The Brooklyn Rail

In their offices in Chelsea, my architecture partner Michael Abel and I met another architecture partnership, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo (Ric) Scofidio, founding partners of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. As one of the offices that serve as a template for New York City offices, we spoke with them on the basis of searching for solutions to the many crises we are facing and how architects are implicated. In their 2001 project, Viewing Platform, at the site of the World Trade Center Ground Zero, we discovered a primer. A plywood sightseeing platform confronting a crisis directly. In their work, there are constantly small experiments unfolding into larger political spaces like the High Line and The Shed. Reality is constantly choreographed and mediated.

—Nile Greenberg

Michael Abel: We specifically want to talk about your New York projects in the context of visibility and invisibility in architecture, starting with The Museum of Modern Art Renovation & Expansion and Viewing Platform.

Nile Greenberg: According to Hal Foster, when Yoshio Taniguchi was raising money for MoMA, he said, “Raise even more money, and I’ll make the architecture disappear.”

Ricardo Scofidio: Very Japanese.

Elizabeth Diller: Of course, the more minimal the detail, the harder it is to design, and the more expensive it is to execute. It’s easy to cover over a misaligned joint with trim or basically a slab of cladding. It’s challenging to align surfaces, and make a tight joint. We don’t like to cover things up, but rather, we expose things. We’re interested in all aspects of visuality across a broad range of issues: cultural, political, and perceptual, including invisibility or problems of the unseen. That interest encompasses all of our work. We’re interested in problematizing visuality, and in critiquing our dependence on vision as the master sense drowning out the others.

Abel: We’ve been thinking about your project Viewing Platform because we’re practicing architecture in an age of crisis. A myriad of crises spinning out of control and layering on top of each other. Viewing Platform, to us, is a type of architecture in reaction to a crisis.

Greenberg: Visibility, in that case, as you have described it in the past, is a phantom limb syndrome. A way to reconnect the broken, the missing. Or, the open casket, as you also described it.

Diller: We already had an interest in tourism, particularly to the past, and the public’s fascination with sites of tragedy. Our installation, Tourisms: suitCase Studies, which was later developed into a book, Back to the Front: Tourisms of War, critiqued the complex relationship between tourism and war as related forms of conquest. Tourists want to see, experience, and stand on sites where violent acts occurred—a mass killing, a military battle, or an assassination. There’s a keen interest in sites that are on the “negative spectrum.”

After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, the public had a strong desire to see the site of devastation, which triggered the need to provide a place for viewing, thus, the Viewing Platform. This is typically an elevated surface associated with sightseeing and picturesque backdrops for touristic photos. But prominent buildings in Manhattan that once could be seen from everywhere were erased. The public wanted to see what was no longer there. There was a sensation New Yorkers had—to bear witness, to be in a place of collective grief. The images of the site were ubiquitous in the media but being there, in that particular spot on earth, was key. The problem was the site was restricted. Barriers limited how close people could get and not obstruct the rescue and clean-up efforts. It was chaotic. We teamed with David Rockwell and Kevin Kennon and decided to take matters into our own hands.

Scofidio: After we arrived in the city, we asked, “Do we want to go and see it or not?” We had heard about the problems of congestion and access. We had mixed emotions about going there. We went to the site and the concern was, “How do you approach something like that?” Where do you go to see it? Where is that moment of awareness of what happened? And could a viewing platform reveal that moment?

Diller: The site had volunteers from various fields, like medical professionals to help the wounded and chefs to feed the volunteers. As architects, we wanted to do something for the civic good. It took a bit of energy to raise money and get permission. In the end, we made it happen and people came. Over time, as the clean-up continued, there was increasingly less to see. But over 40,000 people a day visited the platform to have the experience of seeing nothing. There was no more smoke, and most of the rubble was already removed. But the smell of death was still there, other senses were aroused. It was a site with an aura created by an absence. When you stand in a Civil War battlefield, there is little to see but a plaque. Here, the absence was entirely different.

Scofidio: I think part of it was just the act of being there, whether you understood what you saw, or didn’t see. The fact that you were there marked your spot of having been at that site after that event.

Diller: It’s interesting—we used plywood because it was cheap. People scrawled graffiti all over it, including Rudy Giuliani, who waged war against graffiti.

Scofidio: I don’t think it was graffiti.

Diller: Well, maybe graffiti-like tributes. People also left flowers and flags.

Greenberg: I do find there’s not much of an urge to make physical architecture right now. I think one of the reasons is that they just don’t see the value. I wholeheartedly do see the value. But it’s a phenomenon right now.

