Jonathan Morrison
Elizabeth Diller: from the Shed in Manhattan to a high-tech concert hall for London
The super-architect talks about creating some of the most talked-about projects of the century
It was, according to the angriest of the pamphlets, “too short for a run and too narrow for a playground”. And both are true. So it’s perhaps strange, looking back, that the High Line, a planted-up stretch of disused elevated railway track in Manhattan, has become such an unlikely success.
The mile-and-a-half-long “park in the sky” attracts eight million visitors a year, making it one of the city’s most popular attractions, and has been credited with a multibillion-dollar “halo effect” on surrounding property values in the Meatpacking district. Since opening in 2009 it has played host to a “mile-long opera”, bare-breasted poetry recitals, renegade cabaret performances and inner-city astronomy. But mostly it has taught busy New Yorkers to do nothing: you can’t ride a bike or play with a ball or walk a dog, but you can snatch a moment of calm, do yoga, find Zen. So, despite occasional grumbles about gentrification and overcrowding, it’s hard to find anyone who questions whether it should have been conserved and transformed in the first place.
Perhaps equally unlikely, it has led to international recognition for the firm behind it, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), which flew well below the critical radar for the first 30 years of its existence, but which has just been honoured with this year’s Royal Academy architecture prize. Sparkly accolade though that is, it is nothing compared with another honour: the High Line, or Skypark-Line as it became, was once featured in an episode of The Simpsons.
“Now that’s an achievement,” says Elizabeth Diller, 65, one of the two founding partners alongside Ricardo Scofidio, 84, her husband and one-time tutor. “But people do forget how highly contested it was. It was in this raw, dingy area that was half-dead, but full of transsexuals and prostitutes. The Meatpacking district was meat in all its forms. So it was a hard sell: the developers and property owners didn’t really want it and the then mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was determined to demolish the railway.”
The High Line has been a labour of love since 2004 and there are now 60 similar projects around the world. London is about to get its own version in Greenwich, which is also designed by DS+R. Called the Tide, it will feature raised timber “stepping stones”, sculptures by Damien Hirst, and a 27m-long picnic table.
Moscow also turned to the practice for its first new park for 50 years. Zaryadye Park, next to the Kremlin and built over a warren of KGB tunnels, features a huge V-shaped viewing platform that cantilevers over the river, a “glass-crusted” amphitheatre, an ice cave and a concert hall. But it has apparently been attracting young Russians for the wrong reasons: according to one lurid article, they have “been having sex like feral animals”. “Like that’s a bad thing,” Diller retorts.
There’s a cheerful anti-authoritarian streak to Diller, who says that she and Scofidio set out to found a “dissident practice” in 1981 at a time when they believed that “the profession was bankrupt intellectually” and their work was instead typified by Traffic, a 24-hour installation of 2,500 plastic cones at Columbus Circle in New York. So how does she square that particular intersection with having the Zaryadye opened by President Putin in late 2017? Or extending the High Line into the £20 billion Hudson Yards development, a new skyscraper district that opened this year where a haircut costs upwards of £600? Or then providing Hudson Yards with a fig leaf of culture in the form of the firm’s most remarkable building to date: the Shed, a cavernous performance space that can be extended with a moving carapace, and the commercial tower above it.
“The critical streak has never gone away, but nowadays we try to work in a stealthy way within the system to change it from the inside,” Diller says. “We had a lot of reservations about Moscow — we did it for Muscovites, not Putin, though of course he’s behind everything. We specifically created a free and open space where people can congregate, though we were told not to. And if people are now having sex there, it means we did something right!
“The Shed was built on New York City sovereign property — it was the only area within Hudson Yards that was owned by the city, and that’s why we took it on. We were opportunistic and we took on the tower too, to make sure we had a good neighbour. It meant we could get ten floors for the back of house. We’ve no regrets about doing that: it was always on our terms.”
DS+R’s design for the Centre for Music at the Barbican, London
This willingness to pick and drop projects stems from an unusual ambivalence about architecture itself — perhaps an unprecedented one, given that Diller was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009. But despite this, she insists that “architecture chose me — I didn’t choose it”. The plaudits and the opprobrium, it seems, are shrugged off just the same.
