The arrival of a collection of work by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DSR) raises the question: who needs monographs? These collections of one artist’s, designer’s, or architect’s oeuvre, as it were, used to be both a mark of having arrived for the one who’s creations were collected and an invaluable source book for those seeking to understand, be inspired by, or simply copy what they found in those often-weighty tomes. Both monuments and reference works, monographs proliferated at the end of the last century and take up more than a hundred linear feet of shelves in my library. It would seem, however, that in our Insta age they are just about superfluous. You can access images, from plans and sections to sexy views, of just about any architect’s work faster than you can find, open, and look through the index of a monograph to find only limited representations. Yet the publisher Oscar Rijeda, who produces luxury versions of such books, says he reckons that close to ten thousand monographs still appear every year.
So, what use is the DSR book? It is, by current standards, a modest affair. Although it has almost eight hundred pages spread through two volumes, the paper is thin, the size is a manageable 10” by 12”, and the paper is uncoated, so that the whole weighs just over two pounds. That is, believe it or, quite a bit smaller than many such efforts. There are no essays that aggrandize the work (as Philp Jodidio does in the over-scaled monographs Taschen produces), only a few existing interviews with some of the principals at the firm. It is, if you will, just the facts, ma’am.
As far as I can tell, almost every project the firm has done in its more than four decades of existence are here, although, of course, many designs that did not make it past an early phase are not included. In the “Architecture” section, the book starts with a Plywood House from 1981 that I did not know (such a discovery always being one of the pleasures of a monograph), before moving through such early projects as a social housing in Japan I once trekked to see, through the now-torn-out but wonderfully inventive Brasserie restaurant in New York, to the cultural projects that have allowed the firm to grow from a boutique operation housed in Liz Diller’s and Ricardo Scofidio’s loft to the globe spanning enterprise it is now. You can see themes being established in the ICA Boston and picked up at the Broad in Los Angeles or a photography museum in Rio de Janeiro: continuous surfaces looping from floor to wall to ceiling; stages for seeing and being seen; and transparency and surveillance, and an ethereal slickness that now pervades the firm’s work.
The second volume is called “Not Architecture,” and contains the firm’s experimental work. Here you can find DSR’s site-specific installations, exhibitions, collaborative performances, and research projects that fed into all these modes of presentation. It is with the early projects in these categories, such as their installations at the Capp Street space, WithDrawing Room, in San Francisco in 1987 and the performance The Rotary Notary and his Hot Plate at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in that same year, that Diller and Scofidio made their name. While over time their focus has clearly shifted to the making of “real” buildings, rather than investigations that question what that term even means, or whether we should make buildings, or what buildings mean and do to us and our urban environments, the firm continues to engage in such critical practices. I am currently collaborating with them on an effort to distill water from the Venice canals to make coffee that will be served at this year’s Biennale in that city.
I am not sure why DSR decided to split their work into these two areas. The efforts seem to be so intertwined as to be, especially in their best work, integral to each other. The split also leads to some confusion. Thus, the High Line Park in New York, which they designed together with James Corner, and which contains many moments of investigation into the city and its buildings, but which is a park, is classified as architecture. So is the park they designed in Moscow. On the other hand, the Mile Long Opera, a 2018 even that sang alive the High Line and its surrounding buildings and turned the whole into a gesamtkunstwerk at the highest level, is in the “Not Architecture” volume.
The division takes us back to the problem with monographs. I would say that most of my students have little to no interest in DSR’s built work, however good it might be. Its subtleties escape them. On the other hand, they pour over the experimental work, exhibitions, and performances, no matter how dated they appear. I am sure that prospective clients, however, will skip not only over that second volume, but the first part of the “Architecture” tome to look at the pretty pictures of the business schools, performance venues, and even one honest-to-goodness skyscraper the firm has designed as they are deciding whether to hire them, or merely seeking confirmation that they did the right thing in doing so.
Both students and clients, who are, together with practicing professionals seeking, to put it politely, inspiration, the main audience for the architecture monograph, can get the same information and imagery on their screens. In fact ,there will be more of it, and with a higher resolution than the book has. Sites and apps will also offer, if you surf through the first waves, other views than the ones the architects might want to present, thus broadening your understanding of the work.
That is, finally, the point of such a monograph. While I am sure that it gives everybody at DSR a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction to see what they have accomplished summed up in such an elegant manner (2x4, the New York architects’ graphic designers of choice, made sure of that), it also is an emblem of how they want the world around them to see them – including as a firm that somehow keeps architecture and what they call not-architecture separate. It is the equivalent in architecture of an autobiography.
My ideal of such a self-reflective and -editing collection is not really a monograph, but a series of plates the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel produced between 1820 and 1837. When I was still a student, I was able to purchase an overprint of the 1981 reproduction of an 1866 compendium of these works, without its fancy box and other accoutrements. To this day, when I am depressed or wonder about the use of architecture, I will open a bottle of wine and drag the now almost disintegrating box to my dining room table to leaf through its black-and-white visions of a perfect classical world. The DSR monograph, however much it epitomizes the best kind of modernism, does not have that level of discipline and focus, and I wish it had. Instead, it will become just another part of my collection of such books, there to remind me of how good the firm’s work is before I look up the image or information I need online.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.
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