Elizabeth Diller's office is in the corner of a huge free plan loft in an old warehouse building in Chelsea. I meet it on a Friday afternoon, when the office is Friday and the sparkling sun on the Hudson. The building, which occupies an entire city block, once had trains of goods which entered it.
It is a good reminder that Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio she co -founded with her husband Ricardo Scofidio in 1981 (Charles Renfro became a partner in 2004), is best known for the Highline. The transformation of a disused freight rail line with regard to a surprisingly successful high linear park has radically rebuilt the landscape on the west side of Manhattan to a few pies of houses.
I apologize for carrying out the interview now. Only a few weeks before, Scofidio died. The colleagues of Diller assured me that she was happy to be distracted by speaking of her work.
He is tinged with sadness, but this year brings practice under the world's projectors. On May 31, the V & A East Storehouse will open its doors by the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. Located in a part of the former former media center of the Olympic Games, it is an ingenious reuse of an existing structure and represents a remarkable opening of museums massive collection. At the Venice Biennale, there is a bookstore and an installation that makes coffee from the water from the canal.
All these projects appear closer in intellectual ambition – rethink the institutions, technology and public space – to the first works of Diller and Scofidio than to the great architecture for which their studio has become known. A classic example of the latter is the hangar, located a few blocks from their office houses – a transformable blockbuster which serves as a cultural component for the development of Hudson Yards. Nearby is the Quai 57, transformed into a massive technology camp on the water for Google. Just beyond, their 88-storey Hudson Yards, one of the best recent skyscrapers in the city.
The list continues around the world, from Los Angeles, where they work on a new phase of the Broad Art Museum, in Adélaïde, where the Tarrkarri Center for First Nations Cultures emerges from the Kaurna field. There is also the Al-Mujadilah center and the mosque for women in Qatar, the first contemporary mosque for women in the world. It is a remarkable building with a concrete carpet perforated with a floating roof on it; Bright, light, fluid and open.
However, when Diller and Scofidio broke out on the stage, they were known for having challenged the orthodoxies of large manufacturers, modernists and postmodernists. They did something more agile, working in galleries and on paper, in the academic world and in the text. “There was a kind of resistance,” said Diller, “it came with the 1970s.” (She always sports the same radical chic of quasi-immerses glasses and with a black frame which she made half a century ago.)
“I lived in the East Village and New York was quite depressed at the time, post-industrial but above all. It was the moment when artists could find huge lofts. The space allowed you to do an experimental work, down and dirty and very liberating. ”
If it seems to be the New Yorker archetypal, Diller was born in Poland in 1958 and moved with his family in the United States in 1960. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Architecture where she met Scofidio – who was one of her tutors. Their first work together, says Diller, Traffic In 1981. It was a 24 -hour installation of thousands of orange traffic cones on the island of the circulation of Columbus Circle, a striking visual protest concerning the waste of public space incurred by traffic engineering.
Their first major architectural moment arrived two decades later and was hardly a building. BlurringBuilt for the Swiss national exhibition in 2002, was a skeletal structure taking place on Lake Neuchâtel which was wrapped in a cloud of steam so that the pavilion disappears.
“The exhibitions aimed to show technology,” says Diller, “we therefore carried out a resolutely Lo-Fi project, a criticism.
He was inspired, said Diller, by the writings of the French philosopher Hubert Damisch. But it was also fun, which children could appreciate as much as adults. And it was a pure experience. The architects resisted the temptation to resuscitate it elsewhere – there is now as a memory.
Their 1989 show in MoMA always haunts architectural imagination. Parasite was a sinister installation of the cameras and strange mechanisms that have watched the public. “It was essential,” she says, “on the way people look at the museum and the way the museum looks at them.” Three decades later, they would rethink the MoMa itself.
Another room, Sell (1993), consisted of images of a lively mouth with red trigger projected on an abandoned porn theater in Manhattan. “We were happy,” said Diller. “We were the first architects to receive a subsidy from MacArthur (in 1999) and this validated that what we did was architecture. It was critical, social, political. We also taught and the idea of doing professional architecture has never really entered my mind.
“We have come out of institutional criticism, but we then realized that they are people like us who were now directing the institutions. We went from the wall cup to build them. The fact is that we now realize that we really want these institutions. This is what civil society is. “
Diller shows me the new book of practice, his first monograph. It has a curious format: two books linked together. A part is entitled simple “architecture”, the other “non -architecture” – separated between buildings and writings, art and conceptual projects. It is a work of love and the perfect encapsulation of the transition from institutional criticism to the construction of institutions.
Now his practice is built like crazy. He does not have a unique style established, considering each project as a new experience. “If societies and cities change,” asks me, rhetorically, “how does architecture take place? It's slow, heavy and expensive. How do you produce architecture that does not default the credits? ”
It underlines the Lincoln Center, on which its practice has been working for decades, slowly improving public and performance spaces, as a decisive project. But also, more surprising, until September 11. “New York had crossed this trauma but there was something new in the air, a feeling of citizenship. With the high line, we had the impression that architecture could do something for the city. ” But the high line has also become a conduit for hyper-hengrification, a development accelerator on each side, which ended up looking like a kind of architectural menagerie. Diller rolls his eyes a little, well aware.
In Venice, practice will be involved on three separate sites. With the V&A, it will explore the architecture of storage, in an installation which will focus on the storage life of a toothbrush as a means of exploring global supply chains, containerization, storage and the practice of retail.
The company will also design a new temporary bookstore from the Biennale, a delicate and temporary traction structure and another intervention, an intriguing installation that will filter and transform water from the Venice Channel into Expresso. “I'm going to drink the first cup,” she turns before I could ask more questions.
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