Diller, Elizabeth (1954)
October 28, 2009 | In: Architectural History
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Elizabeth Diller has constantly questioned the state of architecture. First collaborating with Ricardo Scofidio, their interdisciplinary studio now includes Charles Renfro and bears the name Diller Scofidio Renfro (D S R). Their work merges architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts, which take the form of architectural projects, temporary and permanent sitespecific art works, multimedia theater, electronic media, and print.
‘Diller was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1954. She attended The Cooper Union School of Art and received a Bachelor of Architecture in 1979 from The Cooper Union School of Architecture.’ The studio is currently designing the public spaces of Lincoln Center in New York and two architectural projects as the result of international competitions. Other completed projects, of various scales, include: X,Y, a permanent installation for a pachinko parlor in Kobe, Japan; Travelogues, a permanent installation at the new JFK International Arrivals Terminal in New York; and two dance collaborations with the Lyon Ballet Opera and Charleroi Danses. They have been honored with numerous awards such as the MacArthur Foundation Award and the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The page opposite is a conceptual sketch by Diller for Blur Building. ‘Blur Building is an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Nuechatal in the town of Yverdon-les-bain. [It] is an architecture of atmosphere.’ The building is made of a lightweight tensegrity structure and water. ‘Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through a dense array of highpressure mist nozzles. The resulting fog mass produced is a dynamic interplay of natural and manmade forces.…Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical ‘white-out’ and the ‘white-noise’ of the pulsing nozzles.…Unlike entering a building, Blur is a habitable medium – one that is spaceless, formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless.’
The sketch taped into a three-ring binder is a combination of diagram and written text. It has been sketched on a paper napkin with ink. The paper napkin suggests a discussion over a meal, where two or more people were brainstorming and reached for the most convenient writing surface. With this sketch they are showing the architecture of atmosphere, listing all of the qualities of architecture that can be ‘blurred’ with this project. To the left is a simple yet poignant diagram of the ephemeral cloud. A vertical line divides the words from the diagram and also acts as a ground line for the fog mass. The ‘less’ points have been bulleted to separate their importance as conceptual ideas. The strong theoretical nature of this project shows in how the words and the cloud are given equal space on the napkin.
The lines forming the mist sketch are bold and constructed of nearly single line weight. They overlap where they join to close the shape and at the points where the pen caught on the soft paper of the napkin. With a few vertical lines to represent the structure and water source, the succinct description was complete. The diagrammatic qualities of this sketch show the pointed thinking of Diller and her colleagues. The idea was so ‘dimensionless’ that its physical manifestation may not have been necessary. As a conversation the diagram assisted to understand the words and the form (or formlessness). One might speculate that the paper napkin was retained more for the words than the cloud.
