Shut your eyes and jab a finger at a map of the US and you will likely find a brand new, freshly spruced up or forthcoming art museum within driving distance of your digit.

In the Great Plains, there’s the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, with its sweeping new wing by Snøhetta. Venture south and you’ll encounter the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee, by Herzog & de Meuron, and can look forward to the development of a Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art expansion, in Kansas City, Missouri, currently being designed by Weiss Manfredi. Head to New York and discover the reimagined Frick Collection, a Beaux Arts-era mansion overhauled by Selldorf Architects, in addition to soon-to-open expansions of the New Museum, Studio Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helmed by OMA, Adjaye Associates and Frida Escobedo Studio, respectively.

Museums are getting bigger on the western seaboard, too. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will soft launch its Peter Zumthor-designed extension this summer, while The Broad, completed only a decade ago, is also getting a makeover – it just broke ground on a new 50,000 sq ft addition by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. And that’s not even touching on projects in the wider cultural sphere, such as the revamped Storm King sculpture park in New York’s Hudson Valley, or the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow by Mecanoo, the performing arts centre slated to open this summer.

According to data collected by AEA Consulting, a global firm that offers strategic services for the cultural sector, around 90 new cultural projects were announced in North America last year alone. ‘The museum sector has been on a long-term building binge,’ says AEA founder Adrian Ellis.

This may seem paradoxical, especially for the US, which has been plagued by culture wars and budget cuts, so what is behind the boom? One obvious culprit is the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw construction projects around the world grind to a halt before then picking up again. Aaron Dorf, a director at architecture firm Snøhetta, thinks museum work has always been cyclical, but the pandemic definitely contributed to a fresh wave of activity. ‘There were probably plenty of institutions that were in the pre-planning phase and hit pause, so that shifted the timeline for a number of them,’ he says. But there is more than that at play. One of the biggest drivers, says Brian Butterfield, a director at Why Architecture, is quite simply to do with building lifecycles.

'The biggest failure point of museums is the mechanical systems,’ he says, citing critical conservation infrastructure, such as temperature and humidity control. ‘Every 20-30 years, you have to replace them.’ Renovations and expansions are a prime opportunity to not only upgrade ageing systems but also to fund them. ‘It’s quite hard to raise a lot of money for what a layperson sees as an air conditioning replacement project,’ notes Butterfield, pointing to his firm’s recent overhaul of the 40,000 sq ft Michael C Rockefeller Wing at the Met, a portion of the museum that first opened more than four decades ago. Working with the Met’s design team, as well as Beyer Blinder Belle, they were able to reinstall art collections from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, but also incorporate digital features, display light-sensitive works (some on view to visitors for the first time) and conduct a complete mechanical overhaul. ‘The public sees the gallery renovation, but underneath the skin is a full systems upgrade that will hopefully last another 50 years,’ says Butterfield.

Ellis sees the recent uptick in museum openings and expansions as part of a longer trajectory, one that began way back in 1997 with the opening of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry. Cities began to look for more ways to make themselves appealing to both residents and visitors. ‘One of the things those cities alighted on was cultural infrastructure,’ says Ellis. ‘Bilbao was the poster child for this.’

Institutional soul-searching combined with macro trends such as globalisation, the need for heightened security post-9/11, and the ability to access culture in the palm of your hand via a smartphone, among other factors, necessitated a radical shift in the way museums got built, how they courted visitors and how they stacked up against their peers.

‘The tricky thing with museums is how do you keep your existing audience while attracting new ones that are younger and more diverse?’ says Butterfield. ‘Museums want to stay relevant. To do that, you have to evolve. And mostly, that means big capital projects.’

The LACMA extension, which has been in the works for nearly two decades, is a case in point. Its David Geffen Galleries will add nearly 110,000 sq ft to the museum. The project will not only comprise traditional spaces for art viewing, but also a new visitor entrance, outdoor plazas, a theatre, a store, dining destinations and educational facilities.

And museums aren’t the only ones thinking about the future; it’s a question that America’s ageing donor class also has top of mind. ‘There’s a certain generation with priceless art collections. And there are a lot of big capital projects that are being driven by promised gifts,’ says Butterfield.

The Joslyn’s new wing, for example, was built in part to accommodate the collection of the late entrepreneur Phillip G Schrager, a monumental gift that included 52 works by the likes of John Chamberlain, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein and Antony Gormley. And the drive is not just steered by philanthropists and collectors – museum directors are also thinking about their legacies. ‘How do you make your mark?’ says Ellis. ‘Often the easiest way is a capital project. It’s very concrete, no pun intended.’

The money for such projects is certainly out there. According to data collected by Ellis’ firm, of the world’s top ten budgets for recently announced cultural construction projects, nine are in the US. ‘We’re talking about a quarter of a billion to half a billion dollars in the larger projects. These are incredible sums of money,’ he says. ‘Where are these sums coming from? They’re coming from private philanthropy in one form or another. We’re living in a period that’s not dissimilar in many ways from the Gilded Age when all those big museums, like the Met, were formed a century ago.’

However, it does look like this golden age for museum construction, at least in the Western world, is starting to slow down. ‘I think, to some extent, that trend has run or is running its course in Europe and America,’ says Ellis. Dorf concurs: ‘I think we’re on the downslope of a crest.’

The data supports those observations. According to the AIA’s April Architectural Billings Index, an indicator of construction health in the US, project billings have softened for 28 out of the past 31 months, which economists chalk up to uncertainty. Museums will likely feel the squeeze, too, says Ellis. ‘I’m not saying there’s going to be a precipitous decline, but I’m saying you may be looking at peak museum building as a function of peak museum planning.’

Which begs the question, are bigger museums better? ‘If you look at museums that people uniformly declare to be their favourite museums, they tend not to be enormous buildings but relatively modest, like the Sir John Soane’s Museum – they are relatable experiences,’ says Ellis. ‘Very few people put mega museums as their favourite. And I think there’s a lesson there that we probably need to learn.’ A lesson that half-billion-dollar budgets cannot buy.

