Ric Scofidio's Legacy: Redefining Space and Spectacle

I met Liz Diller before I got to know Ric Scofidio. That was not uncommon. In the way the tightly wound duo that founded what is now Diller Scofidio + Renfro looked from the outside, Diller was the public presenter, Ric the tinkerer. Diller gave and gives most of the lectures, while Scofidio figured it all out. Of course, this is, like all such attempts to parse who does what in a creative partnership, a gross over-simplification, but there is no doubt in my mind that Scofidio, who passed away on March 6 at the age of 89, was not only an amazing designer, but also a gearhead who not only obsessed about how to make the firm’s complex designs work, but also loved, for instance, fixing and racing old cars. He was also a brilliant teacher and, to top it off, one of the warmest and most generous people in the profession it has been my privilege to know. The give and take between Liz Diller, his wife and partner, was full of a warmth, humor, and New York angst that drew you into their shared intelligence and passion for architecture.

When I first got to know Diller and Scofidio in the late 1980s, they were architects testing the very limit of the discipline and therefore already heroes to both my students and me. I came to New York to visit them in their loft across the street from Cooper Union and above the Village Voice. The small space was a piece of that Village scene: rough and ready, open and filled with both life and creativity. Ric’s double bass dominated part of what was both living and work area, and it seemed to me already then that Ric, as the bass player in this three-person band (Renfro was at the time I first visited the only employee), provided the steady and subtle backbeat and deeper melody to whatever was going on in the enterprise.

Over the years, I watched as the firm and its work grew not only in size from the early experiments and installations, house proposals and seemingly outrageous entries in competitions into the large and influential presence in the field they are now. Along the way, I worked with them on their first major museum retrospective, in 2003 at the Whitney Museum, and on installations in San Francisco and Venice. As the projects became bigger, they continued to focus on the question of what is it that architecture lets us see and how we are seen within its frames. It did and does so often by erasing the constructions that make that visibility what we expect it to be, along the way transforming spaces to unexpected stages, viewing platforms, and peepholes. Not only we as users or viewers are on display or watch; Diller, Scofidio and Renfro managed to activate objects, from toy robots to haute couture dresses, and from suitcases to parts of the building themselves, to the point that they took part in that masquerade.

What activates those relationships is technology. At the very beginning, cameras and surveillance equipment were central to Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s acts of architectural striptease and reframing, but so were implements as simple as an iron that could be used to “misfold” clothes into emblems of how we present ourselves (Bad Press, 1983), or mirrors that they manipulated so that a woman could slither down a stage show in a ballet performance for which they designed the set; the audience, viewing her in the canted mirror as big as the stage, would see her rising up as an impossible large dress unfolded behind her.

The archetypal Ric Scofidio moment for me was the project the team devised for the Whitney exhibition, Mural. At the risk, again, of over-simplification, it was Ric Scofidio who, from my perspective as curator, took the lead in figuring out how to assemble and program a Rube Goldberg-like contraction that sent a simple household drill scampering across the face of a drywall wall during the course of the show, continually creating holes in a seemingly random pattern. What had started as a solid wall separating viewers and artifacts in one gallery from the other became a translucent and then almost completely open window from one space to the other as the small openings kept proliferating. When I visited first the studio and then the museum during preparation, Scofidio was obsessing and delighting in the contraption. “I promise you it will work,” he said, smiling at my skepticism about the tangle of scaffolding, wires and laptops that were meant to make good on this promise. It did.

As the firm became larger and took on projects that were more standard in their program and, of necessity, their approach, some of both the intellectual and physical experimentation threatened to be lost. A few years ago, just as the firm’s first high-rise was nearing completion in New York’s Hudson Yards, I met Diller and Scofidio for lunch. Scofidio showed up first and immediately sighed: “have you seen our tower? What a disaster. The glass is not what it was meant to be, and the curves got smoothed over.” We discussed what Diller Scofidio + Renfro had and had not been able to achieve at that scale until Diller swept in and before even sitting down exclaimed: “Have you seen our tower? Isn’t it great?” Scofidio arched his eyebrows and gave me a wry smile.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro, to their credit, have not given up their experimental nature. They continue to inform their buildings with the exploration of issues that have fascinated them from their loft days, while also still engaging in installations, exhibitions, and performances –they have not one, but two large-scale pavilions under construction at the Venice Architecture Biennale that opens in May. I am sure Ric Scofidio’s imagination and tinkering will remain a central part of what they do. What I will miss is not only Scofidio’s brilliance and warmth, but also that wry smile and that sense that, however big the building or risky the architecture, it will both work and not work, setting up the next investigation of what the discipline is.

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.