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

Architectural Conceptions

One central question remains: how can the insights gained in these two decades of critical installations, videos and art works be translated into permanent built structures? The question is a timely one, given that in 2002 Diller Scofidio were awarded commissions for two major cultural institutions, the Eyebeam Museum of Art & Technology in New York (to be completed 2007) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (to be completed 2006). A tentative answer, at least as proposed by the projected Eyebeam Museum, could be rather pessimistic: the freedoms permitted in the ephemeral spaces of installations or the noninstrumental art work cannot, in fact, be translated into a full-scale building program. This is not to say that the Eyebeam Museum might not be a beautiful, successful structure, but rather that the design fails to maintain the critical viewpoint of its designers' earlier work.

Diller Scofidio here seem content to make use of what must rank as one of the hoariest cliches of contemporary architecture--the "fold," utilized as an alternative to more traditional architectonic strategies. Best known through the work of Peter Eisenman (who has made the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's text on this form required reading--or skimming--for architecture students everywhere), this formal device has become ubiquitous in the pages of advanced architecture journals and in the studios of top schools. Hence we have the accordionlike form, rising out-of-scale over the Chelsea streetscape, with exhibition spaces cleverly distinguished from studio spaces by means of alternating pleats of the continuous concrete ribbon from which the building is composed. (The actual structure will be rather bulkier than many of the images presented at the Whitney suggest: the trusses of the floor plates are to be suspended from two towers that sandwich the site, belying much of the daring transparency of the computer renderings.) The unexplained high-tech "spider" climbing the street wall of the building, seen in several of the representations displayed, only adds a touch of kitsch to the slick architecture-journal graphics.

Yet Diller Scofidio's contemporaneous project for Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art has much to recommend it. Perhaps this is because it takes its cues not from architectural fashion but from their own previous work, namely their award-winning 1991 design titled Slow House, a project for a vacation house that would have adventurously juxtaposed picture window, video screen and automotive windshield in an extended analysis of technologies of seeing. Several of the lessons of this unrealized design are brilliantly incorporated into the ICA project, which will similarly explore the spaces of the gaze, but now on the public scale of the city rather than on the domestic scale of the individual house. It is to be a decidedly civic object, sited along the water and adjoining the Boston Harborwalk, whose promenade symbolically rises up a set of monumental stairways to become part of the architecture itself. The bending concrete plane of the building forms a dramatically bold volume, and its cantilevered upper floor provides a variety of perspectives onto the harbor. Watching the city, observing static art works or viewing multimedia presentations will all be accommodated in a variety of spaces with a variety of glazing that ranges from transparent to opaque (some of which may be adjusted to suit changing programmatic needs). Although decidedly original, the ICA proposal benefits from its careful referencing of architectural sources: not only their own Slow House but also, in a faint echo, Curzio Malaparte's self-designed house on Capri (begun in the late 1930s), with its transformation of the domestic program into an observatory onto its spectacular Mediterranean seascape.