DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO running head recto Architecture after Images after Architecture Dimendberg Edward DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO chicago and london chicago press university of chicago iii Edward Dimendberg is professor of film and media studies, visual studies, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, coeditor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, and the principal of Dimendberg Consulting LLC. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in China 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dimendberg, Edward. Diller Scofidio + Renfro : architecture after images / Edward Dimendberg. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book) 1. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 2. Architecture—United States. I. Title. na737.d56d56 2013 720.922—dc23 2012022899 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). frontispiece Diller Scofidio + Renfro, School of American Ballet practice rooms, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. FOR LYNNE I MISTRUST ALL SYSTEMATIZERS AND I AVOID THEM. THE WILL TO A SYSTEM IS A LACK OF INTEGRITY. friedrich nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Contents Introduction 1 chapter one 1976–1989 13 chapter two 1990–1999 59 chapter three 2000–2008 127 Conclusion 199 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 209 Index 233 i.1 Diller + Scofidio, Blur, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002. Photograph © Massimo Vitali. Reproduced by permission of the photographer and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Introduction In the summer of 2002, visitors to the Swiss national exposition in the town of Yverdon-les-Bains donned plastic rain ponchos and groped their way through Blur, an artificial cloud by New York architects Diller + Scofidio. Jutting into a lake and connected to the shore by a walkway, the frame of the building resembled a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome shrouded in fog. Its walls were made of water vapor and breathable. I was as entranced as the fairgoers surrounding me by an experience that provided almost nothing to see and became the principal icon of the expo and a crowd- pleaser. Continually shifting shape,Blur provoked that rarest of phenomena in contemporary life, an unclas- sifiable moment. How does a film scholar come to write a book about an architecture studio? What is its argument? Over the past nine years curious friends and colleagues frequently asked me these questions. Architectural historian Sigfried Giedion claimed in 1928 that “only film can make the new architecture intelligible.”1 As different as the twenty-first-century built environment is from the European modernism of the 1920s that sought to remake the world through mass-produced public housing, reinforced concrete construction, and the aesthetics of transparency and flowing spaces, Giedion’s assertion nonetheless provides a valuable point of entry into the architecture of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in which images no longer merely document 1 introduction buildings but investigate the visual and spatial realities of the present, as ambi- tious cinema always has. Like the atmosphere of Blur, these architects make con- temporary space intelligible, playful, and unpredictable by controlling how and what we see and cannot see. Even before they produced any work, or perhaps as their first achievement, Elizabeth Diller (born 1954) and Ricardo Scofidio (born 1935) adopted a mode of activity that challenged conventional terminology to encapsulate exactly what they did. Few working in the arena of the built environment have more stead- fastly resisted the temptations of embracing a single label than Diller, Scofidio, and, since 2004, their partner Charles Renfro (born 1964).2 Their alternation between distinct professional and cultural languages and media is their great strength and significant contribution as well as the subject of this book. Visiting their projects; looking at drawings, sketchbooks, models, videos, and notes in the archives of the architects; speaking with them and their col- laborators, clients, friends, and colleagues; and reading critical commentaries on their work constituted my research for a project that involved inspecting a grove of moving trees in Liverpool, going through customs in reverse at New York’s Kennedy Airport, climbing steps in a public housing project in Japan, and sorting slides in a bathtub in a Manhattan warehouse. Neither a biography of the architects, a complete inventory of their projects, an exhibition catalog, a volume commissioned by the studio, nor a personal selection of my favorite works by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, this study is a critical chronological exploration of the status of images (both moving and still) in their architecture and the transforma- tion of modernism it has brought about. Its narrative unfolds in three chapters treating four decades of activity by the architects, and begins in the 1970s and concludes in 2008, just as the studio received several large commissions that promise, once again, to alter its profile. The most recent projects I consider are their renovations of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts completed in 2011. Space limitations have pre- vented me from discussing others realized after 2008. Anyone interested in the current activities of DS+R would benefit from visiting the studio website (www. dsrny.com). I consider some achievements of DS+R more successful and significant than others and have written about them accordingly. Yet making qualitative judg- ments is challenging in the case of architects who work in multiple media. How should one compare a temporary video installation with a museum, a theatrical set with a book, a performance with an exhibition, or a housing project with a restaurant, given their vastly different audiences, materials, aspirations, clients, time frames, and budgets? To address this challenge, at the beginning of each chapter I indicate those accomplishments I regard as most crucial during that decade. This includes unbuilt work for which I have been able to view documentation. Revealing mis- steps also belong to this story. While recognizing the impossibility of history 2 narrating itself and not shirking from criticism and evaluation, I have resisted the temptation to draw more than provisional conclusions about the trajectories introduction of Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro and to present the meaning of their attainments as conclusively settled. Thus, I do not believe that recently finished buildings, projects such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) or their renovations at Lincoln Center, are the logical culmination of their activities. Fortuitous coincidences and accidents continue to shape their practice, as has a commitment to working on a small scale. If ever there were an architectural history irreducible to a single direction, it is theirs. Wary of imposing an ending on this continually unfolding story, I present it chronologically in the interests of efficiency and to facilitate its retell- ing by others. Attempting more (or less) when so much of the architecture of DS+R is still relatively new strikes me as premature. A narrative of growing commercialization and alleged abandonment of avant- garde roots (the “sell-out” hypothesis) strikes me as an implausible distortion of the history of the studio. Not only does it overlook the quality and techno- logical innovation in their projects of the past decade, but it also overstates the autonomy of architects in design processes whose outcomes are shaped by col- laborators, clients, budgets, sites, and zoning codes. Instead of tracking fidelity to or deviation from a core identity, I analyze the work Diller Scofidio + Renfro realize in different scales and contexts and its changing conceptual and cultural ambitions. Historians must identify turning points, defining actions, and substantial accomplishments, lest they burden readers with a mass of unconnected details. Richard Evans argues (and I concur) that they should puncture myths, demolish orthodoxies, and explode politically motivated narratives that advance spurious claims to objectivity.3 After having been ignored during the first decade of their activities, Diller and Scofidio slowly developed a reputation as architects who emphasized structural elements in Sentinel and explored video surveillance in Para-Site, despite the fact that they also realized conventional buildings. From their earliest projects, they have always worked in multiple architectural modes at the same time. Later, they became known as makers of highly conceptual installations about postmodern culture, a view that ignored their innovative investigations of mate- rials and frequently conflated their scrupulously multivalent projects with advo- cating theoretical positions. Just as often, commentators have paid short shrift to designers, clients, materials, and budgetary constraints and romanticized Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro as geniuses, paradoxically neglecting their talents at the col- laborations necessary to realize their ideas. Recent successes of the studio have also obscured the financial uncertainty