Architect Ricardo Scofidio has died, aged 89. One of his era's seminal creatives in the built environment field, Scofidio passed away peacefully, surrounded by his family, including his partner in life and work, Elizabeth Diller, announced his studio, Diller Scofidio + Renfro in an Instagram post.

'Ric had a profound impact on our architectural practice, establishing the studio with a mission to make space on his own terms. 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.'

Ricardo Scofidio: the architect's life and career

Scofidio co-founded Diller Scofidio with his partner in work and life, Elizabeth Diller, in New York in 1981. The pair worked together on projects that blur the lines of art and architecture, turning heads and making their mark with structures such as the Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains for the Swiss National Exposition in 2002.

The mesmerising, 300ft-wide, 200ft-deep, 75ft-high lightweight tensegrity structure was set like an intangible cloud on the waters of Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland, challenging perceptions of what the very nature of architecture is.

Charles Renfro joined the firm in 1997, becoming a partner in the firm in 2004, and Benjamin Gilmartin joined in 2004, becoming a partner in 2015. The team went from strength to strength, completing some of the early 21st century's most celebrated buildings. Key examples include the New York High Line, The Broad in Los Angeles, The Shed, the MoMA expansion and the 15 Hudson Yards (all in New York).

At the same time, the studio continued to work tirelessly on the intersection of art and building, designing stage and performance sets, installations and exhibitions. In 2014, its conceptual work titled 'Musings on a Glass Box', took place in the glass box that happens to be Jean Nouvel's iconic Fondation Cartier in Paris; the effect was a 'stirring performance of playfulness and respect,' wrote our reporter, Amy Verner, at the time.

Scofidio made an unforgettable mark in the architecture field, and his legacy will live on through his firm and his partners Diller and Renfro. Diller Scofidio + Renfro has announced that a memorial service to celebrate the architect's life is being planned, with news to follow in the coming weeks.

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Blue Dream is a house in the Hamptons. Nestled in the dunes behind Two Mile Hollow beach in East Hampton, the project is the culmination of a long, long design and construction process. This new monograph, authored by architecture critic Paul Goldberger, tells the story of Blue Dream, locating it within the existing tradition of avant-garde design and innovation in the region. 

The house was commissioned from Diller Scofidio + Renfro by realtor and collector Robert S Taubman and his late wife, Julie Reyes Taubman, a photographer and writer who was also one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. 

The story of Blue Dream

Built by esteemed local contractor Ed Bulgin, with landscaping by Michael Boucher, Blue Dream is Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s first private residential project, a wispy concoction of fluid concrete, fibreglass and ribbons of glazing overlooking the beach.

The Taubmans acquired the site in 2005, deciding from the outset that this would be a bold departure from convention, as well as a suitable backdrop for a spectacular collection of 20th-century art and design. Inside and out, Blue Dream departs radically from the area’s clapboard vernacular.

Goldberger digs deep into the architectural heritage of both clients, who each came from the moneyed world of American philanthropy and patronage and had a strong pull towards the avant-garde. He also charts the Hamptons’ role as a crucible of 20th-century architectural innovation – something inextricably linked with that world of money and privilege. 

The Taubmans searched far and wide for an architect, considering Shigeru Ban, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien amongst others, eventually running a modest competition that led to a number of design ideas being worked up by Thomas Phifer. At the 11th hour they moved on, commissioning Peter L Gluck to work up yet another ultimately fruitless design.

This long-drawn-out process eventually settled on DS+R’s studio; nearly six years after the clients acquired the site, the design process had to start all over again. As with almost all cutting-edge works of architecture, the process and execution are at least as fascinating as the finished product. Blue Dream is no different, with major changes – like the shift from poured concrete to fibreglass for the swooping roof structure – further impacting on the building programme. 

Shaping the interiors proved equally arduous. Working with designer Michael Lewis, the process of interior design was as much about curating and accommodating Julie Taubman’s extensive and ever-growing collection of art and furnishings. The finishing stages of the project’s completion were clouded by Taubman’s final illness, but the book captures the relentless eye for every detail that she brought to the project, right down the copper front door, hand-embossed with a huge reproduction of her own thumbprint.

The story of the Blue Dream house certainly perpetuates the idea that the avant-garde must be birthed from a heroic struggle, a tussle between client and architect, fate and fortune. The spectacular end result is captured by Iwan Baan, who uses his experienced photographic eye to highlight the house’s relationship with its surroundings as well as its utterly unique programme.

Blue Dream and the Legacy of Modernism in the Hamptons, Paul Goldberger, DelMonico Books, $85, DelMonicobooks.com, available via ArtBooks.com

The College of the Holy Cross has just opened a $110 million performing arts centre designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro expressing the school’s commitment to liberal arts as a core component of its curriculum. The team behind it highlight that it is designed to break down boundaries, celebrating inclusivity and creativity through putting public space for coming together and debate at its heart. 

‘There’s a spirit of cultural change that’s brought about by this space and by this building that I think is absolutely fundamental to who we are at Holy Cross,' says associate professor of music Daniel J DiCenso.

Prior Performing Arts Center is more than a house for the theatre and music departments. Not only is there a sound-engineered, 400-seat proscenium stage lined with makore wood tricked out with technology, along with a 200-seat black box theatre and an art gallery, the space aims to serve as a public commons where students from all degree programmes can gather, lounge, use specialised facilities, experience ad hoc events and orchestra performances, and hang out at its café. Sitting near the top of a hill above Worcester, the second biggest city in Massachusetts after Boston, the building is visible to the town and was designed to be open to all. 

On the outside, it looks like an elegant Frank Stella sculpture. Folds of formwork composed of reinforced glass concrete panels curve over sheer walls of rusted steel, accented at each corner with gardens planted by landscape architecture firm Olin Partnership. Curtain walls and clerestory windows bring daylight to the central gathering space, dubbed ‘the Beehive', opening up views of its production facilities, set shop, costume design studio, and sound and AR/VR labs. 

