Diller + Scofidio :: 21st Century [neo-]Beaux-Arts architects

Diller + Scofidio


**21st Century [neo-]Beaux-Arts architects**

he ultimate project for [Elizabeth] Diller and [Ricardo] Scofidio would be a structure that called into question the nature of architecture, the way Duchamp's 'Fountain,' a porcelain urinal that the artist named, turned upside down and signed, questioned the nature of art. If you're interested in games of perception, the power of wordplay and the discovery of unexpected beauty in the prosaic, Duchamp is your man....

iller and Scofidio are receiving a major museum retrospective, opening March 1, at the moment they are preparing to break ground on their first major building, the $37 million Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Their influence, however, overshadows their list of completed commissions. 'In experimental architecture and design, they are the only ones who made as the core of their work the question "What do we mean by architecture?"' says Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and curator of the Whitney show along with K. Michael Hays, the museum's adjunct curator of architecture.

he quickest way of explaining how, within the profession, Diller + Scofidio became a catch phrase is to describe its iconic project, the 'Slow House.' [See above

] A weekend retreat on the Long Island waterfront, it was designed in 1989 for a Japanese art investor. 'Our client came to us and said he wanted a house with a view,' Diller recalls. That request provoked them to explore the very notion of a view -- for instance, the evolution of the picture window and the terminology in real-estate ads. 'Why is architecture a technology that creates a view?' Diller recounts. 'Because it mediates it with a window frame.' The couple argued that the picture window represents a more advanced technology than the video display -- 'because it strips away the hardware that you have on a TV monitor and leaves only the effect.'[fn.66

]

ut of this research emerged a design that, depending on where you are coming from, is either dazzling or lunatic. Although ''Slow House'' does include certain necessities (like a kitchen and guest bedrooms), it is essentially a retreat with a view. The design has a clarity that architectural lingo, including the discourse of Diller + Scofidio, usually lacks. Knowing that the client would arrive at his weekend hideaway after an automobile trip (with its own windshield-framed view), the architects extended the journey with a long driveway up to a narrow building facade that was just a doorway. The house curved like a banana; once you were inside, the shape prevented you at first from seeing the window in the back. When you finally got to the window-framed view, it was partly obstructed by a video monitor, displaying the same vista. In a revelation worthy of Duchamp, you realized that while the sea has always been there, only man can make a view.

he design won an award from the magazine Progressive Architecture in 1991 and remains Diller + Scofidio's most influential single work. 'You walked by students' desks, and every one had drawn this banana shape,' Hays, the Whitney curator, recalls. The house itself, however, was never built. Soon after the foundation was dug, the art market crashed, and the financially stricken client pulled the plug. 'It was absolutely heartbreaking,' Diller says.

--Arthur Lubow, "Architects, in Theory", NYT Sunday Magazine, 16Feb03, pp.36-41.

Isn't Diller and Scofidio's being "heartbroken" by their building not getting built antipodally anti-Duchamp, in spirit?

When Duchamp's large glass paintings broke, he did not lament his loss. He thought of a way to integrate the breakage into the work of art. So, when Diller and Scofidio's pride and joy, when what their apparently very conventional bourgeois egos identified themselves with, got stopped just after the foundation was dug, if they were really Duchamp-ean, they would have seized the opportunity thus offered to them by fortune, to think how to integrate the client dropping the project, into their work of art.

What could be a more critical part of the essence of a work of art, what is more important to what we mean by architecture, than the cash nexus? Wouldn't a truly pioneering architect be less concerned with what buildings look like than with how they are paid for or not paid for? Perhaps Diller and Scofidio could have renamed their architectural/artistic achievement:

No House #1: Deconstruction from an art market crash

Diller and Scofidio could conduct tours to the unfinished former construction site. If the site is off limits, they could conduct tours as far as one could go even though one could not see "anything" (except, of course, seeing that one cannot see the site, and also seeing lots of other things everywhere around -- Duchamp named one of his ReadyMades: "Not seen and less seen"...). Diller and Scofidio could publish a monograph on the project as a Gesamtkunstwerk. They could make a museum exhibit installation about it....

But these are all things that have been done before. To be really "Duchamp-ean" (2 B du champ?), Diller and Scofidio would have to make something from the "not-construction" that nobody ever yet thought of. I, for one (1), would be interested to see it.

E-mail me your thoughts.

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