Ricardo Scofidio, who with his wife, Elizabeth Diller, brought a conceptual art sensibility to architecture while designing some of the world's most innovative concert halls, museums, academic buildings and parks, including, with partners, the High Line in Manhattan, died Thursday. He was 89.
His sons Gino and Ian Scofidio confirmed his death, in a Manhattan hospital. They did not specify a cause.
Scofidio and Diller founded the firm now called Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York in 1979. Operating out of a gritty East Village studio, they became known for their inventive ideas about how architecture could alternately challenge and enhance perceptions, and in 1999 they became the first architects to be awarded MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants.
Twenty-five years later, the firm employed about 100 architects and often made the short list as candidates for the world's most prestigious cultural and institutional commissions. Calm and soft-spoken, Scofidio maintained his focus on the details that could make or break a building.
"I'm always a little shocked when people try to make me realize we're a big firm doing big projects," he told Architectural Digest in 2019, "because that was not the goal."
Indeed, the firm's success came despite its tendency to treat a commission not as a chance to do a client's bidding, but as an opportunity to question the client's goals -- as well as the most basic premises of the profession. Aaron Betsky, who was a co-curator of a show of Diller and Scofidio's work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003, described them at the time as the only architects who made "the core of their work the question, 'What do we mean by architecture?'"
Scofidio had been teaching at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York for more than a decade when he met Diller, at the time a student in his second-year design studio. They began dating after the course ended. By the time they married in 1989, they had been living and working together for years. As their firm grew -- with the addition of partners Charles Renfro in 2004 and Benjamin Gilmartin in 2015 -- Scofidio took the lead on some projects but assumed an advisory role on many others.
"I've become what I consider to be the troubleshooter -- when there are snags or hang-ups, I'll work to find a solution," he said in an interview in 2019.
But even in his 80s, Scofidio was instrumental in the design of the firm's projects, Renfro said in an interview in 2021. "His voice is in all of them -- both as a conceptual thinker and as someone who helped solve deep technical problems," he said.
The firm's achievements can be seen, in microcosm, along the West Side of Manhattan. Running from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street, the High Line -- designed with landscape architects James Corner Field Operations and horticulturist Piet Oudolf -- is not just a repurposed railroad viaduct; it is also a mile and a half of ingenious design, much of it self-effacing, in that it focuses attention not so much on itself but rather on the neighborhood around it.
Scofidio was the firm's partner in charge of the project during 12 years of design and construction. "Ric would say, 'My job is to save the High Line from architecture,'" said Robert Hammond, a co-founder and the longtime CEO of the High Line. "It was all about revealing and removing."
Public Spaces Reinvented
Not far from the High Line's northern terminus, the Shed, designed with the Rockwell Group, is an experimental venue for performances and exhibitions, known for the giant wheels on which part of the building rolls.
About a mile and a half northeast is the Museum of Modern Art, where in 2019 the firm completed a $450 million renovation that made the museum more user-friendly, while adding more than 40,000 square feet of gallery space.
Farther north is Lincoln Center, where Diller Scofidio + Renfro spent almost a decade, at a cost of $1 billion, to bring the outdoor spaces (and a few interiors) to life. Several of their signature gestures are present: A tilted lawn became the roof of a restaurant in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, and across 65th Street, a surgical cut through the corner of the Juilliard School building left its innards exposed, like a specimen under glass.
Three miles north of Lincoln Center, the firm designed a new business school building on Columbia University's Manhattanville campus, in West Harlem. And at West 171st Street, just below the George Washington Bridge, stands the Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, a classroom and lab building for Columbia University medical students.
The Vagelos building seems almost impossibly futuristic, with a single, undulating concrete ribbon serving at various points as floors, walls and ceilings. It is the best realized example of a so-called continuous surface building, a concept the architects had been exploring for more than 30 years.
Together, the projects amounted to a veritable reinvention of New York's public spaces, cultural institutions and educational facilities.
Scofidio's firm also built outside New York. In California, it was responsible for a privately funded museum, the Broad, in downtown Los Angeles; the McMurtry Building for Art & Art History at Stanford University; and the renovated Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In London, the firm designed a branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum, known as V&A East. In Asia, one of its most ambitious projects was a new "company town" in Guangdong province in China, designed for a handbag manufacturer hoping to improve the plight of Chinese workers.