The interaction of concrete and steel, mirroring the brick and limestone of Holy Cross’ historic campus, plays with ideas of backstage and public presentation, merging expressiveness and function, one of the hallmarks of the Diller Scofidio + Renfro office. The designers analysed the college’s needs and the building’s anticipated uses and devised a site plan that inadvertently, they claim, happens to form a cross. ‘We love doing academic work,' says Charles Renfro, the lead principal designer. ‘We know that they want a pedagogical tool that also demonstrates the pedagogy.'

Last year, Vincent D Rougeau became the school's first non-ordained president. He says liberal arts education is a natural extension of the Jesuit order, which since its origins has been known for intellectual inquiry and embrace of the arts. ‘Since our earliest days, we’ve been focused on humanities, arts, and science, and we see all of those coming together as a path to wisdom,' he says. ‘This centre is going to help us elevate all of those pieces in a stunning new space and communicate to the world all of the aspects of what makes a liberal arts education great.' 

In a world where tensions can easily rise, especially when it comes to issues of diversity of thought and religion, it is down to the school's new public commons approach to lead the debate and demonstrate the success or failure of the building’s gesture of inclusivity.

INFORMATION

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Following a year where much large-scale construction was significantly impacted by the global pandemic, the New York architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) is about to celebrate a series of new projects in quick succession, while also launching exciting new designs across the globe. Located both in the United States and abroad, these projects span education and cultural buildings, as well as infrastructure and mixed-use schemes. Some were completed at the end of 2020 but awaiting their formal launch, others are gearing up to open to the public this spring, and the newest announce designs to come. Feast your eyes on this new crop of DS+R work. 

Susan Wakil Health Building, Sydney, Australia

Newly opened, the Susan Wakil Health Building by Billard Leece Partnership and Diller Scofidio + Renfro presents a fresh vision for consolidating education and practice under one roof. The new home of the University of Sydney’s School of Nursing and Midwifery (part of the Sydney School of Health Sciences) includes a library and other components of the faculty for medicine and health. With a rhythmic façade system that offers high-performance shading and an open forecourt that provides a cascade of informal collaborative spaces, the multidisciplinary nature of the building is evident from the get-go. ‘Our design creates a new common ground for the university, the hospital and the Charles Perkins Centre [a research institute], while respecting the site’s historic significance as a gathering place,’ says DS+R partner Benjamin Gilmartin. ‘The landscape rises to encompass shared facilities for research and learning, branching out into a three-dimensional network of open spaces connected at every level from inside to outside. At the heart of this network is the Upper Wakil Garden – a multivalent and dynamic reinvention of the campus quad. A “cleave” within the upper volume of the Susan Wakil Building draws light down into the garden throughout the year, while its interlacing circulation acts as a connective tissue between academic workplaces and clinical spaces within.’

Tianjin Juilliard School, Tianjin, China

The Tianjin Juilliard School quietly opened its brand new campus in China at the end of last October but, due to the pandemic, will only now celebrate its formal opening. As a centre for performance, practice, research and exhibition, with communal spaces designed to welcome the public as well, the school is the first performing arts institution in China to offer a US-accredited Master of Music degree. At a staggering 350,000 sq ft, the building is composed of four faceted pavilions that contain a 690-seat concert hall, a 299-seat recital hall, a 225-seat black box theatre, and spaces for administration, faculty and rehearsals. Punctuated by five glass bridges, which contain classrooms, teaching studios and practice rooms, the building’s design facilitates an organic cultural exchange between students, faculty and visitors, while also echoing some features of the Juilliard School in New York, which the firm renovated and expanded in 2009.

David Rubenstein Forum, Chicago, USA 

Completed last September, but opened in phases in accordance with pandemic-related regulations and guidelines, the David Rubenstein Forum at the University of Chicago is a venue intended to foster intellectual exchange and discourse among scholars, researchers and dignitaries from around the world. It is fitting, then, that the eight-storey tower, composed of a stack of irregularly placed volumes, boasts a 285-seat auditorium and is filled with multipurpose meeting spaces that offer a wide variety of environments, be it calm or animated, focused or diffused. Oriented to offer the best views of both the north and south sides of Chicago, the building is a dynamic series of collaborative and contemplative spaces that fosters a sense of community and identity.

Southwest Downtown Pedestrian Bridge, Colorado Springs, USA 

To complement its US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs, which opened in July 2020, DS+R has conceived a pedestrian bridge that serves to connect a growing number of pedestrian bicycle paths that weave through the city. Inspired by the dynamic, gravity-defying quality of athletes in motion, the 250ft curved steel bridge appears to float above an active railyard to link the museum and the park. Prefabricated in Houston and welded section by section on site, the bridge was carefully hoisted up onto its abutments last October. With a wide and generous berth to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, the bridge will open to the public in the summer of 2021.

Aboriginal Art and Cultures Centre, Adelaide, Australia 

Created by DS+R in collaboration with Woods Bagot, the design for the Aboriginal Art and Cultures Centre (AACC) is launched as a celebration of the past, present and future of Aboriginal cultures. The building will encompass facilities for contemporary art practices and host a series of events. Its design is anchored on the important elements in Aboriginal culture of earth, land and sky. Inside, performance and exhibition areas will meet public space and the entry to the adjacent Kainka Wirra (Adelaide Botanic Garden) in a structure that is set to become an important place for gathering and learning. ‘We’re thrilled to be part of this groundbreaking vision to create a place of pride that authentically honours the oldest living cultures on the planet,' says Charles Renfro. ‘This first-of-its-kind project has taken on a new life with our continued collaboration with the Aboriginal community and other stakeholder groups, as well as our Australian design partner Woods Bagot. The AACC will welcome visitors through a radically open ground floor, into a safe space with storytelling at its heart. It will be a building of the 21st century, while remaining agile enough to allow future generations to evolve their own storytelling.'