Diller: How much does that reservation have to do with concerns about the environment and the wastefulness of architecture? Of course the renovation of existing structures and adaptive reuse are critical, though I agree with you, there’s a distancing from any sense of responsibility for the design of new structures. It is a bit alarming because we need new generations of designers. Our institutions are going extinct, and we need to rethink them—not every existing building can be saved or is worth saving.

Abel: There are certainly people that are not scared of architecture, and they are on the wrong side of politics. The left is interested in temporary architecture that will ultimately disappear. It can and is documented through media, but most physical architecture that affects the actual city is not critical.

Diller: The very justifiable concern about architecture’s role in the climate crisis should not be confused with a design vacuum and sense of guilt surrounding design. There’s a false sense that if you build, you’re contributing to the climate crisis. Actually, there are very few thinkers around ecological and environmental issues who care about design, who care about advancing the discipline of architecture through its many trajectories, and that’s a problem.

Abel: The ecological project is largely measurable, and I do think a large part of architecture is to make the measurable into something that is immeasurable. Which is the spirit of architecture, as John Hejduk would say. DS+R participates in peripheral mediums, which in the end contributes to a more complex architecture—one with layers and immeasurabilities.

Diller: There’s a wide range of scales and media at the architect’s disposal. At our studio, we never limit ourselves to buildings, nor to independent projects. For us, it’s all one and the same. Because we started with independent work, without clients and the restrictions associated with professional practice, we became independent and scrappy. We were able to write our own agendas, find sites, and create opportunities to make our work public. Architecture snuck in there. Buildings snuck in there! We never thought of it as invasive though, or a threat to our independent work, just more opportunities.

Scofidio: We never had a desire to have an office like this.

Abel: I do think that an office needs to be a certain size to make architecture of a certain scale for the city.

Scofidio: We’re still kind of messy in terms of how we function as an office. We’re quite inefficient at times. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Diller: Look, it happened organically, the High Line and Lincoln Center came at roughly the same time. We needed more staff to execute work at an urban scale, and we needed more space to house that staff. We never considered scaling up from a twelve-person office, but all of a sudden we were fifty strong. You can’t always control the direction of your practice. Ours unfolded in an organic way, we just rode with it.

Abel: It’s strange though, because now we look at your practice as a model. We see that you are engaged in art, you’re engaged in performance. And we see this now as a path to designing performance centers.

Diller: If you understand how performers, directors, and choreographers work, you can understand a theater program from the inside out. Once you know what it feels like to be under a spotlight or to have a soft surface to land on and save your knees, or to have a sixty-foot stage, or to be challenged by an idiosyncratic space, you can figure out how best to support artists and also challenge the conventions of theater. Once you experience making installations in museums, you can make better exhibition spaces or challenge the white cube gallery. Living on both sides of the institutional wall makes you more sensitive and also more critical. Are we asking the right questions or are we playing by the rules?

Greenberg: Playing with all the mediums is really a useful practice for us. You said you weren’t limited when you were a younger practice. But I do feel like there’s an interesting limitation that you seem to uphold, which is that everything has to be real, which I think is different from medium specificity. A lot of your peers proposed new World Trade Centers, but DS+R proposed this humble platform, the reality of which was much more immediate than any sort of conceptual architecture. Something on a small scale had such an impact because it was real. I think that throughline is something that, in preparation for this interview, was a huge shift for me in thinking about how you work.

Diller: It’s interesting to dial that back in time. The day after 9/11, a reporter from the New York Times called asking for a quote. “What would you do there?” I said something like, “We’d like to think about it.”

Scofidio: We got many calls that day to respond to the loss of the buildings.

Diller: It was crazy, and of course most responses from our peers were along the lines of, “Rebuild the towers but taller and stronger.” We couldn’t think that way. Herbert Muschamp was the architecture critic at the New York Times, and following 9/11, he assembled a think tank of New York architects, which included Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, Steven Holl, Tod Williams, Billie Tsien, Richard Meier, and Ric and myself. He was flipping out about what had happened and wanted to devote an issue of the New York Times Magazine to each architect’s vision for the site.

We thought this was not an architectural problem. We should assemble a group of philosophers, theorists, sociologists, and thinkers and discuss what should be on that footprint. Aside from the Viewing Platform, which was an immediate response, we strongly believed that there should not be a burial site there, and we also thought that the site should not be covered over by a big building. Instead, there should be a new kind of cultural center.

