Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s first U.S. building

by Mimi Zeiger, photographs by Flavio

September 2006 In 2003, when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City exhibited Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio, the firm responded to the institutional constraints of the retrospective with the site-specific installation Mural. The piece, a robotic drill rigged to a track, was programmed to randomly puncture the gallery walls with half-inch diameter holes, violating the sanctity of that classic white backdrop. A year and a half after Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s irreverent artwork, they broke ground on Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the firm’s first museum and first building in the United States.

Long-regarded as artist/architects or architect/artists, depending on your viewpoint, the interdisciplinary studio was recently renamed Diller Scofidio + Renfro to reflect the promotion of architect Charles Renfro to partner. The new moniker emphasizes the firm’s ongoing transformation from a dynamic duo to a more open, collaborative office. These days the practice straddles both sides of the professional aisle and it is precisely this duality that enticed director Jill Medvedow and the ICA board. “We were drawn to them because they seemed brilliant, deserving, and unbuilt,” she said, laughing at her exaggeration (the firm has completed structures in Switzerland and Japan). “They had so many ideas in the areas of architecture, design, and performance that they were an apt fit to the ICA. We have a long history of being an institution that makes its reputation betting on artists before they enter the canon. We felt comfortable taking a risk.”

Hiring a firm with a limited construction track record and one that critiques the art world would seem chancy if it weren’t for the clarity of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s scheme. The act of seeing—be it a theatrical performance, through a camera lens, or a prying surveillance video—is the major “preoccupation,” to cite Diller, that traces through the office’s diverse work. Powerfully expressed at the ICA, the structure serves as a viewing mechanism for both art and the environment, mediating a sweeping perspective of Boston Harbor. “The building is an extension of the eyes. It is sight specific,” quipped Renfro.

The museum is sited on South Boston’s Fan Pier, one parking lot away from the World Trade Center—an area at the edge of the city’s financial district that is prime for tourism. The waterfront is slated for massive development into a “destination” with plans for the requisite coterie of retail and entertainment outlets threaded together by a civic walkway, the HarborWalk. At the moment the building seems like a boxy sculpture sandwiched on a bit of landfill between asphalt and water, but the ICA will set the tone for the neighborhood’s evolution. The façades are primarily clad in aluminum panels, stucco, and glass planking (which glows at night), while Santa Maria, a South American hardwood, wraps many horizontal surfaces. The wood is used diagrammatically; it clearly demarcates spaces that are linked to the public realm. An extension of the HarborWalk, the decking finishes the café and outdoor grandstand, an informal gathering and performance space located under the cantilevered galleries. The hardwood also penetrates into the second-floor, glass-enclosed theater to skin the stage before looping back to line the auditorium ceiling and outdoor canopy.

If one idea behind the ICA’s exterior was about developing a material vocabulary to indicate public areas, the interior creates a language related to how and what we see. For instance, when a visitor enters the lobby under the theater’s rake, the sequence is awkwardly set at an angle to the façade, resulting in a narrowed focus. Glimpses of the harbor are caught obliquely and the perfect, picture-postcard views are left outside. “We were concerned about the harbor as a visual site and visual draw in relationship to the internal nature of the museum. It is that play between external and internal forces that the building has to reconcile,” explained Diller.

A 140-square-foot elevator connects the lobby to the theater and administration on the second and third levels and to the galleries on the fourth floor. It is also conceived as a type of a lens—through its clear panes the view changes with each level. “It is not the gaudy glass elevator of a high-rise hotel,” offered Renfro. “The elevator is intended as a piece of the building sheered off of the top floor and it drops down to meet you. Operating in the world of transformation, it offers a gauzy filtration of the site.” Flexible, neutral galleries crown the museum and expand the ICA’s current display space threefold for temporary exhibitions as well as the newly established permanent collection. The large, open-span spaces are turned completely inward, illuminated by an array of north-facing skylights; a scrim panel system controls the glare. Connecting the two largest spaces is the Founders’ Gallery, a long, narrow hall that faces the harbor with floor-to-ceiling glass panes. The original design called for reticulated film to cover the breathtaking view, offering limited, personal vistas. “It is kind of pornographic to reveal it all,” said Diller. Yet, when board members and other bigwigs recently toured the unfinished building they were awed by the panorama and lobbied the obscuring film out of the design—a political lesson that, for the architects, still smarts.

