 155–58,

227n67, 227n69 Scher, Julia, 216n128 Scher, Paula, 186 Scherer, Barrymore Laurence, 230n116 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 10 Schlemmer, Oskar, 42, 214n93 Schneider, Ira, 221n125 Schodek, Daniel, 217n20 School of American Ballet, 182f, 183 Schroeder House (Rietveld), 131 Schwartz, Martha, 129 Scofidio, Ricardo: biography, 2; earlier work in his architecture practice, 15–16; impact as a teacher, 18, 212n26. See also Diller + Scofidio Scott, Felicity, 217n30 Seagram Building, 136, 137 Second Artillery Armory, 76 Second Johannesburg Art Biennial, South Africa, 109 Second Skin, 98 Security by Julia (Scher), 216n128 Sejima, Kazuyo, 129, 130 semiology, 13–14, 211nn11–12 semiotext(e), 89, 219n98 Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (Greimas and Courtés), 221n115 Semper, Gottfried, 225n29 Senster, The (Inhatowicz), 226n47 Sentinel, 3; connection to Hejduk, 28; design details, 27–28; genesis of, 26–27 Serres, Michel, 216n124 Shanken, Edward A., 221n125 Sheirer, Richard, 148 Sheraton, Mimi, 136 Sherman, Cindy, 4 She Was and She Is, Even (Fabre), 214n88 Shining, The (film), 17 Shulman, Julius, 119 Sicha, Choire, 187, 190 Sillman, Amy, 230n125 Simpson, Deane, 125, 164, 226n50 Site of Reversible Destiny-Yoro Park (Arakawa), 225n7 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 140 Skin, 105 Slither, 84; design details, 130–34; frustration with Japanese officials, 134, 225n16; location, 129, 225n7; purpose behind an all-women team, 129–30, 225n10; resident’s review, 134, 225n17 Slow House: commission from Itakura, 65–66; design details, 66–67; prevailing themes, 67, 68; reviews of, 68–71; revisiting of, 73–75; videotape use in, 67, 217n30 Slutzky, Robert, 17, 19 smart glass, 217nn20–22 Smart Materials and Technologies in Architecture (Addington and Schodek), 217n20 Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Design (Ritter), 217n20 Smith, Kiki, 158 Smith, Paul, 219n74 Smith, Roberta, 216n123 Smith Miller + Hawkinson, 128 Smithson, Robert, 193 Snow Show, The, 158, 228n76 “social condenser” concept, 177, 229n102 Soft Sell, 4; design details, 78–79; history of the site, 79; relevance to architecture, 80; reviews of, 79–80 Soho: Downtown Manhattan, 211n9 Sol Goldman and Alex Dilorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings (Haacke), 13 Sorkin, Michael, 60, 214n94 Sozanski, Edward J., 215n113

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Polshek Partners, 191 Pol-X West, 98–99 Ponte, Alessandra, 62, 64, 114 postmodernism: architects’ view of, 3, 8, 21, 60–61, 87; Blur and, 155; exploration of postmodern culture, 80; Flesh and, 89; modernism and, 61, 95; Room 120 and, 125; Slow House and, 68; Traffic, 25–26; Villa Rotunda, 20–22 Princeton University, 61–62, 114 Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, 15 Pritzker family, 162 Progressive Architecture, 68 Projections on a Gallery Window (Graham), 14–15 prostheses in a piece, 41–42, 62, 214nn94–95 Psycho (film), 125 public/private divide: emphasizing of spatial interiority and exteriority, 6–7; focus on the venue and the viewer (see Para-Site); in the TwoWay Hotel design, 148; urban versus rural in Three Windows, 35; in the withDrawing Room, 44 Pure Mix, 158–59, 228n76

