He lived long enough to see his monograph come out. Ricardo Scofidio, cofounder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), or “Ric” to his friends, died yesterday at age 89. News of Scofidio’s death was confirmed by his two sons, Ian and Gino, for The New York Times. A cause of death was not given, although Scofidio had been ill for some time prior to his passing.
Scofidio’s expansive oeuvre, and that of his wife and business partner Liz Diller’s, was recently encapsulated in Architecture, Not Architecture, the first comprehensive book about DS+R, which featured over 100 built and ephemeral projects by the lauded New York City office. Restless Architecture, a show Scofidio helped curate at MAXXI, is still on view in Rome. Surely, Scofidio’s legacy will live on in many, many other ways aside from texts and exhibitions, however.
DS+R (before it was called that) got its start in a humble East Village studio in the 1970s doing avant-garde artworks, choreography, teaching, and some buildings here and there, but went on to conceive skyscrapers, urban forests, funky houses, and so much more. Scofidio’s imprint as an educator, mentor, and friend can be seen in the myriad heartfelt messages that poured out after his death.
Jill Medvedow, former director of ICA/Boston, who worked closely with Scofidio on DS+R’s landmark home for the institution, told AN that Scofidio “was my rock in a building project that was a first for me, the ICA, and Diller and Scofidio. His quiet authority, sensitivity to space, detail and client and his extraordinary partnership with Liz and Charles helped create a beloved museum and a treasured friendship.”
“Ric was many things—a sage architect, jazz musician, mechanic, science fiction philosopher, artist, and digital tinkerer,” added David Allin, a DS+R principal who worked closely with Scofidio. “His insight was both broad and deep, cutting through the most intractable challenges with his signature blend of cunning, humor, and deep humanity. Sitting with Ric—reviewing a design, sketching through a detail, or talking about a classic car—was a privilege and a joy for so many of us at DS+R.”
“We never had a desire to have an office like this”
Ricardo Scofidio was born in 1935 in New York City. His father, who was Black, was a jazz musician. Scofidio’s mother was half Black, and half white. Later, in 2003, Scofidio told Arthur Lubow for New York Times Magazine that his father told him he was Italian in order to evade racial prejudice. “I was continually told as a child to be invisible,” Scofidio said.
“It’s been difficult all my life to have a presence,” Scofidio told Lubow in 2003. “To this day, in a crowd, I want to retreat.”
Scofidio studied architecture at Cooper Union, and then Columbia University. He married Allana Jeanne De Serio in 1955, but the two divorced in 1979. They had two sons, Marco and Dana. Scofidio was teaching at Cooper Union when Liz Diller was his student. They started dating and moved in together after Diller was no longer in his studio.
In 1979, the year of Scofidio’s divorce, Lee Skolnick, who studied with Diller at Cooper Union, worked with Scofidio and Diller at the firm, but eventually left to start his own practice. Diller and Scofidio went on to operate at the intersection of architecture, choreography, tourism, and other disciplines. Traffic debuted in 1981, occupying Columbus Circle with plentiful parking cones. Back to the Front: Tourisms of War came later, which dealt with the ‘touristification’ of D-Day Beaches in Normandy, France.
DS+R built near and afar. Diller and Scofidio’s first joint architectural project together was Kinney House (1981), a project in Westchester County that John Hejduk met with praise. In 1986, The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo was staged in the brick vaults of the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage. Then came Slow House (1991).
Diller and Scofidio received MacArthur Foundation fellowships in 1999, the first architects to ever do so. Slither Housing, a 105-unit apartment building, opened in 2000 in Gifu, Japan. Blur Building opened in Switzerland in 2002, marking one of DS+R’s most known works. ICA/Boston completed in 2006.
In 2001, not long after 9/11, Scofidio and Diller built Viewing Platform, a harrowing “plywood sightseeing platform” that gave voyeurs a peak into gaping holes in the ground left over from the terrorist attack, covered at that time by fences. Diller, in conversation with Nile Greenberg and Michael Abel for Brooklyn Rail in September 2024, said over 40,000 people used Viewing Platform every day for months to see the carnage, and grieve.
Charles Renfro joined Diller and Scofidio in 2004, after a stint at Smith-Miller + Hawkinson. That’s when the office became DS+R. The Highline, Shed, and Lincoln Center all followed. Benjamin Gilmartin became a partner at DS+R in 2015, the same year The Broad finished in L.A.
The Vagelos Education Center opened in 2016 at Columbia University, which arguably revisited a concept DS+R employed for a separate unbuilt project, Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology. The firm quickly grew to keep pace. “We never had a desire to have an office like this,” Scofidio told Brooklyn Rail.
“Buildings snuck in there!”
DS+R kept the Dada spirit alive as time went on: The Hirshhorn Bubble (2012) posited an inflatable intervention, for instance, at the center of Gordon Bunshaft’s National Mall museum. But, as DS+R grew larger, so did the flak. The firm was criticized for designing Zaryadye Park in Moscow at the foot of the Kremlin, and attending a 2017 ribbon cutting ceremony with Vladimir Putin. Michal Murawski, an architectural anthropologist who’s written extensively about DS+R, lambasted Zaryadye in Soniakh.
“We never considered scaling up from a twelve-person office, but all of a sudden we were fifty strong,” Diller added, in recent conversation with Greenberg and Abel. “You can’t always control the direction of your practice. Ours unfolded in an organic way, we just rode with it.”
“Because we started with independent work, without clients and the restrictions associated with professional practice, we became independent and scrappy,” Diller added. “We were able to write our own agendas, find sites, and create opportunities to make our work public. Architecture snuck in there. Buildings snuck in there! We never thought of it as invasive though, or a threat to our independent work, just more opportunities.”
All while practicing, Diller and Scofidio kept teaching. Alan Sacks, a longtime collaborator, who had Diller as a thesis advisor, said Scofidio was “a good guy in a field, and a city (and a country and a world) that has so few of those and none who did it with as much style and grace.” [Parenthesis in original.]
DS+R, in a statement, said Scofidio was “surrounded by family, including his partner in life and work, Elizabeth Diller,” when he died. “Ric had a profound impact on our architectural practice, establishing the studio with a mission to make space on his own terms,” DS+R added. “The firm’s partners and principals, many of whom have collaborated with him for decades, will extend his architectural legacy in the work we will continue to perform every day.”
A spokesperson for DS+R told AN that “a memorial service to celebrate Ric’s life is being planned and will be announced in the coming weeks.”
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