Although the design offers contemplative spaces for experiencing art, it is also a structural feat. The ICA wanted the galleries on one floor, but site restrictions couldn’t accommodate the 17,000 square feet required at ground level, so the architects decided to raise them roughly 25 feet over the HarborWalk, and supported them by four mega-trusses and eight columns. A complex, cantilevered structure, especially one built on landfill, is the kind of challenge you might expect an art-minded practice to shy away from. But, buffered by the strength of their scheme, Diller Scofidio + Renfro collaborated with local firm Perry Dean Rogers | Partners and structural engineer Arup New York to work out the realities of construction. “Our firm was prepared theoretically to tackle the issues—we try to sync-up the technical and programmatic requirements with the idea,” said Renfro. “The concept and the response are laminated together. Even so, there were tremendous learning curves. We found out in the process, for instance, how a tiny little word in the specification gets magnified into confusion on the construction site.”

Located on the fourth floor is the vertiginous Mediatheque, the most experimental of the museum’s three education spaces. (The ICA also boasts a lobby-level, hands-on family education room as well as a computer lab loaded with digital art-making equipment.) Programmatically, the Mediatheque is a darkened room with auditorium-type seating equipped with computers so visitors can access the museum’s extensive digital art archive and exhibition-specific media. But the space is far from simple. Seen from the exterior it appears to unhinge from the underside of the cantilevered galleries and hangs at an angle perilously above the outdoor grandstand. The inside is dizzying: A stepped floor is matched with a steeply sloped ceiling that directs the view to a large window framing the harbor. With no horizon or sky for reference, the watery surface behind the glass resembles a giant screen filled with static, echoing the computer monitors in the foreground.

It is through two spaces—the Mediatheque and the performing arts theater—where the development of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s conceptual obsessions truly can be traced. For Scofidio, the digital center has origins in the firm’s 1991 unbuilt project, Slow House. Planned for a site along the Long Island coast, the house is about the temptations of the view: The slow curve of the floor plan culminates in a picture window framing the horizon interrupted only by a video monitor displaying a live feed of the same vista. “The picture window is only an effect,” he said, commenting on both the older project and the Mediatheque. “We say the technology is low because it is not video, but the view is about real estate and issues of capital and modernism. We are so in love with hardware, that we don’t understand that these kinds of visual technologies are just as high tech.”

Specific older projects can be cited as precedents to individual spaces in the ICA, but it is the 5,200-square-foot theater that is the most retrospective component of the project. What is striking about the performance space is that it takes the conceptual ideas the firm had investigated for years through set design and other temporary structures—preoccupations with display, vision, and the performer/audience relationship as seen in works like the 1987 multimedia set design for Susan Mosakowski’s play, The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate (Delay in Glass)—and makes them solid. In an eccentric inversion typical of the architects, both the west and the north walls surrounding the 51-foot-wide stage are glazed.

Here, electronic blinds allow for both total blackout or filtered light. When the shades are up there is a full view over the exterior grandstand and the harbor—a conflation of the unscripted “urban theater” outside and the choreography inside. By abandoning the conventionally prescribed black-box theater, the space will challenge not only the audience, but also the performers. The ICA has asked dance companies capable of responding to the unusual theater to create pieces for the space and it plans to premiere original works by Streb Extreme Action and Mark Morris Dance Group.

More cultural institutions are on the boards for Diller Scofidio + Renfro, such as the renovation and expansion of New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in collaboration with FXFowle Architects. Moving from the gallery to the public realm poses hard questions for a practice known for being avant-garde. “Have we sold out?” Diller asked herself. “No. What we’ve learned is that our range has expanded. There are more factors, some that we can’t control, when making more and more complex projects: clients, budgets, community, and politics. The negotiation is a growing experience, but we don’t feel heavily compromised. There is more dimension to the work and it will be richer for it.”

The ICA was slated to open in mid-September, but the date’s been pushed back by several weeks as the team finishes the ambitious project. This last-minute scramble may teach something about construction delays, but it doesn’t detract from the architects’ conceptual coup—the creation of a piece of finely detailed architecture that tackles issues of Boston Harbor’s transitioning site and the ICA’s programmatic needs while staying true to the firm’s signature wit and visual investigations.