Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFRO

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Introduction.......................................1CHAPTER ONE 1976–1989.......................13CHAPTER TWO 1990–1999.......................59CHAPTER THREE 2000–2008.....................127Conclusion.........................................199Acknowledgments....................................203Notes..............................................209Index..............................................233

Chapter One

An inclination to "blur" traditional genres and media pervaded much of the most ambitious culture produced during the 1970s and 1980s in New York City. Diller and Scofidio clearly learned from the proliferation of video, performance, postminimalist, and installation art, developments they knew well and that constitute a significant frame of reference for understanding their architecture. Inspired by the political ferment of the 1960s, this mixing of cultural forms sought to apprehend the realities of life in advanced industrial societies. Hans Haacke mapped the holdings of New York's worst slumlords in Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971. Martha Rosler combined photographs of the Bowery with captions in her 1981 work The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems. Different as the aesthetic creeds and contexts of these projects were, they shared a concern with investigating the spaces of everyday life as highly codified social and political systems, that is to say, as languages, for this was the moment when semiology, the study of culture as a system of signs, exercised its greatest influence in the humanities and arts.

Visual artists in New York encountered the ideas of French semiologist Roland Barthes in translation and engaged with them in their work by the middle of the 1960s. Attempts to theorize architecture as a language commenced in the 1930s, yet the project of understanding it semiologically was not taken up until 1969, first in the work of Charles Jencks and George Baird, and later by fellow architectural theorists Diana Agrest, Mario Gandelsonas, Geoffrey Broadbent, and Alan Colquhoun. Initially, architectural theorists employed the notion of the sign to criticize behaviorist tendencies in the social sciences, according to which the built environment appeared law-governed and amenable to prediction and control. Applying the core insight of semiology developed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the conventional or "arbitrary" character of all signs, these critics questioned the imputation of innate meaning to architecture, the ability of science to establish a correlation between space and behavior, and the alleged neutrality of meaning in functionalist styles.

Diller and Scofidio took seriously the analogy between architecture and language, as their description of the with Drawing Room (1987) as a contribution toward "an oppositional grammar" of "home" and the isolation of the "irreducible domestic unit" suggests. Their work of the 1980s extracted signifying elements from architecture to reveal the social character of spatial codes. It drew sustenance from academic discourse in architecture and the visual arts and had a culturally critical thrust, without however advocating or producing utopian alternative spaces, a key difference between their ironic and analytic leanings and earlier experimental projects by Austrian architects Coop Himmelblau or Haus-Rucker-Co.

Many artists in New York during the 1970s understood scrutinizing everyday life and displaying their observations in the gallery, the museum, or the performance space as a political gesture. They sought to examine how consumerism, advertising, the mass media, culturally sanctioned gender roles, and notions of domesticity maintained relations of control whose naturalness and benign function appeared increasingly dubious. As semiology recast avant-garde cinema and the discipline of film studies leached out into the art world, artists, photographers, and filmmakers sought to expose the complicity of culture with political and economic institutions.

At its most strident, the 1980s fusion of semiology and psychoanalysis, especially in the field of film theory, could become moralizing, suspicious of visual and erotic pleasures in all their guises. If Diller and Scofidio had early on recognized the utility of the semiological logic of binary oppositions between signifiers and signifieds, the components of the sign for Saussure, they never became enslaved to this model, and, driven by the constraints and opportunities of each project, they made architecture that was too playful, too enamored with space, design, and creating objects, to conform to theoretical orthodoxy.

From their location at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the architects occupied an ideal position from which to observe the New York art world. Although they did not exhibit in art venues in the late 1970s, while Diller was still a student and Scofidio had withdrawn from architectural practice while teaching at Cooper, they followed the work of artist Dan Graham with particular interest. His Projections on a Gallery Window, realized at Franklin Furnace from January 2 to January 20, 1979 (a piece that the architects could have seen), projected slides of other gallery spaces onto the lower half of the front window of the exhibition space. Investigating the relationship among windows, mirrors, transparency, photography, and the spectator, Graham's piece suggests how a visual artist working in multiple media engaged issues of space and vision that shortly would emerge as key concerns of these two architects as well. At this time, Diller and Scofidio also attended numerous events at the Kitchen, the leading venue in the 1970s for performance and experimental video located in New York's Soho. The missing link between their encounter with contemporary art and architecture and their creative synthesis of its tendencies into a distinctive vocabulary soon would emerge in the studio environment they created.

THIRTY-SIX COOPER SQUARE

In their live-in loft at Thirty-Six Cooper Square in the East Village, above the offices of the Village Voice newspaper and across the street from the Cooper Union, Scofidio and Diller spent much of 1980s writing grant applications to finance small architectural projects in public art and experimental theater contexts. They slept in one corner of the space, worked in another, and hired student designers when a project required them, a pattern largely unchanged until 1997, at which time their studio had just one permanent employee. In 2006, shortly before they moved to 601 West Twenty-Sixth Street in West Chelsea, their once nearly empty loft was overflowing with designers at work stations and spilled over onto an additional floor.