Scofidio: But we did not want to build on it conventionally, we wanted to keep it as a landscape. If there was any program to it, it would be under the landscape.

Diller: The space under the landscape would be a place of discourse. A place where people could come together to debate and have a cultural exchange. We wanted the site to deal with the problem of the problem, not just mask it with a building. Whereas the rest of the architects were debating whether to restore the grid or keep the mega-block, we felt that the dialogue pointed out architecture’s retreat from social and political issues. So we quit the group.

Greenberg: This was a very romantic period in New York architecture, a lot of people were coming together, firms were partnering, and the loss became a symbol of the city. New York had achieved a global peak of sympathy. How does New York feel to you today?

Diller: In 2002, we were still in a state of trauma. In the period of 2002 to 2003, there was a palpable sense of civic consciousness in the city. I believe that’s what gave life to the High Line and Lincoln Center. If 9/11 had not happened, I don’t think those projects would have happened. There was a sense of citizenship in New York, a sense of responsibility to make the city better. It was not political.

Scofidio: That trauma following 9/11 lasted for at least two-and-a-half years. You couldn’t escape it: during every meal, every meeting with people, the sense of vulnerability bubbled to the surface. It also marked a paradigm shift—

Diller: —Accompanied by an alignment of the stars. The Bloomberg administration was on the way in and Giuliani was on the way out. Giuliani wanted to demolish the High Line. The new leadership brought with it a vision and an openness to change.

Abel: You made public spaces where people can meet and engage. That, in itself, to me is a political act. In establishing these places, they’re incredibly destabilized or re-contextualized. They’re very alien to the environment, which is another political act.

Diller: Everything’s political. You can be overt or stealthy. There was a big shift in our thinking from the time we were critics, lobbing grenades at the system, to the time we were doing generative projects. We reached a point where we didn’t feel it was enough to just point to the problem.

Abel: So, what is overt then for you? What should architects be overt about?

Diller: Architects should be overtly against the privatization of the city and greedy developers that neglect the health of the city. We should be overt about advocating for public space and planning.

Scofidio: I’m just the opposite.

Diller: Yeah?

Scofidio: I don’t believe in those kinds of gestures because they destroy the city, ultimately. I remember years ago, I thought I was going to do the best project to change the city; it might be just a sign on the corner—it wouldn’t be a building. Right? Because by the time the proposal is built, everything has changed anyway. People are locked into a past which has become the future. It’s a mess.

Greenberg: You at some point described architecture as a delayed medium. Compared to most art forms, architecture has this huge time delay. This is the question of why politics and architecture are distanced.

Scofidio: I don’t believe in masterplans. For me, what made Lincoln Center so successful is that we were challenged simply to deal with public space. That was it, period. Our work at Lincoln Center did not start as a grand master plan for change. We were asked to improve the street and the plazas, but we could not alter the outdoor public space without touching interior public space, which started to affect adjacent programs. Change occurred slowly over a period of ten years.

Diller: Ric is also saying that architecture takes a long time. It’s worth it because you plant things in the ground, and they change people’s lives—they’re not fleeting. Some of our work is ephemeral: it’s here, and then it’s gone. We can put two years of our time into something that lasts seven days, like The Mile-Long Opera (2018). It takes the same amount of time to design a building that could be up for fifty years or more. It’s hard to make big claims about which is more impactful. Sometimes it’s just an act like Traffic (1981): a one-day, twenty-four-hour event, which was political. What do you do in that place? It was critiquing other approaches which were permanent.

Scofidio: No, I was just thinking about MoMA: there was never a master plan, just a series of additions wherever there was space. Our addition added to the series but it consciously touched the other additions back in time. We pulled the string of pearls together. That’s what has made it successful. It was different from what Taniguchi did—ripping out the old and replacing it with the new. Ours was about shaping what was there so that it would function better.

Greenberg: How do you feel about MoMA now that it’s in action and operating?

Scofidio: I like it.

Greenberg: Has it changed your perspective seeing it in use?

Diller: It’s working more or less how we envisioned. The institution chose to change fundamentally. It acknowledged that just nine years after the Taniguchi expansion, there had to be a different approach. That we were even asked to do the expansion was a big leap of faith for MoMA. It was a big step for us too; we were critical of the museum in our interview—critical that art was half a mile from the front door, that the museum was disconnected from the city, critical of the transactional quality across the street level, critical of the circulation. The museum recognized these problems as well, and there was a lot of good will. The project started as an expansion of exhibition space to the west, but it ended up touching all parts of MoMA that were never in the script. MoMA was also ready to abandon their discipline-specific galleries.