Born in Poland to Jewish parents, Diller moved to the US at the age of five and found the experience “destabilising”. It was difficult to keep up in class in her second language — she struggled to read English initially — but she was pushed towards university by her “extremely overprotective” parents. There was a lot of unspoken history, a lot of trauma in the near-enough past, and it left her “always wanting to play the outsider”.
“They wanted my brother and I to have a great education, as they had missed out,” she says. “For them, a great education meant getting into a great profession, and that meant liberty. My mum tried to get me to become a dentist and I wanted to be a photographer — I’ve always been interested in visual culture — but they insisted I had to have a career at the end. So I stepped into architecture secretly, and my parents didn’t find out about it until graduation day!”
The Shed in Hudson Yards, New York
At Cooper Union, the college in East Village, she was taught by Scofidio, who already had four children, and they quickly formed a personal and professional compact (Charles Renfro added his name to the stationery in 2004 and they have since accepted a fourth partner, Benjamin Gilmartin). At a time when architecture was seen as suspect, a servant of capitalism, too commercial, even too corrupt, they experimented with installations celebrating the ordinary: ironing, cones and the like. Indeed, they continue to produce thought-provoking artwork, with recent examples including the Arbores Laetae in Liverpool, a cluster of slowly rotating trees that left passing drunks heavily confused, and Pure Mix, an ice mosaic in Finland comprising frozen blocks of branded mineral and even holy water.
But architecture, Diller says, “grew into me” and opportunities opened up. At the end of the 1990s the practice was asked to come up with ideas for the redevelopment of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a conglomerate of august institutions, and somehow managed to forge them into a coherent whole in their first large-scale commission.
“It took a lot of patience, but I learnt to bring people along,” Diller says. “Architecture is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent persuasion, but that can be just as creative.” More cultural complexes were to follow, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, the first new museum to be built in the city for 100 years, and the striking Broad museum in Los Angeles.
“We started it as an act of defiance and defined it as a dissident practice,” she says. “But we stopped defining it as we were increasingly allowed to push conventions around. Labels feel thin to me now. The speed of change is so fast that we’re constantly having to rethink what we do. Even institutions are becoming obsolete and having to be rescripted.”
Being able to rethink what an institution is and does was key to DS+R winning one of the most important UK competitions of recent years — the £288 million Centre for Music at the Barbican in London, which will provide Sir Simon Rattle’s London Symphony Orchestra with a world-class venue for the first time. A twisting pyramid of performance spaces and offices, destined for the difficult site occupied by the Museum of London, DS+R’s design is intended to be endlessly adaptable in a similar way to the Shed, able to accommodate future media that may not yet have been conceived of, while simultaneously attracting new audiences, educating children and providing a landmark at the north end of the City’s proposed “Culture Mile”.
However, the project has suffered a series of delays. “So many things depend on other things happening,” Diller says. “We’re still working on a fundraising and a business plan that makes sense for everyone — there has to be some self-sufficiency — and the Museum of London, who are moving out [to Smithfield] obviously have their own scheduling issues.
“But it’s a super-interesting site, and we’re confident we can break down the walls and conventions of what can be an elitist form of art. Classical music is here to stay, but there will be all kinds of new work in media we can’t yet imagine, and we have to make it flexible.”
Listening to the orchestra’s ideas was “some of the most interesting work” she’s done. “It’ll be a special hall, and acoustically perfect, but it’ll also allow audiences to interact more and flow around the space.” Rattle’s key thing, she says, was allowing kids to be involved and watch rehearsals “without being a nuisance”, so they have created pods around the main hall for educational use. “Solving these sorts of problems is how we move architecture forward.”
So, having become the go-to architectural practice for big cultural projects, is that where the future of DS+R, now “120 kids strong — a sort of bloody, gritty, but fun battlefield”, lies? Diller laughs. She’d rather be working on schemes like the High Line — small-scale, at least initially, where she can create something from nothing. “I like jumping out of airplanes before checking the parachute. My new bug is jumping into things and trying to convince people to do stuff. It’s kind of crazy, but when it works, it feels more rewarding. We just follow our instincts and curiosity, and somehow we find our way.”
Perhaps as Lisa, always the most high-minded member of the banana-coloured family from Springfield, says: “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” It seems to be working out for Diller, and if the new Centre for Music lives up to the aspirations, well, you wouldn’t bet against it too making an appearance on The Simpsons sometime soon.
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