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The genius of the aberrant
Diller + Scofidio operates beyond the norms of architectural practice
Henry Urbach -- Interior Design, 1/1/2003 12:00:00 AM
| The genius of the aberrant | |
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Diller + Scofidio operates beyond the norms of architectural practice
Toy robots moving slavishly through an X-ray scanner, men's dress shirts pressed into surreal shapes, a video projection of corporate logos morphing seamlessly from one to the next. These are but a few ways that Diller + Scofidio is putting the unconscious habits of architecture on view at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The studio's first retrospective, "Scanning: The Aberrant Architecture of Diller + Scofidio" (March 1 to June 1), explores the alleged neutrality of these controlling habits. Curated by Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and Michael Hays, Harvard University architectural-theory professor and adjunct curator of architecture at the Whitney, the exhibition presents projects from the past 20 years alongside work created specifically for the occasion. Each project takes on a specific collision of design and cultural paradox. Does the pressed white shirt sustain a machine-age tradition of streamlining the body? How might a set of drinking glasses register our ambivalent dependence on chemicals? Do picture windows draw on our impulse to see and, through vision, exert power? And how does the American lawn, in its many private and public forms, organize institutional norms as smoothly functioning as they are invisible? "Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have shown us that someone is always watching us while we're watching something else," says Betsky. "Buildings are largely a frame for those acts." Heady though this may sound, the real genius of Diller and Scofidio—the first architects to win a MacArthur Foundation fellowship—is their capacity to make serious theory playful, sensuous, and accessible. With an unfailing dedication to craft and a remarkable ability to cross media, disciplines, and scales, Diller + Scofidio has assembled a body of work that compels us to acknowledge architecture as a system of representation, a tool to make social categories real and concrete. However probing Diller + Scofidio's take on the discipline of architecture, the firm's early ideas nonetheless took shape as sculpture, video, installation, or set design. Then, over the past few years, Diller + Scofidio moved toward buildings and interior spaces that demonstrate how architects might challenge and loosen social norms as well as codifying them. A 105-unit housing block in Gifu, Japan, was completed in 2000. So was the transformation of the Brasserie restaurant in New York's Seagram Building, where multiple design moves join to accommodate—but also make strange—the social theater of restaurant dining. At the Swiss National Exhibition, 2002, Diller + Scofidio unveiled the Blur Building, a misty challenge to the century-old tradition of exhibition pavilions that serve as objects and instruments of viewing. The Eyebeam museum in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, are scheduled, funds permitting, for completion in 2006 and 2007. In "Scanning," the duo tackles the conventions of museum display while simultaneously making use of them. Among the new installations is a group of wall panels that once supported famous paintings at the Museum of Modern Art building undergoing demolition. A number of works are being presented in retail vitrines, and a performer will periodically traverse the galleries, spritzing fragrance. Most spectacular of all, a large robotic arm will scan the museum walls, randomly drilling holes. "The show is mainly a contemplation on the allegedly neutral white wall," Diller says. According to Hays, "Aaron and I agreed to stress the conceptual dimension over Diller + Scofidio's more recent professional work. We're especially interested in how they defamiliarize 'normal,' everyday occurrences to underscore things that typically go unnoticed." One reason for the show's emphasis, he says, is the young Whitney architecture department's commitment to exploring the fertile margins of practice. (This differs from MoMA's more professional orientation.) "Our show is meant to be liberating in its truly expansive vision of what architecture can do in the world," Hays continues. With the installations designed for "Scanning," Diller and Scofidio demonstrate again that—despite their recent turn to building—the studio's conceptual, experimental phase is far from over. |
  The individual pieces in Bad Press were made by mis-ironing dress shirts into oblivion.  The design for Eyebeam, New York, organizes a nuanced set of reciprocal spaces for art production and viewing.  A kind of architectural void, Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building for the Swiss National Exhibition, 2002, hovers above Lake Neuchâtel, shrouded in a veil of mist.  Master/Slave, first presented at the Fondation Cartier Pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, incorporates Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum's prized collection of toy robots. |
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