Ricardo Scofidio, an architect who helped reshape the museum panorama within the US, died on Thursday at 89. His dying was introduced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the agency he based along with his spouse Elizabeth Diller in 1997.
Working alongside Diller and agency associate Charles Renfro, Scofidio labored on many US museum initiatives, from the Museum of Modern Art‘s 2019 enlargement to a constructing for the Broad, the Los Angeles non-public museum of collectors Eli and Edythe Broad.
The agency’s numerous initiatives included any variety of initiatives that weren’t museums: Lincoln Middle, redesigned with new outside areas at a value of $1 billion; the Excessive Line, the railroad viaduct–turned–park that runs by way of New York’s Chelsea neighborhood; the Blur, a pavilion located in a Swiss lake; the Brasserie, a restaurant within the Seagram Constructing. However it’s Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s museums which have had a few of the biggest influence. (Although Scofidio was not the principal designer of all of them, he continued to play an lively position in practically all of them.)
The Institute of Modern Artwork Boston, the primary US museum designed by Scofidio’s agency, provided a view of what the group would supply in future initiatives. Opened in 2006, the museum was, on the time, the primary to be inbuilt Boston in a century. It towers over the harbor close by, with a hulking cantilevered type that juts out towards the water.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston isn’t with out its quirks. A lot of the artwork is confined to the constructing’s expansive fourth flooring, leaving many parts of this sizable museum inaccessible to the general public, and the foyer was labeled “an ungainly leftover area” upon the constructing’s debut. However, even regardless of all of it, the ICA Boston nailed down an aesthetic that Scofidio and his companions would popularize within the years to come back: glossy however not too glossy, with heavy, minimalist types that don’t really feel austere.
The ICA Boston.
Corbis through Getty Pictures
Maybe for that motive, Scofidio, who received a MacArthur “genius” grant alongside Diller in 1999, changing into the primary architects ever to take action, was typically even handled as an artist in his personal proper. His agency’s work was the topic of a survey on the Whitney Museum in 2003. Final yr, on the MAXXI museum in Rome, Diller Scofidio + Renfro mounted a present known as known as “Stressed Structure.” In that exhibition’s description, the agency requested: “In mild of the quick tempo of change throughout us, why ought to structure sit nonetheless?”
Ricardo Scofidio was born in 1935. His father was a Black jazz musician who, in keeping with Scofidio, insisted that he was Italian; his mom was “light-skinned,” as Scofidio as soon as recalled, however was “really half Black.” “I used to be regularly instructed as a baby to be invisible,” Scofidio instructed the New York Instances Journal.
However his profession as a number one architect would make sure that he wouldn’t stay that method. He studied structure at each Cooper Union and Columbia College. He started educating at Cooper Union in 1965, the place he would ultimately meet Diller, who was a pupil of his. They might cofound their agency in 1979 and marry in 1989. (Diller was his second spouse, after Allana Jeanne De Serio.)
Scofidio and Diller had been by thought of necessary figures inside the discipline of structure by the beginning of the brand new millennium. They had been famend for mapping overlaps between structure and the fields of style, concept, and extra. However the ICA cemented their standing as two of the go-to architects for museums looking for to revamp or increase.
A slew of museum initiatives adopted the ICA: a renovation for the Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, a brand new constructing for the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, a deliberate enlargement for the Artwork Gallery of Nova Scotia in Canada.
The Broad in Los Angeles.
Photograph AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Pictures
Not everybody cherished all of their creations. The Broad, the museum Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed in LA, has confirmed notably divisive, with many poking enjoyable at its honeycombed exterior product of metal. “The excellent news is that the museum’s exterior and essential exhibition area maintain their very own,” wrote Sarah Williams Goldhagen in Artwork in America upon its opening in 2015. “However total the Broad is a disappointment, and the methods during which it fails are greater than just a little regarding. Its incoherence, its poor urbanism and its unoriginality counsel that the transition from critics to makers might have DS + R stumped.”
The agency’s $450 million MoMA enlargement, which opened in 2019, has been extra universally praised. It seamlessly added 47,000 sq. toes of gallery area to the museum, whose programming was out of the blue in a position to develop much more bold than it was prior to now.
At that very same museum, 30 years earlier, Diller and Scofidio took half in MoMA’s famed “Tasks” sequence, which has acted as a launching pad for artists, lots of whom are firstly of their careers. They debuted a chunk known as para-site, during which cameras and hanging chairs had been positioned round MoMA. The feeds from the cameras could possibly be seen within the sculpture backyard, the place guests might get uncommon angles of areas they knew properly. It acted as a mission assertion for what Scofidio would later search to do: alter the best way individuals noticed museums.
