Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture After Images

249 Pages·2014·9.924 MB·English

by  Edward Dimendberg

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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.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in China
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth)
isbn-13: 978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dimendberg, Edward.
  Diller Scofidio + Renfro : architecture after images /
Edward Dimendberg.
    pages. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  isbn 978-0-226-15181-6 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn
978-0-226-00872-1 (e-book) 1. Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
2. Architecture—United States. I. Title.
 na737.d56d56 2013
  720.922—dc23
2012022899
∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso
Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
frontispiece
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, School of American Ballet
practice rooms, Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts, New York City, 2010. Photograph © Iwan Baan.
Reproduced by permission of the photographer and
Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
for lynne
i mistrust all systematizers and i avoid them.
the will to a system is a lack of integrity.
friedrich nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
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Introduction
1
chapter one 
1976–1989
13
chapter two 
1990–1999
59
chapter three 
2000–2008
127
Conclusion
199
Acknowledgments
203
Notes
209
Index
233
i.1
Diller + Scofidio, Blur,
Yverdon-les-Bains,
Switzerland, 2002.
Photograph © Massimo
Vitali. Reproduced
by permission of the
photographer and Diller
Scofidio + Renfro.
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In the summer of 2002, visitors to the Swiss national
exposition in the town of Yverdon-les-Bains donned
plastic rain ponchos and groped their way through
Blur, an artificial cloud by New York architects Diller +
Scofidio. Jutting into a lake and connected to the shore
by a walkway, the frame of the building resembled a
Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome shrouded in fog.
Its walls were made of water vapor and breathable. I
was as entranced as the fairgoers surrounding me by
an experience that provided almost nothing to see and
became the principal icon of the expo and a crowd-
pleaser. Continually shifting shape, Blur provoked that
rarest of phenomena in contemporary life, an unclas-
sifiable moment.
How does a film scholar come to write a book about
an architecture studio? What is its argument? Over
the past nine years curious friends and colleagues
frequently asked me these questions. Architectural
historian Sigfried Giedion claimed in 1928 that “only
film can make the new architecture intelligible.”1 As
different as the twenty-first-century built environment
is from the European modernism of the 1920s that
sought to remake the world through mass-produced
public housing, reinforced concrete construction, and
the aesthetics of transparency and flowing spaces,
Giedion’s assertion nonetheless provides a valuable
point of entry into the architecture of Diller Scofidio
+ Renfro, in which images no longer merely document 11