Abel: Do you think abandoning the discipline-specific galleries was a good idea?

Diller: Yeah. I thought it was very good, if they really meant it. The fear was that architecture and design would disappear. But actually, MoMA always valued architecture. It was the first museum to have an Architecture and Design department and collection within a couple of years of its founding. There are six chief curators that run their departments; Architecture and Design is one of them. There was a collaborative effort among all the chief curators during the design process. The museum was ready to rethink the way it collected and how it defined the twentieth century—reflecting on the geographies that were missed and the artists missed and dismissed.

Scofidio: The anatomy of the building had to change too. The thing that I loved about the original MoMA was the central stair: you came up and entered the galleries and you got lost looking at the artwork. You didn’t know where you were, but then you would find the stair again and that would re-orient you, and then you would go and get lost in the work again. With the successive additions to the building, MoMA became a highway where you would go find a show you came to see, and out through the gift shop. The sense of exploration or getting lost was missing. I think finally, now, we’ve retrieved that ability to get lost and then relocate yourself again.

Greenberg: The stair in particular.

Scofidio: The stair is an antidote to the commercial feel of the escalators.

Diller: I should add that one of MoMA’s other big changes is its commitment to re-hanging a third of the collection galleries every six months. This exposes so much more of MoMA’s vast collection to the public, and it’s not just the hero objects. When we started to work with MoMA, we realized how important building the collection was to them. They bear a huge responsibility to rethink their historic inheritance and address its past biases.

Abel: Visibility, again. It’s visibility through invisibility.

Diller: While MoMA was growing, its collection was as well. But other things were worth putting on display. We felt that modernism was an unfinished project. Some of its ambitions were worth extending, like a belief in progress and pushing material limits. MoMA was the first museum to incorporate glass into its galleries, for example. We used glass in a new way—façade panels that spanned horizontally and acted as beams in the new West core. We also suspended a cantilevered steel stair six stories. Invisibility plays a role in these gravity-defying minimalist elements. While we had many structural and material adventures going on, we were also trying not to be the center of attention. If you remember, the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) was being knocked down, and we were being blamed for it. It was a horrible chapter in our professional and personal lives as AFAM was designed by our colleagues a decade before. But this was a decision that MoMA had made before we came on the scene, and we worked very hard to find a way to save it. But we couldn’t save it and still allow MoMA to use the huge block of space it acquired to the west. Unlike the last expansion that produced a huge, monumental atrium with little gallery space, our expansion had no fat, just meat. We would utilize as much space for art as we possibly could. Even the circulation and the new core were simple and efficient. As Ric was saying, we prioritized orientation—the glass wall at the new communicating stair allowed visitors to see across 53rd street onto an open, public space. Especially with a 30 percent expansion of MoMA’s galleries, the new core would be a palette cleanser for the experience of endless galleries. At street level, the store previously blocked one’s view into the Museum. The public interface was solid, and when you got into the lobby you found yourself in a tunnel that was crowded with queues of visitors waiting to get tickets or check coats. We sank the store and cleared out the lobby. We tucked all the housekeeping functions out of the way. Now from 53rd Street you can see right through the lobby to the Sculpture Garden, making MoMA more inviting and showing off its more public side. We were able to restore pre-admission galleries. By the way, the Sculpture Garden was always free, but people didn’t know you could get to it without paying admission.

Greenberg: A lot of people blame architects for things when they don’t function, or if the building isn’t working. You’ve solved this issue, in the name of the institution or of the public.

Diller: We’re MoMA patrons, so we wanted it to be a good experience for us too.

Abel: Appreciation of culture is related to sight as well. When you look at a building like The Shed, you can look at it and decide whether you like it or not—you don’t really do that at MoMA. There is little to see.

Diller: MoMA was a site that was already built up, but it needed serious surgery. The new part of the expansion was underneath Jean Nouvel’s new tower. We only had the cleave of space that the Folk Art Museum previously occupied for new construction—the rest was renovation. Much of our work involved unraveling the logics of architects that preceded us: Tanaguchi, César Pelli, Philip Johnson, Philip Goodwin, and Edward Durell Stone. Moving ducts out of the way to make a physical connection from the existing building to the addition was like heart surgery. We pride ourselves in not having to pound our chests. We were doing something that we thought was critical to MoMA’s next step and we used the opportunities we had for expression. Of course, we gave the curators the white wall galleries at specific heights they asked for, but we also got our gallery stack of slipped half levels. The Shed was a different kind of opportunity. There was no client initially to work with, no program brief to resolve, no legacy to undermine.