Pirelli 39, Milan, Italy

Situated right in the heart of Milan’s Porta Nuova Gioia District (and created in collaboration with Italian architect Stefano Boeri), Pirelli 39 is a mixed-use complex for pioneering local developer COIMA. Combining existing buildings that have been creatively redesigned, new structures, green spaces and a firm position promoting sustainability, this project includes a carefully curated biodiverse greenhouse enclosure. The scheme's tall, landmark tower is also engulfed in vegetation, which ‘will also absorb 14 tons of CO2 and produce 9 tons of oxygen per year – the equalivent output of a 10,000 sq m forest,' explain the architects. The building's wooden structure, too, is designed to decrease its carbon footprint.

INFORMATION

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2019 proved to be an especially busy year for Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The interdisciplinary design firm’s co-founding partner, Liz Diller repeatedly garnered headlines; first in the spring with the highly anticipated opening of The Shed, and then in the autumn with the eagerly awaited revamp of the Museum of Modern Art – both high-profile projects on home turf whose influence extends far beyond the physical architecture. 

The Shed is housed in an innovative eight-level building and features state-of-the-art gallery, rehearsal and performance spaces, and an already-iconic telescoping outer shell that can be deployed to transform the adjoining outdoor plaza into a mammoth performance hall. It supports the non-profit cultural organisation’s mission to integrate the arts, but also asks what a contemporary cultural institution should look like. A welcome counterpoint to Hudson Yards’ more shamelessly commercial developments, The Shed presents a more egalitarian way of experiencing culture – made possible by its architecture.

While The Shed pioneers a new vision for the arts, the expansion of MoMA saw DS+R use architecture to re-energise an existing institution. Despite the project’s controversial beginnings – early plans called for the demolition of the neighbouring American Folk Art Museum – the end result has been a much-welcomed net gain of gallery space, studio space, a new creativity lab, an expanded store, and a new café and outdoor terrace that fortifies the museum’s standing and future plans.

‘The two projects couldn’t be more different: one tweaks the inherited institution; the other is a start-up that tests a new paradigm,’ Diller reflects. ‘On the one side, we worked with MoMA, a well-established institution with a great legacy that carries the weight of the history of modernism on its shoulders. We helped them expose their vast collection in new ways that challenge the way the history of the last century was told.’

‘In contrast, we also worked on The Shed, a new platform that breaks down disciplinary barriers and the distinction between high/low culture,’ she adds. ‘This new organism is infrastructure responsive to the changing needs of artists, and less dependent on philanthropic dollars.’

Having played such a significant role in shaping the contemporary cultural landscape in New York – our Best City for 2020, Diller has unique insights into the evolution of public institutions. ‘Museums are not just repositories for art; they must act as civic entities that engage diverse audiences, offerings and activities,’ she says. ‘The authority of the museum has broken down and museums can no longer tell single narratives that carry the truth. The one-way monologue from the authoritative museum to the audience has broken down and architecture must play a role in giving audiences the much-needed agency to determine their own experience.’

INFORMATION

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Space has always been a rare commodity in New York City – something that the Museum of Modern Art, which occupies a piece of prime real estate right in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, knows well. Ever since the establishment of its permanent home, the Goodwin-Stone Building, which opened in 1939 and is still where the current museum is sited, the institution has grappled with finding enough room to house its impressive collection. 

Since then, the museum’s building has been added to multiple times. Philip Johnson contributed the museum’s iconic sculpture garden in 1953 and an expanded East-West Wing in 1964. Cesar Pelli added the Garden Hall and Museum Tower, a mixed-use residential build that also added gallery space to the museum in 1984, and Yoshio Taniguchi’s most recent renovation and extension in 2004 saw the creation of the building’s airy second floor atrium, and its granite and glass façade, which the art-viewing public have come to know so well.

Joining this illustrious group and mélange of architecture is Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, which was bestowed the controversial task of transforming the museum’s acquisition of its neighbouring Folk Art Museum (designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects) that would ultimately yield a net increase in the museum’s gallery space by a third, bringing its total square footage to 165,000. Opening to the public on 21 October, the re-envisioned MoMA not only boasts a new Creativity Lab, a state-of-the-art Studio and a bounty of much-needed gallery space, but a flagship museum store on the lower ground level, reconfigured circulation and a new café along with an outdoor terrace on the sixth floor as well. 

‘We tried to see past the controversy because times change and we were looking at the big picture at how MoMA could improve,’ explains Liz Diller. ‘We set out from the beginning to not only do the expansion galleries but help MoMA realise this program which is a big shift for them to show that much more of their collection across all disciplines.’

‘Beyond that we also wanted to have a much better interface with the public and bring art closer to the street,' she adds. ‘Things like bringing a little bit more intuition to the circulation and to provide beyond the galleries that MoMA had asked some new potential galleries that were not really foreseen. We had a lot to do and working through the noise, there was just such a huge conversation happening inside MoMA about how things can happen that was part of the dialogue.’

Working within the material palette already present, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s design taps into the building’s historic DNA while bringing a contemporary sensibility with its abstraction of space, purity of material expression and the use of a sense of thinness throughout its remit. Starting at the new museum entrance, which now sees ticketing and coat check located off the building’s central axis and welcomes visitors with into a double-height space and custom entry canopy, the building exhibits a much more spacious feel, which also allows it to host new site-specific installations, like Philippe Parreno’s specially commissioned ‘Echo (Danny the Street)’, comprised of a series of interconnected objects which splays out through the lobby. 

Veering west from here, a new flagship store on the lower level maintains the new visual connection between museum and street. Located under an intricate, millwork ceiling, flanked by an eye-catching double height book wall, the store is easily accessed via an elegant staircase as well as a circular, glass-encased elevator, and perfectly placed beside a connecting lounge area that leads to the new gallery spaces on the ground floor and above. 

