In Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images, Edward
Dimendberg offers the first comprehensive treatment of one of the most
imaginative contemporary design studios. Since founding their practice
in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have integrated
architecture, urban design, media art, and the performing arts in a
dazzling array of projects, which include performances, art
installations, and books, in addition to buildings and public spaces. At
the center of this work is a fascination with vision and a commitment to
questioning the certainty and security long associated with
architecture.
Dimendberg provides an extensive overview of these concerns and the
history of the studio, revealing how principals Elizabeth Diller,
Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro continue to expand the definition
of architecture, question the nature of space and vision in contemporary
culture, and produce work that is endlessly surprising and rewarding,
from New York's High Line to Blur, an artificial cloud, and
Facsimile, a video screen that moves around a building facade.
Dimendberg also explores the relation of work by DS+R to that by earlier
modernists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Hejduk. He reveals how the
fascination of the architects with evolving forms of media, technology,
and building materials has produced works that unsettle distinctions
among architecture and other media. Based on interviews with the
architects, their clients, and collaborators as well as unprecedented
access to unpublished documents, sketchbook entries, and archival
records, Diller Scofidio + Renfro is the most thorough consideration
of DS+R in any language. Illustrated with many previously unpublished
renderings in addition to photos from significant contemporary
photographers, this book is an essential study of one of the most
significant and creative architecture and design studios working
today.