Abel: Somehow like the Viewing Platform.

Diller: It was exactly like that. Why not just jump off the cliff and figure out in mid-air how to make a soft landing?

Scofidio: We’ve jumped off a lot of cliffs.

Diller: Yeah, it’s true. I’ll tell you precisely what happened on that one. There was an RFP (request for proposal) from the city that requested proposals for an undefined cultural project on a small plot of land in Hudson Yards. The site was one-third of what we ended up using. We imagined a new contemporary arts building that could be expandable because the site footprint was too small. The building we proposed would expand to double its original size. The city liked the idea and encouraged us to develop it, but for two years there was absolutely no institutional entity, thus, no funding.

Scofidio: We were never sure if we were the only ones that had responded to the RFP. It was 2008, and all of the financial institutions were tanking. No cultural entity wanted to expand and there was no one thinking about new ones.

Diller: It was a precarious time for culture. Philanthropy was drying up. No one even knew what they had in the bank at the time. We were compelled to make it real. Kate Levin, the Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner in the Bloomberg administration, encouraged us to develop the project. She even recommended us for a National Endowment grant for 100,000 dollars. It wasn’t until 2011 that we met with Mayor Bloomberg and a large contingent from the mayor’s office—all commissioners. We were told that we had to make our case in ten minutes, because the mayor had a short attention span. An hour-and-a-half later, he was still in our studio asking questions. We had envisioned not only a building, but also a new institution, and its operation, and how it would be staffed, and how it could be self-supporting.

Scofidio: That’s when he asked for a business plan.

Diller: We had this big, illustrated document with graphs and data concocted through an architect’s lens that we called a business plan. He suggested that we work with Robert K. Steel, the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, who would also give us some resources. Then it really started. They saw the passion and they saw the hard work. We naively thought that it could happen, and it was the naiveté that made it happen. If we had been the least bit skeptical then, we would have never advanced the idea enough to convince anyone. So that’s the trick. Passionately believing in something deeply enough to will it into happening. After that, Daniel L. Doctoroff got involved. He had the same passion, but he also had the clout. He built a board and a capital campaign on a dream. Finally, we got a contract in 2012, four years after imagining this unlikely project in the middle of a financial downturn.

Scofidio: Similar to the High Line. We still had a lot to prove—that you could do a park in the sky, that you can invent a new type of institution.

Greenberg: Over the course of your practice, you’ve developed a new language, and The Shed is part of that. It’s not just the thinness of everything, but how the thin goes to thick: very muscular forms, more like bodies. I’m curious how to think about form right now, how this might influence which projects deserve form versus which projects don’t require it as much?

Diller: Only architects could ask other architects that question! We have no preconceptions about form. The form always comes out of the experiment. But I think we have proclivities toward the too thick and too thin, the too short, and a bit awkward—not the beautiful or the well-proportioned, but the oddities that make you pay attention because there’s something wrong with the picture. Something is off. In the case of The Shed, we made a decision to use the lightest possible cladding—ETFE pillows filled with air. The building looks pudgy like a down parka but you can get the environmental effect of insulated glass at 1/100th of the weight.

The Shed leaves everything exposed. There’s no conventional cladding. The structure is welded plate steel. The ducts are part of the skeletal structure. What you see is what you get. So it’s a functional response but also aesthetic. We had to distribute the weight of the building on wheels, called bogies, and we decided on six points of distribution. Over one-million pounds rests on an area the size of the palm of your hand, which is the tangent point of each of the bogies. I keep wondering whether we made the right decision using large wheels instead of small ones. There was a discussion with the engineers about using maglev, in which the mechanism would be totally invisible. The building would float on air but appear to have a bigger footprint on the ground. We went with the toy look of the large wheels.

Scofidio: So many of our buildings are locked into technical circumstances and inspired by a hunch which led to design inevitabilities, like the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. There are many decisions where the form starts locked in technically, but intuition gets in the way. The Shed’s structure and touchdown points could have been done hundreds of ways. We made model after model until we found one that looked right. But it wasn’t about signature.

Abel: So in these projects you are all trying to eliminate authorship.

Diller: We’re not trying to dismiss authorship, but the work is not about a style, it’s connected to thinking. We very much own the ideas. It’s not in the same category of authorship as Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry, being recognizable with the same signature style, but a consistency of critical thinking. We look back at the trajectory of the work, and it’s all connected to ongoing research and itches that keep needing to be scratched.