The very notion of an architectural studio, implying permanence and continuity, does not capture the rhythms of what during the 1980s could better be described as an artist's atelier. Months, sometimes years, would pass without paid design work or any discussion in print of their activities, during which time Scofidio and Diller taught to earn a living. Supplies and equipment were charged to personal credit cards, and debt grew along with uncertainty about the future. Neither Diller nor Scofidio sought long-term employment in a large professional practice, although Diller once worked briefly for Richard Meier. They preferred independence and commissions whose outcome they could shape. Nor did they turn toward a conceptually driven "paper architecture," an option embraced by many architects of their generation who were unable to obtain clients and resigned to the likelihood that their drawings would not be built.

Scofidio's earlier practice, Berman, Roberts, & Scofidio, was founded in 1967 and completed numerous buildings in New York State. Its most unconventional project remains an unrealized proposal for Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn completed in 1968 with the artist Hans Haacke, who later proposed leaving "an area ten feet deep between two topographical contour lines uncultivated for the lifetime of the hilly park." In 1972, the office realized the renovation in the Brooklyn park of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, dedicated to those who died on British ships during the American Revolution, with landscape architect A. E. Bye. This commission suggests Scofidio's interest in the relation of memory to the built environment. He and John T. Roberts completed a master plan in January 1973 for the Green Camp in northern New Jersey, then owned by Cooper Union.

Scofidio and Diller initially did not seek projects with larger budgets and more complex programs. Despite their enjoyment of building, they did not care for the profession of architecture. Their commitment to small research-based projects distinguished them from most practitioners in the 1980s, including other self-proclaimed challengers to the status quo such as Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry. During this time, two schools, Cooper Union and Princeton, provided them with contexts in which to exchange ideas and to encounter colleagues and students who became collaborators and key interlocutors. These academic affiliations enabled them to earn a living as well as to shape pedagogy and the profession by their involvement as faculty and by teaching subsequently noteworthy architectural professionals such as Shigeru Ban, Laurie Hawkinson, Paul Lewis, David Lewis, Jürgen Mayer, Lindy Roy, Henry Urbach, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

THE COOPER UNION AND JOHN HEJDUK

Throughout the 1980s, the key institution for the architects was the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where Scofidio taught from 1967 to 2007. Diller studied architecture at Cooper from 1975 to 1979 and taught there from 1982 to 1990. In 1857, inventor and philanthropist Peter Cooper established the charter of his school, which to this day runs on the basis of an endowment and admits students on full scholarship through an entrance examination. A major influence on the identity of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture was John Hejduk (1929–2000). He arrived there in 1963 and served as its dean from 1975 until his death. Hejduk drew, painted, and wrote prolifically yet built relatively little. His best-known project is the redesign of the interior of the Cooper Foundation Building, completed in 1974. Although a member of "the New York Five"—an implausible grouping of Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, John Hejduk, and Michael Graves that was promoted by Arthur Drexler, then head of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art—Hejduk exercised his most profound influence as an educator. He believed drawing and storytelling were on par with building and inspired many younger architects who were dissatisfied with the commercialization and commodification of architecture, or who perhaps simply could not find clients during the economic recession of the 1980s. Hejduk's embrace of verbal language (he wrote poetry and prose) and belief that architecture could function poetically and allegorically mattered to numerous architects of the generation of Daniel Libeskind. Analyzing the relation of Diller and Scofidio to Hejduk is more complicated. Although they never accepted the search for transcendence and romantic mode of self-expression evident in his work (especially his writing) after 1970, and as time went on increasingly embraced ideas and subject matter that could find no place in Hejduk's worldview, they nonetheless commenced their practice in dialogue with him.

All three architects shared a penchant for conceptual polarities, a distrust of closed systems, and a high tolerance, if not a liking, for ambiguity. Hejduk, a voracious reader of literature and a cinephile, introduced detective stories into the Cooper curriculum and perspicaciously analyzed the relation of architecture to the frame of the moving image. He and Diller admired The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), a film whose mystery, visceral impact, and precision either architect would have emulated in design work. If certain projects by Diller and Scofidio of the 1980s recall the elegance and laconic quality of Hejduk's sketches and objects, if not their occasional anthropomorphism, his example as an architect who cared little about making money and devoted his entire career to exploratory research, wherever it might lead, was likely more significant to them.

Beginning his career in 1954 at the University of Texas at Austin as one of the so-called Texas Rangers, a group including architects Colin Rowe, Bernard Hoesli, and Robert Slutzky that introduced a rigorous formal analysis of architecture, especially the interwar buildings of Le Corbusier, into a largely moribund curriculum, Hejduk was a contested figure during his time at Texas (he and his fellow innovators lost their jobs two years later) and remained so wherever he taught. Deeply charismatic, highly opinionated, and given to delivering elliptical pronouncements about architecture in his trademark Bronx accent, he brought an extraordinary sensitivity toward built form to his teaching. While in Texas, he developed with Slutzky the so-called nine-square problem, a three-square-by-three-square grid that could be designed in plan or as a model. It became a key element of studio pedagogy at Cooper, even before Slutzky also joined its faculty in 1968.