Among the firm's outdoor spaces, the most astonishing may be Zaryadye Park, a 32-acre civic extravaganza in Moscow that slopes down to the Moskva River just a few hundred feet east of the Kremlin. It's hard to know what is more startling: the avant-garde design, which includes a hairpin-shaped promontory cantilevered over the river, or the choice of American architects to build on what was arguably the most prominent site in the city. The park was inaugurated by President Vladimir Putin in 2017.
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The firm also occasionally designed homes, including a Manhattan penthouse for media mogul David Geffen and a Long Island beach house for Robert Taubman, the head of a shopping mall empire.
In fact, it was a private home that first brought Diller and Scofidio to the attention of the architecture world. In 1989, a Japanese art collector asked them to create a house that took advantage of the view of the Atlantic Ocean from Long Island. The couple designed a crescent-shaped building with a door at one end and a picture window overlooking the ocean at the other. A TV screen showing the same ocean view blocked part of the window, an effect the architects described as "collapsing the opposition between the authentic and mediated." (The house was never completed.)
A decade later, the couple were acclaimed for their redesign of the Brasserie in the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue. The firm again used cameras, this time broadcasting the arrival of each customer on screens suspended prominently over the bar, a gesture that was both celebratory and unsettling.
The architects' next big project, in 2002, was the Blur, a pavilion on a lake in Switzerland made of scaffolding and 31,400 high-pressure nozzles. Water shooting out of the nozzles created a football-field-size cloud over the lake, an apparition that visitors could walk through wearing ponchos. When the Swiss Expo ended that fall, the project was dismantled, and the architects rejected proposals to reinstall it elsewhere. It is "an experiment, not a monument," Scofidio said at the time.
But it led to another kind of blur -- a two-decade flurry of activity in which the couple worked on as many as 40 projects simultaneously. Their first major U.S. building was the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, a somewhat utilitarian-looking structure overhanging the harbor. It introduced several of the architects' trademarks, including dramatic cantilevers and windows angled so as to reduce views to abstractions.
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Son of a Jazz Man
Ricardo Merrill Scofidio was born on April 16, 1935, in New York City to Earle and June (Matthews) Scofidio. He had a brother, Basilio. His father, a jazz musician who played the alto saxophone and the clarinet, was Black, "but he insisted to his dying day that he was Italian," Scofidio told Arthur Lubow for an article in The New York Times Magazine in 2003. His mother "was light-skinned," he said, "but she was actually half Black."
He added, "I was continually told as a child to be invisible."
He attended the Cooper Union School of Architecture and then Columbia University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1960. He began teaching at the Cooper Union in 1965.
In 1955, he married Allana Jeanne De Serio, with whom he had four children. They divorced in 1979. In addition to his sons Ian and Gino, he is survived by his wife; two other sons, Marco and Dana; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He lived in Manhattan.
By the late 1970s, Scofidio was unhappy with his marriage and his career. Attempting to practice architecture, he said in 2003, he spent "more time flying around meeting clients" than designing.
"It was a great frustration," he added. "I realized at that point I had to change my life."
Change it he did, after Diller enrolled in his architecture studio. Romantic entanglement was postponed, because "she was a student, and I respected that," he said. But after she took a semester off to think, they moved in together. "It meant abandoning everything and starting over," he said. "It was like shedding skin."
In its early years, Diller + Scofidio was best known for designing theater and dance backdrops and installation art. In 1993, the couple installed a screen in Times Square on which a woman's mouth, viewed in extreme close-up, murmured come-ons to passersby: "Hey, you, wanna buy a ticket to paradise? Wanna buy a new lifestyle?"
The same year, they created Bad Press, a work consisting of 18 men's white shirts ironed into evocative shapes. As curators, the couple mounted several edgy shows, including a 1998 exhibition at the Canadian Center for Architecture about the role of lawns in American life.
A 2003 exhibition of their work at the Whitney Museum included a robotic drill that moved through the galleries puncturing the walls; by the end of the show's run, the walls looked like Swiss cheese. It was, among other things, a meditation on the ephemerality of architecture. But by then, they were already doing more building than tearing down.
Reviewing the show, Herbert Muschamp, then the architecture critic of the Times, wrote: "For too many promising architects, the first blush of fame is instantly translated into a sense of entitlement that far outstrips talent or achievement. Not with this pair."
He added: "Ms. Diller and Mr. Scofidio have earned our attention honestly, each amazing step along the way."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.