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Diller + Scofidio: critical structures: a recent Whitney Museum show featured installations, models and projections by this New York architecture team at a significant moment, as they move from art-based cultural critique into their first major commissions for museum buildings - Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio - Critical Essay
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Tom McDonough
It is a curious fact that at the Whitney all the architectural projects were presented in a small gallery at the very back of the exhibition, the models uncomfortably close to one another. This may have been a curatorial choice or, given the venue (an art museum with a relatively newfound interest in architecture), there may have been a decision to emphasize the more artlike aspects of their production. Nevertheless, it was regrettable, and was perhaps one of the causes of the poor press the show received. (7) If Diller + Scofidio are presented primarily in the context of contemporary art, their practice could seem derivative of earlier conceptual precedents and may even appear somewhat beside the point.
But they aren't conceptual latecomers so much as architectural pioneers, introducing a set of self-reflexive critical strategies into a discipline better known for its affirmative stance toward contemporary culture. The misunderstanding might have been avoided had their architectural work (both proposals and actual buildings) been more centrally featured, from their early Kinney (Plywood) House of 1981 through their recent Slither Building in Gifu, Japan (2000)--completed structures that were unfortunately absent from the Whitney retrospective. Presenting the architecture as an adjunct to their artistic output was a mistake that reduced the real complexities and specificities of their designs--and their imaginative dialogue with advanced architectural practice of the 1970s (particularly in the designs for Slow Honse)--to the level of sound-bite simplifications consisting of a few glamorous computer-animated renderings and models. It deserved more.
But can we also read into this presentation a vague disdain on Diller + Scofidio's part for their own built output? After two decades of producing works largely free from the limitations of client, site and program, does the practical work of design seem inevitably tainted by compromise? I hope not, for Diller + Scofidio, at their best, seem to be proposing a crucial alternative to the uses of building technology that currently dominate architectural practice. Their work neither adopts the rather arbitrary "artistic" forms of a Frank Gehry, with his affirmation of contemporary, spectacle culture, nor relinquishes the architect's role in favor of a technological determinism as in much work of the "blob" school of Greg Lynn et al. Instead, this design team is reaching toward critically examining technology while making sophisticated and imaginative use of it. Like their mentors at Cooper Union, most notably the late John Hejduk, Diller + Scofidio are producing buildings that are simultaneously spatial experiences and narratives of and about the societies in which they are embedded. In a world in which technology is increasingly dissolving formerly distinct lines between the real and the virtual, the directly experienced and the telecast, this is more necessary than ever.
(1.) Aaron Betsky, "Display Engineers," in Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003, p. 23.