2 39

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Speaks, Michael, 219n91 Spielberg, Harry, 91 Starbucks, 136 Starck, Philippe, 61 Steen, Karen E., 230n122 Steina, 216n128 Stern, Robert A. M., 191 Sternfeld, Joel, 186 Stewart, Ellen, 37 Stoller, Ezra, 119 Stone, Edward Durrell, 26 Storefront for Art and Architecture, NY, 50, 216n2 Störmer, Jan, 217n20 Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, The (Tomalin and Hall), 223n158 Studio Granda, 162, 163 Subtopia, 110 suitcases in designs, 71–73, 140–42 Sullivan, Kaylynn, 27, 28 Surface Transportation Board, 191 surrealism/surrealists, 7, 28, 64, 106, 223n146 surveillance. See transparency and surveillance themes; video monitors/ surveillance Swiss Expo, Yverdon-les-Bains, 150 Takahashi, Akiko, 129, 130 Tanning, Dorothea, 37 Tati, Jacques, 85, 219n84 Tatlin, Vladimir, 7, 210n10 Technical University, Delft, 229n103 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 62 Television, 51 Tenth Avenue Overlook and Square, High Line, 193 Terra Gram, 190, 191 Texas Rangers, 17 Teyssot, Georges, 34, 62, 64, 113, 223n160 theater architecture. See performances Third International Biennial of SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, 125 Three Windows, 34–37 Tiller Girls, 223n145 Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen, 171 Todd, Carroll, 140 Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (Cox), 221n134 Tokyo Story (film), 130 Tomalin, Nichols, 223n158 Tourisms: suitCase Studies, 71–73, 218n39, 218n41, 218n49 Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, The (MacCannell), 218n42 Traffic, 25–26 transparency and surveillance themes: commentary on in Overexposed, 85–86; in High Line, 193–94; in Master/Slave, 121, 124–25, 224n177; video surveillance use (see video monitors/surveillance) Travelogues, 5, 140–42 travel themes. See Tourisms: suitCase Studies; Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class ; Travelogues Tschumi, Bernard, 216n9 “24-hour diagram” (Koolhaas and OMA), 219n71 “Twin Houses for One Resident” (Diller), 19 Two-Way Hotel, Hong Kong, 148 Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP), 186 United Artists Cineplex, 92 Urbach, Henry, 16 Urban Screens Reader (McQuire, Martin, Niederer), 221n140

240

Valenti, Nick, 136, 138, 183 Vanderbilit, Tom, 228n76 van der Rohe, Mies, 136 Varah, Adine K., 102 Veder, Robin, 224n174

Venice Architecture Biennial, 197 Ventilator, 81, 219n72 Venturi, Robert, 7, 210n11, 218n41 Vertov, Dziga, 55 Vice/Virtue drinking glasses, 8f, 65 video monitors/surveillance: at the Brasserie, 139–40; in EJM1, 108; Facsimile, 4, 98; first use of moving images, 31; key precedent for, 221n125; in Loophole, 76–77; in Overexposed, 3–4, 84–85; in Para-Site, 55, 56, 216nn127–18; in Room 120, 125–26; in Slow House, 67, 217n30; viewing positions and mass culture commented on in projects, 91–92 Video Surveillance Piece (Nauman), 56 Vidler, Anthony, 62, 64–65, 114, 201, 224n177 Villa Rotunda, The, 20–21 Villa VPRO (MVDRV), 143 Viola, Bill, 51 Virilio, Paul, 196 Virtual Office, The, 142 Vitra furniture company, 142 Volharding Building (Buijs), 7, 210n10 Wagner, Robert, 170 Walkaround Time, 214n88 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 71 Walter Phillips Gallery, Canada, 75 Warhol, Andy, 85, 219n84 Warke, Val, 218n43 Wasiuta, Mark, 128 water motifs in projects, 67; Blur, 150–55; ICA, 167; Pure Mix, 158–59, 228n76 Webb, Mike, 18 Weems, Marianne, 94, 111, 223n157 Weibel, Peter, 216n128 Weiner, Lawrence, 158 We Interrupt This Program, 95–96 Westbeth (Atlas), 223n150 Whiteread, Rachel, 158 Whitney Museum of American Art, 4, 82, 155 Wigley, Mark, 62, 114, 200 Williams, Tod, 18, 212n26 Window, Room, Furniture, 21, 212n39 windows: depicted in Sentinel, 28; in Gate, 30; in the High Line design, 193; in the ICA, 166–67, 228n86; Kinney Plywood House’s use of, 22–25; light and shadows in a drawing, 21; partnering with video in Slow House, 67–68; three-dimensional exhibition piece, 34–37 Wipe Cycle (Gillete and Schneider), 221n125 withDrawing Room, the, 9; contrast with Matta-Clark’s work, 46–47, 215n104; deploying of furniture and mirrored images, 47, 49; design details, 43–47, 215n103; exploration of intersections and separations, 45–46, 214–15n99; impetus for, 43; prevailing themes, 14, 49 Wittkower, Rudolf, 212n24 Wong, Victor, 127, 214n84, 218n47 Woods, Lebbeus, 50 World Trade Center Site Viewing Platform, 148–49, 226n51 Wrede, Stuart, 53 Wright, Beryl, 76 Wright, Calvert, 79, 82 X,Y, 110–11 Yalkut, Jud, 221n125 Yokohama Urban Design Forum, 219n71 YouPrison, 195 Zaera-Polo, Alejandro, 16 Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary, 135 Zenith (TV Looking Glass) (Paik), 216n128 Ziegler, Mel, 120 Zimmerman, Elyn, 32 Zipp, Samuel, 229n93 Zumthor, Peter, 162, 163