The new galleries located in the expanded building, now named the David Geffen Wing and Jerry Speyer and Katherine Farley Building, are a dynamic interplay of glass, wood and Gypsum board, which makes up the galleries’ walls. Adding about 11,500 sq ft per floor, the fluid and adaptable gallery spaces, which can be reconfigured according to the exhibition on view, are armed with a feeling of intimacy, thanks to the vertically interlocking concept that they are backed by. Some spaces are naturally lit, while others are technically equipped for performance and film. As visitors walk through interstitial spaces, often enclosed in glass, they are able to look into other galleries below or towards the street, thus underscoring the interconnectedness that Diller Scofidio + Renfro sought to bring to the fore. 

The new spaces’ verticality is held together by the ‘blade' stair – a sculptural element, that demonstrates a material lightness for an ultimately monumental presence – which runs through the height of the expanded building. Composed of glass balustrades that are cantilevered and held in place by pins and a six-inch thin vertical spine that hangs from the roof structure to support the steps and landings, the staircase is a gesture that references the museum’s original Bauhaus stair, while bringing its own contemporary and futuristic flavour that’s set to distinguish the expansion for the years to come.

INFORMATION

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As entire swathes of London are undergoing complete transformations – King’s Cross, Battersea and Nine Elms, and London City Island come to mind – developers are becoming increasingly aware of the need to address placemaking, in their effort to weave new buildings, residents and neighbourhoods into real, live hubs of activity and thriving parts of the metropolis. Greenwich Peninsula is raising the game in the field by commissioning architectural innovation leaders Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) to design a coherent public park for the area; and the result's first phase, The Tide, is launching to the public this weekend. 

Created by DS+R in collaboration with London based Neiheiser Argyros and landscape architects GROSS MAX, the project was conceived as a linear riverside park, connecting different parts of the Peninsula and helping with circulation flow, as well as providing outdoor space and greenery for users. The team behind The Tide call it a ‘cultural' park too, which makes sense, seeing as it is awash with art pieces by an impressive array of artists, including Damien Hirst, Allen Jones, Morag Myerscough, Heather & Ivan Morison, GERONIMO and Gaz Coombes.

The free-to-view outdoor art collection will change and evolve over time – routes and artworks will be spread across the landscape of native trees and throughout the impressive elevated walkways. At nine metre high, the walkways add a powerful vertical dimension to this park. 

‘The design of The Tide seeks to embed a new public realm into the daily rhythms of Greenwich Peninsula by layering together its currents of activity into a thickened landscape,’ says DS+R partner in charge of the project, Benjamin Gilmartin. ‘Visitors will experience the park from varying vantage points, from street level up to nine metre high elevated paths that weave through the site to plug into the existing network of leisure, art, and social life across neighbourhoods. Diverse programming along the way will act as islands that welcome the surges of commuters, visitors, cyclists and runners, while also providing intimate places of pause for contemplation, conversation, and people watching.’

This weekend marks the public launch of the exciting scheme's first phase – the very first one kilometre of the park’s planned landscaped route for art, running, walking and meditation – and the future will see another four kilometre route released in due course. Meanwhile, To launch The Tide, Greenwich Peninsula is hosting the Turning Tides Festival there, taking place from 5 – 7 and 12 – 14 July.

INFORMATION

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neiheiserargyros.com

Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel may be the most visually expressive piece in Hudson Yards, but the opening of The Shed – a new cultural organisation dedicated to commissioning and developing original works of art across all disciplines and for all audiences – promises to be the most impactful. Its highly anticipated arrival this week not only puts its vibrant, opening programme of musical performances and art in the spotlight, but also gives visitors the chance to finally experience its innovative, adaptable building, designed by lead architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro and collaborating architect Rockwell Group, in the flesh.
 
In development since 2008, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group’s design for The Shed is a 200,000 sq ft structure that can physically transform to suit and support the needs of the artists. The eight-level building comprises two levels of gallery space, a theatre, a creative lab for local artists, a rehearsal space and an event space, all anchored by a 17,000 sq ft courtyard space (known as The McCourt), suited for large-scale performances, events and installations. These can be both indoors or outdoors, depending on whether the building’s telescoping outer shell is retracted or not. Made possible by its exposed steel diagrid frame that is moved by a kinetic system inspired by gantry cranes found in shipping ports and railway systems, the movable shell rests on large bogie wheel assemblies that only requires 180 horsepower (a Toyota Prius uses 134 horsepower) to deploy.

Amongst the building’s many unique aspects is the fact that it was initially designed without an official client in mind. The curatorial and administrative team, lead by artistic director and CEO Alex Poots, was only established years later, in 2014. Left up to their own devices, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group created a concept that placed the needs of the arts, artists and performers at its front and centre.

‘We started this project with an observation,’ recalled Liz Diller, during her remarks at the press preview of The Shed. ‘Arts in New York are siloed – from visual arts to performing arts and music. That’s not how artists think today, and what about tomorrow? Or two, three decades from now. We cannot know, so we began the project with an ethos and a hunch: an anti-institutional institution that would house all the arts under one roof, in a building responsive to the ever-changing needs of artists in all media at all scales, indoors and out. The building had to be flexible, so flexible that it could even change its size on demand.’

The impact of The Shed is far from confined to its forward-thinking design. Its programming, which Poots developed with visionaries and talents in multiple fields, kicks off with a five-night concert – ‘Soundtrack of America’ – that celebrates the impact of African American music on contemporary culture, which was conceived by filmmaker Steve McQueen and Quincy Jones, among others. In one gallery, the world premiere of ‘Reich Richter Part’ sets an installation of new works by the artist Gerhard Richter against new musical pieces by the composer Steve Reich. Each presentation also begins with choral performances of ‘Richter Part’, a previous collaboration between the artist and Estonian composer Arvo Part that was developed by Poots and The Shed’s senior program advisor Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2015. Another gallery houses new work by the artist Trisha Donnelly, and in the theatre, yet another performance, ‘Norma Jeane Baker of Troy’ starring Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming, will commence from 9 April.

