Ricardo Scofidio (1935–2025)
137March 14, 2025
Architect Ricardo Scofidio, known for his open, airy museum designs and for his role in transforming New York’s High Line from a trash-strewn, disused railbed to a verdant oasis that continues to delight tourists and city dwellers alike, died in Manhattan on March 6. He was eighty-nine. His sons Ian and Gino confirmed his death to theNew York Times.A cofounder, with his wife, Elizabeth Diller, of the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Scofidio designed or had a hand in designing such landmarks as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the private Broad museum in Los Angeles, and the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as wild-card structures such as theBlur Building, a temporary pavilion that sucked water out of a Swiss lake and sprayed it out as a massive cloud of mist. In 1999, in recognition of their conceptual art–based practice, he and Diller became the first architects ever to receive a MacArthur “Genius” grant. Scofidio throughout his career remained guided by a freewheeling brand of thinking more frequently associated with art than with architecture. “So many of our buildings are locked into technical circumstances and inspired by a hunch which led to design inevitabilities,” Scofidio told theBrooklyn Railin 2024. “There are many decisions where the form starts locked in technically, but intuition gets in the way.”
Ricardo Scofidio was born on April 16, 1935, in New York. His mother was half-Black, and his father, a jazz saxophonist, was Black, but firmly averred that he was Italian. “I was continually told as a child to be invisible,” Scofidio told theNew York Times Magazinein 2003. “It’s been difficult all my life to have a presence. To this day, in a crowd, I want to retreat.” After attending the Cooper Union School of Architecture and obtaining his BA from Columbia University in 1960, he began teaching at Cooper Union in 1965. In the late 1970s, unhappily married to the mother of his four sons, he met Polish-born Elizabeth Diller, who was taking one of his studio classes. The two struck up a romantic relationship after she was no longer his student and in 1981, following his divorce, established in a shabby East Village apartment the practice that would eventually become Diller Scofidio + Renfro, marrying in 1989.
The pair’s early efforts centered not only architecture but art, as embodied in works such asTraffic, 1981, for which they united the disparate traffic islands then making up New York’s Columbus Circle rotary with a field of three thousand neon orange traffic cones; and the 1993 Times Square video installationSoft Sell, in which a monstrous set of glossy female lips projected across the entrance of an abandoned porn theater titillated passersby with sexy come-ons. Other projects of this era included the 1981Kinney House, a Westchester County, New York, residence sheathed in plywood, and, a decade later, the never-completedSlow House, which the architects described as “a door to a window,” the two orifices separated by a hundred-foot-long passage that broadened gradually from the entry point to provide a spectacular blufftop view of the ocean, and of a video screen, placed outside and at an angle to the window, playing a live feed of said ocean. The dwelling’s residents were given the option of recording the feed so that they could enjoy a daytime view at night, or a sunny vista on a cloudy day.
In 1999, Scofidio and Renfro were awarded Macarthur Foundation fellowships, paving the way for other architects, including Samuel Mockbee and Jeanne Gang, who later won the prestigious fellowships. The new millennium brought projects includingSlither Housing(2000), a public housing block in Gifu, Japan, whose apartments occupy graduated levels, giving the building the appearance of an undulating reptile; the earlier mentioned Blur Building, constructed in 2002 on Lake Neuchâtel for the Swiss Expo and utilizing 35,000 high-pressure nozzles to produce the fog that variously obscured the pavilion, crowned it, or rose and drifted away, depending on the weather; and, in 2006, theICA Boston, whose angled windows and cantilevered overhang presaged future designs and prompted Hal Foster to write in the pages ofArtforum, “DS+R are at a crossroads, one telling of our time. On the one hand, their blurring of genres, their fusion of architecture, art, and media, is part of a postmodernism that today has precious little purchase left on capitalist modernity—indeed, that fronts for that modernity as much as anything else. On the other hand, DS+R have discovered a different kind of mixed condition at work in the sites and the program given them to develop—a condition of tensions, even of conflicts, that their designs have begun to open up, to ‘mediate’ in a way that does not simply smoothen.”
TheHigh Line, however, which Scofidio spearheaded, remains perhaps the firm’s greatest achievement of the decade. With its warm wood planking, plentiful resting areas, and plantings of long, waving grasses, the park, no matter how crowded, feels like a calm canyon snaking through crumbling tenements and monumental skyscrapers, offering occasional glimpses of the Hudson River beyond. “What makes it so successful is that it’s not an architectural statement,” Scofidio toldDezeenin 2014. “It’s really about growing out of what was there in a very quiet way.”
The past twenty years saw Diller Scofidio + Renfro collaborate with Rockwell Group to design New York’sShed(2019), an expandable exhibition space and performance venue whose outer shell can be rolled back to reveal it to the sky. As well, the firm designed the controversialZaryadye Park(2013), a stunning outdoor space in Moscow near the Kremlin; LA’sBroad(2015), known for its basket-weave exterior, which lets natural light filter into its columnless galleries;MoMA’s 40,000-square-foot visitor-friendly 2019 expansion; and Columbia University’s glass-and-concreteRoy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, a towering “continuous surface” building whose design informs that of the soon-to-be-completedMuseum of Image & Soundin Rio de Janeiro.
DS+R today employs roughly a hundred architects, including Charles Renfro, who joined in 1997 and became a partner in 2004, and Benjamin Gilmartin, who joined that same year and was made partner in 2015. A monograph on the firm’s work, Architecture, Not Architecture, was released earlier this year. Both Scofidio and Diller throughout the years likened their practice to jumping off a cliff but Scofidio perhaps best encapsulated the couple’s ethos in a 2009 interview with Charlie Rose. “One of the things that is important to us,” he told Rose, “is taking that leap of faith and believing in yourself that you are going to get there.”