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

The Blur Building

The tourist spectacle and its vicissitudes were also the subject of Diller Scofidio's most successful project: the Blur Building, built for Swiss EXPO 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near the town of Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. It was presented at the Whitney through construction drawings and two videos, one a full-wall projection, keyed to normal human scale, that gave the visitor some sense of the experience of this unique building, which existed only for the duration of the Expo.

Its physical structure an ellipse measuring 328 by 213 feet and rising to a height of 82 feet--was a high-tech lightweight steel frame that supported a number of viewing platforms. Its primary material was water, in the form of mist shot through more than 31,000 nozzles, which enshrouded the structural elements in a near-perpetual fog. As the architects described it in an early conceptual sketch, the project was one of continuous negation of architectural expectations: "scaleless, formless, massless, colorless, dimensionless, weightless, odorless, centerless, featureless, depthless, meaningless...." (5)

Yet despite this seemingly negative program, the Blur Building engaged in a wonderfully complex dialogue with its predecessors among exhibition architecture, most famously, Sir Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, built for London's Great Exhibition in 1851, or the Galerie des Machines from Paris's Exposition of 1889. Both were massive engineering marvels of iron and glass, deemed hardly worthy of the title "architecture" by their contemporaries. They placed their new architectural technologies in the service, above all, of selling: selling the myriad goods available in a newly industrializing global economy, selling myths of national superiority, selling a self-image to a national bourgeoisie.

The Blur Building simultaneously enlisted and refuted this heritage in one gesture. Like the Crystal Palace and its descendants, it was the sum of its architectural refusals, continuing the modernist quest to "make it new," to eradicate tradition through the embrace of new technologies. But it also subverted the standard logic of exhibition architecture: it did not offer an iconic image of the future to its visitors, presenting them instead with an ever-shifting cloud floating just above the waters of the lake. Nor, once the building had been reached across pedestrian bridges from the shore, was anything offered to view other than the gray fog itself. "We realized we could use the lake water to problematize vision, to get in the way of the lake view," Elizabeth Diller has said. "We also wanted to produce an anti-heroic architecture in the form of a special effect, an atmosphere." (6) In the Blur Building, several of the issues that have engaged Diller Scofidio over the years were readdressed in a compelling new form. The commodity, tourism and desire were all assembled here in a critical nexus in which each reveals its dependence upon the others.

That Diller Scofidio managed to make these points while also producing a striking building, one that was both critically and popularly acclaimed as a delight and a provocation, is all the more admirable. They should be relishing the irony that their "formless" and "meaningless" structure became the icon of Swiss EXPO 2002, memorialized on everything from chocolates and sugar packets to stamps--souvenirs displayed at the Whitney as part of the Blur Building's documentation.