The potential for this new contemporary arts institution – the first in New York in decades – knows few bounds. Built on city land, and not developer-based, The Shed’s arrival is a cultural beacon that will appeal and be accessible to audiences of all backgrounds. Many civic initiatives have been put in place to enable underprivileged youth and communities access to the programmes on offer. As Jonathan Tisch, vice chairman of The Shed’s board of directors, says: ‘There are many great institutions in our city, but many are about the past, and The Shed is about the future.’ 

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Diller Scofidio + Renfro website, and the Rockwell Group website

One of New York's most highly anticipated new neighbourhoods, Hudson Yards has been in frenzied construction for a few years now; and results are slowly starting to show. Ahead of the opening of some of the area's key publicly accessed areas, such as The Shed and a big chunk of the retail element, the new area's first residential tower, Fifteen Hudson Yards, is also nearing completion. 

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (who was the lead architect) and the Rockwell Group (who led the interiors), this elegant high rise is already over 60 per cent sold and making fast advances towards a grand opening. In the meantime, the developers, Related and Oxford, have just unveiled the interiors for the first time, matching sophisticated residential spaces with lush amenities for the residents and their guests.

The entire 50th floor at Fifteen Hudson Yard is dedicated to wellness, including an aquatics centre, gym, yoga and beauty facilities, set against a backdrop of the water and the city skyline. One floor up is the development's entertaining offering, featuring a club room, private dining, screening and performance room, golf club lounge, wine storage and tasting room, business centre, and a collaborative work space.

‘Over the past decade, we’ve had the opportunity to shape an urban ensemble comprised of a recreational, cultural and residential project for three diverse clients – working with the city on the High Line, with The Shed on a new cultural start-up, and now with Related on the first residential tower at Hudson Yards,' said DS+R Founding Partner, Elizabeth Diller, whose firm is involved in more than one key Hudson Yards projects.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the website of the Rockwell Group

New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Dublin practice O’Donnell + Tuomey have revealed designs for their new buildings for the V&A. Both buildings are earmarked for London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. They are due to open in 2023 as part of East Bank, a £1.1bn hub which is to include BBC studios, a venue for Sadler’s Wells and a new site for UAL’s London College of Fashion.

The Irish firm’s scheme for a five-storey V&A museum with three terraces sits on a square in front of the canal. Its form was inspired by Cristóbal Balenciaga. Co-founders John Tuomey and Sheila O’Donnell visited the V&A’s exhibition on the Spanish couturier and were taken by the transparency and structure of some images. ‘We have dropped a jacket over the skeleton, to give the building an identity,' says Tuomey of the design. At the other end of the site, O’Donnell is working on the design of Sadler’s Wells East. The two projects will act as ‘bookends to the cultural quarter', she says.

With the closure of the V&A’s West London storage facility in Blythe House, 250,000 objects and 917 archives will move into DS+R’s collection and research centre. Unusually for such a building, it’s intended as ‘a place of storage where the public is welcome', says Elizabeth Diller, whose firm was responsible for the High Line in New York. Her design adds two mezzanines to an existing building ten minutes’ walk from the museum.

‘I think of this as an immersive cabinet of curiosities’, she says, adding that the V&A is ‘my favourite museum in the world'. Exhibits will include Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s plywood office for Edgar J Kaufmann, and enough wall space for a 15m-wide theatrical backcloth designed by Natalia Goncharova for the 1926 Ballets Russes London production of Stravinsky’s Firebird.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of O'Donnell + Tuomey

Given its track record for staging fashion spectaculars, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute does not shy away from controversy by any means. Its latest effort, ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’, which examines the influence of Roman Catholic imagery and symbolism in fashion, may have been polarising from the outset. However, installed within the museum’s galleries for Byzantine and medieval art, its Costume Center space and also uptown at The Met Cloisters, the historical context of viewing both ecclesiastical fashion and genuine religious garments bestows the exhibition with a palpable gravitas, whether you are a believer or not.

As the largest undertaking the Costume Institute has attempted to date, ‘Heavenly Bodies’ brings together over 150 garments, including 40 papal robes and vestments dating back to the mid-18th century, on loan from the Sistine Chapel Sacristy – an unprecedented move as some of them have never been seen outside of the Vatican exhibition space in the museum, the task was given to Diller Scofidio + Renfro to create a cohesive exhibition design to bring it all together.

‘We were really game to take on such a complex theme,’ says founding partner Liz Diller, who also oversaw the firm’s design for the museum’s Charles James retrospective in 2014. ‘The idea of bringing in all this modern and contemporary fashion with [objects] from the Vatican was a challenge to figure out how do. To do it both in the spaces of the museum and at the Cloisters – there was a lot that had to be thought through and resolved.’

‘We spent a lot of time in the early days talking about taking the subject matter seriously on its own terms, but also not being overly reverential and trying not to do anything campy or too narrative. Keeping a foot in the museum and then also [bringing] something more elevated was something we tried to get the right balance for,’ adds project lead Kumar Atre.

The exhibition opens in the Byzantine and Medieval art galleries, where ethereal creations from Dior, Givenchy and Valentino are situated alongside more austere, nun and clergy-inspired garb from Thom Browne and Yves Saint Laurent in its sanctuary-like setting.

DS+R specially designed a display system, made from concrete, steel and acrylic, that quietly adapted itself to the garments being showcased. From hovering platforms lightly suspended off the ground, to towering industrial pedestals and modern yet other worldly vitrines, the system’s variations maintain a fresh, yet continuous thread as viewers explore the various spaces.

Diller explains, ‘There was an existing museology in all the spaces, and so we had to intersect it in a way that was both respectful, but also give the show a coherence about it.’

From this historical backdrop, the exhibition moves on to the white-box Anna Wintour Costume Center, where the Vatican’s loaned objects are appropriately given their own moment. Papal robes are displayed in wide cases, while mitres and other accessories are shown in tall single vitrines, each visible on all sides so that visitors can appreciate the intricate embroidery and all its details.

