DSR

A design _ architecture

Inside/Out: the works of DS+R

By Robert Landon

Great architects tend to bloom late in life. It can take decades to win over the few people in the world with the power to risk a few hundred million on iconoclastic notions. The New York firm Diller, Scofidio and Renfro (known as DS+R) is no exception.

Though Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have been stars of architectural circles since the ‘80s (Charles Renfro became a partner in 2004), it is only in the last five years that they have actual buildings to boast of. It’s not that they weren’t busy. Diller and Scofidio did pioneering work intertwining architecture, urban planning, performance, electronic media and critical theory. They first gained attention designing theater sets, window displays and museum exhibitions – all temporary structures. Appropriately enough, they won international prominence with Blur Building, another temporary construction enveloped in manmade fog, so that it seemed to hover above Switzerland’s Lake Neuchatel. Architecture or performance art? DS+R lets you decide.

Now, after decades with its head in the notional clouds, DS+R is giving more

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permanent form to its ideas, creating a string of real-world projects that probe the boundaries of architecture and urban design. However, they are not forsaking their theoretical roots. As heir to French critical thinkers like Saussure and Derrida, DS+R wants its buildings to deconstruct as much as construct, to dissolve apparent binaries like inside and out, public and private, art and commerce – but always with the higher purpose of enabling new and more democratic urban experiences.

Consider their first major construction, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA, 2006). Here, DS+R gives form to its ideas by literally pulling the street up into the building itself. The steps leading to the museum entrance blend seamlessly with the waterfront promenade on which the museum sits. As a result, the steps serve as a social gathering place as much as a passage into the museum. In fact, the museum’s vast concrete weight is cantilevered across those same steps, as if the building was designed to safeguard the non-paying public as much as to guard the precious art inside. In doing

©Paul Clemence

The New York-based architecture firm is redefining city living

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ŠPaul Clemence

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so, DS+R is resisting clear divisions between inner sanctum and the hubbub of street life.

The High Line, DS+R’s next major completed work, is another uncanny twinning of opposites. Occupying a 2.3-kilometer stretch of elevated train tracks, these hanging gardens wind their unlikely way through the factories and warehouses of New York’s Meatpacking District. Renfro has called the park an “unfurled piazza” – a place where, like an Italian piazza, people come to stroll, to commune, to see and be seen.

Though the High Line sits amid the hard realities of New York, there is something dreamlike about threading your way along the old tracks, with bees buzzing in the park’s meadow grasses even as the traffic of 10th Avenue roars beneath you. And its peculiar vantage on New York is also uncanny, alternating between closeups of the city’s old industrial fabric and unlikely views of the wider city.

As an urban intervention, DS+R’s work at New York’s Lincoln Center is perhaps even more remarkable. Until a few years ago, Lincoln Center was “a kind of acropolis of the elite that was largely divorced from the rest of the city,” says Renfro. In response, DS+R has found brilliant ways to deconstruct old barriers – physical and

psychological – while still respecting the institution’s basic DNA. For example, the concrete walls of Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School have been cut away and replaced with glass, lending transparency to a building that once looked like a bunker.

From the main plaza, a pair of canopies reach out to the sidewalk, subtly beckoning passersby. And a manmade knoll – actually a wing-like roof restaurant covered in grass – attracts all comers, from fur-lined operagoers to kids playing hooky from the gritty public school just down the street.

Perhaps most ambitious of all is DS+R’s forthcoming Museum of Image and Sound, which is starting to take form just a few yards from Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach.

In a city of extreme social divisions, DS+R is once again threading street life into an elite institution. In this case, the public sidewalk – including Rio’s distinctive cobblestones – are being pulled, bent and enfolded into the building, so that a visitor can walk all the way to the roof without ever paying admission.

“Our ultimate desire is not just to enliven city spaces but to re-engage and re-imagine the city itself – to expose hidden aspect of spaces, whether social, formal or political,” says Renfro.

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