By emphasizing the frame and its elements through which architecture could develop a program and explore the interaction of posts, beams, and walls, the nine-square exemplified a formal geometrical approach to design teaching. Years later, Hejduk acknowledged its transcendental, if not Platonist, roots by noting that "the nine-square is metaphysical. It always was, it still is for me.... It is one of the classic open-ended problems given in the last thirty years. The nine-square has nothing to do with style. It is detached: The nine-square is unending in its voidness." Although it effectively revealed weaknesses and half-baked ideas in student design work, this powerful design tool came at the cost of what an architect of a later generation calls "the complete removal of design decisions from both the physical world and a cultural context," and many teachers later distanced themselves from its self-contained formalism.

Hejduk cared deeply about how buildings might enfranchise their users and improve the world. A committed modernist, he believed successful architecture reflected on its form, intervened in lived space, and when most effective could be poetic and political. As the Texas years receded in time, Hejduk introduced verbal language into his drawings as a means to tell stories, construct allegories, and issue moral judgments. He frequently excoriated the architectural profession and figures such as Philip Johnson, whom he regarded as false messiahs:

Either consciously or unconsciously, I've determined not to accept the status quo in architecture, whether it's practice, theory, or whatever the hell it is. I'm a very pragmatic architect; I believe in the idea of program, but not in the antiquated ideas of program where program is paramount. Program not only has to do with building and aesthetics, it has to do with the sociopolitical aspects of a world.... You know what I am getting at? In other words, there are programs today that still maintain their authenticity, but there are other programs now that shouldn't be around at all. They serve no function. An eighty-story, block-wide high-rise office building is an antiquated program for our time. There's just no use for it.

Scofidio taught studio at Cooper, sometimes in tandem with his colleague Tod Williams, with whom he published an essay on studio pedagogy. Its emphasis on developing formal skills in students echoes the philosophy of the school presented in the several editions of the book Education of an Architect. If Scofidio occasionally alluded to the shape of his 1964 Porsche 356C in a design, more often he found professional practice frustrating. By the time he began his relationship with Diller, who took a studio with him in 1977, he had contemplated giving up architecture and was increasingly disenchanted with the politics of it. His impact as a teacher was tremendous, and Mike Webb, with whom he cotaught fourth-year studio, claims, "No architect I ever met or had listened to in a studio had Ric's tough, rigorous mathematical approach to architectural design."

Studying in a small school run by an architect as opinionated as Hejduk inevitably affected young architects forming their identity. Other Cooper faculty such as Raimund Abraham and Peter Eisenman contributed to an atmosphere of rivalry in which students took sides. Diller began her studies as a photography major, and perhaps for this reason she came to architecture with a certain distance and fared better than many of her fellow students in retaining her creative autonomy. Writing some years later when already on the faculty at Cooper, she acknowledged Hejduk's authority in a revealing manner: "Just as his statements must be interpreted, surfacing as they often do through the riddle and parable of the raconteur, his strategy to nurture the independent mind of both student and teacher is equally indirect. It is Hejduk that constitutes the school's most subtle and pervasive paradox: for, he is a leader that cannot be followed." Williams remembers Diller's growing distance from Hejduk over the course of her studies and agrees with Diller's own assessment that Hejduk's direct impact upon her while a student was minimal. Scofidio was closer to Hejduk and enjoyed a warm friendship with him.

The student work Diller completed at Cooper defies easy categorization and presents formal and social concerns very different from those that Hejduk introduced during his early years as dean. Architect Ralph Lerner (1949–2011), several years ahead of Diller and later dean at Princeton where he hired her, remembered Hejduk being deeply shaken by the Kent State riots and the political transformations of the early 1970s. It was at this moment that Hejduk broadened the approach of the school and hired faculty such as Abraham, who introduced a more intuitive and lyrical approach to form making than the modernist precepts of Richard Meier, who taught at Cooper from 1963 to 1973. Slutzky eventually moved to the School of Art after a disagreement with Hejduk about the direction in which the School of Architecture was heading.

Diller's senior thesis of 1979, "Twin Houses for One Resident," reveals her considerable draughtsmanship. A drawing from it exhibited in a June 5–23, 1984, group show, Detail: The Special Task; An Exhibition of Works by Women Architects, presents the attic window and piano nobile window from adjacent but nonidentical houses for one resident. Her brief describes a client with strong aesthetic desiring border on the irrational (who else but someone fascinated by dualities would build, inhabit, clean, and maintain twin houses?) and reveals a palpable fascination with joints and the meetings of architectural surfaces. The project hovers between a meditation on process and affect and a step toward realizing ideas in built form, tendencies one also could discern in Abraham's own work. It concretizes Diller's retrospective assessment of Cooper as a school where "the distinction between representation and the represented collapsed entirely. The physical properties of the drawing, the ultrathin space of the drawing surface, and the new strategies of architectural notation defined the school's agenda."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from DILLER SCOFIDIO + RENFROby Edward Dimendberg Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.