The final part of the exhibition’s triptych strikes a more spiritual and contemplative note amongst the solitude of the Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park near the Bronx. Playing off the dramatic monastery architecture, creations by Rick Owens, Undercover and Gareth Pugh are presented in all their irreverent glory.

‘The show is in cooperation with other curators and a lot of other artifacts,’ Diller concludes. ‘There is a kind of thinking about all the links and a building of the choreography, but it’s also about taking advantage of and interpreting what’s already there.’

INFORMATION

‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’ is on view from 10 May – 8 October 2018. For more information, visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

If you've ever wondered what an alternate version of the Big Apple might look like, then ‘Never Built New York’ is the show to visit. Curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and inspired by the namesake book the pair launched a year ago, the exhibition examines 150 years worth of innovative, crazy and imaginative projects that have been expertly designed – but never built – for New York. Including works by a range of established architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the show, which has been designed by Christian Wassmann, inspires and informs.

We caught up with co-curator Sam Lubell to find out more...

W*: What drew you and your co-author to the theme of the book and show? 
SL: Back in 2010, the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles asked Greg Goldin and I to curate an exhibition about unbuilt work in Los Angeles. We were immediately seduced by the wonderful artistry and imagination of the plans, and by how radically they could have changed the city. Many came exceptionally close to happening, shedding light on an alternative architectural history, and on the urban processes that hold up both effective, visionary plans and potentially damaging ones. We were also excited by how the schemes help crystallize the trends of their times, shed light on previously forgotten talents, and in many cases, have impacts despite the fact that they never happen. Never Built Los Angeles became a book and show in 2013, and following their success we immediately got to work on Never Built New York. 

W*: How did you go about researching for these projects?
SL: In New York we drew on many of the same research techniques we had honed in Los Angeles. First we targeted the most important architects in the city’s history, then went about discovering their unbuilt schemes by diving into archives around the city, and the country. We looked at original plans and drawings, and read through correspondence and documentation. We also reached out to existing firms, searched through books and periodicals and talked to many of the city’s top urban historians. 

W*: Were these projects designed to be built, but just didn't materialise for planning or other reasons, or are they entirely speculative projects, follies and imaginative interpretations of could have been in New York?
SL: There are some notable exceptions, but the majority of these projects were intended to be built. The reasons they didn’t happen generally remain constant throughout the ages, including money, politics, nervous neighbours, battles with clients, and, from time to time, scandal and even fraud. Projects that almost happened have an immediate power, because each one has its own story of creativity and struggle, and each shows us how close the city has come to being something very different. Of course the more speculative projects can be fascinating as well, showcasing fantastic architectural ideas and imagination, and freeing us from the messy, often boring constraints of reality. 

W*: How easy is it to translate a book theme into three dimensional space, for an exhibition? 
SL: It’s not easy, and we were lucky to have a great designer, Christian Wassmann. To us it was vital for an architectural show to evoke sensations of space, and reflect the conditions of the city; and in the main gallery, the Rubin, Christian expertly recreated the urban density and geography of New York in his packed, layered, salon-style layout. The other two galleries provided settings to showcase the projects in very different ways. By inserting more than 45 glowing models (built by students at Columbia GSAPP) into the Panorama of the City of New York (one of the largest architectural scale models in the world), we were able to give people an idea of how these projects would have looked and felt in the city itself. In the central Skylight Gallery, which has a huge window onto Flushing Meadows Corona Park, we inserted only projects planned for the park (including plans for the World’s Fair, the United Nations, and many stadiums), including an inflatable, bouncy house recreation of Eliot Noyes Westinghouse Pavilion for the World’s Fair. 

W*: What do you hope the visitor can take away from the show?
SL: We want people to, like us, be seduced, awed, and sometimes repulsed by these plans, and to think about why that’s the case. So many people take the architectural and urban processes around them for granted, and we hope the show will give them an increased awareness. We also hope people will begin to reflect on what currents are keeping the best, most visionary things from happening now, and are, on the flip side, allowing the most banal, ineffective ones to happen as well. Cities can change, sometimes quickly, and we all have a stake in how that happens.

W*: Do you have a favourite among these unrealised projects?
SL: It’s really tough to choose a favorite, but I particularly like the National American Indian Memorial (1909), at the tip of Staten Island, which I believe would have permanently changed our country’s perception of its history. Financed by Rodman Wanamaker, and designed by Thomas Hastings (architect of the New York Public Library) and famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, the statue of a native chief  would have roughly equaled the size of the Statue of Liberty, and it would have been the first site visitors took in when reaching New York Harbor by ship. Wanamaker and the country at large became distracted by World War I, and the plan never happened. Native Americans were not granted citizenship until about ten years later, in 1924. 

INFORMATION

’Never Built New York’ is on view until the 18 February 2018. For more information visit the Queens Museum website

ADDRESS

Queens Museum
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368
USA

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The centerpiece of a plan to increase and enhance public space in Moscow, Zaryadye Park, located just steps from Red Square, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin, is the first large-scale green to open in the city in the past 50 years.

But while it’s called a park (and looks like a park), Zaryadye, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro together with Hargreaves Associates and Citymakers, is much more than that; stealthily encompassing five pavilions, two amphitheatres, a concert hall and an overlook cantilevering 70m over the Moscow River.

Charles Renfro, a partner at DS+R, calls this ‘wild urbanism’: a merger of nature and the city that was the primary focus of the design. ‘We’re mixing and intermingling the edges,’ explains DS+R senior associate David Chacon, walking through the site’s 14,000 sq m of enclosed space on a rainy day in mid-October.

The subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) merger of hard and soft is everywhere. Thirty-five acres of landscape winds its way down to the river, embodying several of Russia’s different regional landscapes, including wetlands, tundra, steppe and coniferous coastal and birch forests. Around, over and under this varied composition, the buildings – including a media centre, science centre, underground museum, concert hall, market hall offering foods from around Russia and a new restaurant themed on Soviet space exploration – take on an eroded profile, their entryways curving and stepping down from the ground plane, their green roofs (often installed with large skylights) merging with and sometimes becoming hillsides themselves.

A hexagonal stone paving system further knits hardscape and landscape, gradually blending with grass, dirt, gravel, trees, shrubs and other plant life. A series of vista points provide a frame for the Moscow cityscape to unfold in often surprising ways. You can, for instance, gaze at Red Square from a mossy steppe that’s actually the top of a building. Or – somewhat like an impressionist painting – through the triangular glazed panels of the ‘Crust’: a curved, partially enclosed amphitheatre at the park’s eastern end that fuses with the 2,000-seat philharmonic concert hall on its far side.

The project sits on the site of the former Rossiya Hotel. It was overseen by Moscow’s chief architect, Sergey Kuznetsov, who organised a competition drawing 90 submissions from 27 countries. The city, he says, intentionally sought to reach out beyond its local comfort zone, and chose to focus on the unifying power of the natural world over potentially divisive symbols of history and politics. It also wanted to create a much-needed connection between the city’s centrepiece, Red Square, and the Moskva River. The reinforced concrete, boomerang-shaped cantilever does that in spades, and has become the park’s must-visit destination. But just down the way, you can get lost in a colourful birch forest before getting a peek at the Kremlin, and then, around the corner, enter a building (then another, and another).

‘I call it Moscow lost and found,’ says Petr Kudryavtsev, a partner at Citymakers, the firm that consulted on urban design, programming and other key components of the park. Considering how your experience changes so profoundly moving through the new facility, it’s a perfect description.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Diller Scofidio + Renfro website, the Hargreaves Associates website and the Citymakers website

A rendering of The Shed, a cultural venue currently under construction in New York City designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group. Here, we take a look at DS+R’s greatest hits...

The Frieze Academy’s Art & Architecture Conference kicked off outside of the Frieze London tent in the more sedate environment of the Royal Institution, Mayfair. This year’s theme ‘Designing spaces to show, make and live with art’ focused on how architecture has shaped the cultural landscape.

The audience were treated to a line-up of the some of the UK’s most active and influential architects, as well as a flying visit from Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) who stepped onto the red-eye flight from NY, to tae the place of Liz Diller. Renfro did not disappoint with his quick fire responses to Ollie Wainwright, The Guardian’s architectural critic, and ability to shake off the standard line of critique – escalating real estate prices – levelled at the High Line in New York. Renfro was always one step ahead – the project had predicted 400,000 visitors but received eight million in its first year, a resounding success story.

Wainwright’s probed into the relationship between the firm’s cultural project, The Shed, and rising housing values – the 10-storey Shed is nested into a 70-storey residential tower in a prime block of NY land, which could be read as a cosy coupling between real estate and art. But Renfro hit back, stating that Alex Poots – former director of Manchester International Festival and now creative director of The Shed – has designated a whole floor of the building to a production workshop, a gesture intended to mitigate the lack of artistic space in the former meatpacking district.

The Shed’s main feature is the Polymer transparent sliding roof canopy, which incidentally uses the same amount of electricity as a Prius engine running for half an hour-the roof when deployed doubles the building’s performance area. This is ‘architecture of the unanticipated,’ explains Renfro. ‘There is no way to anticipate the future of art.’

Renfro started his presentation with images of an earlier DS+R project, Mural, 2014, where automated drills systematically bore into four interior walls at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The walls eventually collapse – a comment on the systems and structures of the institutional gallery space. Now they have the opportunity to design a building which could be a strong contender for pushing the typology of spaces for cultural production.

Sir David Chipperfield – who opened the conference and was recently commissioned by the Royal Academy to design its extensive expansion – reminded the audience of the complexity of competing visions for the gallery, from the curators to those in charge of visitor experience: ‘They are not coherent spaces but nevertheless they have a strong pull for architects.’

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film was completed in 2016. Pictured here, part of the revamped former 1939 art deco industrial printing plant turned gallery space

Completed in 2015, The Broad houses the art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad in Los Angeles and includes gallery space and a library. 

Exterior view of the McMurty Building for the Department of Art & Art History, completed in 2015.

As part of her guest editorship in 2015, Liz Diller took us on an exclusive photographic tour of The Broad art museum in Los Angeles (see W*199)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Frieze Academy website and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro website

This month marks Wallpaper’s coming of age: our 21st anniversary. It’s also my tenth year as editor-in-chief, having switched from being creative director in April 2007. I must confess that my coming of age came a number of years earlier. Time flies.

One of the earliest projects I worked on in my new role was our inaugural October Guest Editors’ Issue. Now, many media outlets have given over their editorial reins to appropriate talents in order to bring a fresh perspective and generate some PR buzz. But because of Wallpaper’s multi-faceted editorial remit, we felt our spin on the concept should be equally all-encompassing – we would invite not just one, but up to three diverse creatives each year who would reflect our offering, but also push us to try new things.

So year one saw a purist industrial designer, Dieter Rams, an iconoclastic artist, Jeff Koons, and a much-more-than-a-fashion-designer fashion designer, Hedi Slimane. To rebalance the unintentional male bias for 2007, the next year saw Louise Bourgeois, Zaha Hadid and Rei Kawakubo bring art, architecture, and fashion girl power to our pages. Subsequent editions have seen Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, David Lynch, Robert Wilson, Kraftwerk, Christian Marclay, Lang Lang, Ole Scheeren, Taryn Simon, Laurie Simmons, Elmgreen & Dragset, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, William Wegman and Liz Diller have fun at our expense. That makes 21 in total, and therefore a convenient excuse to take a retrospective look, as well as request some updates for our latest issue. (Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm)

In addition to a 20-plus page section within the magazine, each of our Guest Editors was also invited to design a cover. Many called for unusual paper technologies – Hedi used specialist printing inks to simulate glitter, whereas Karl invited readers to strip the Dior Homme suit off his muse by means of a peelable layer. Starck constructed a transparent front cover using three layers of tracing paper. And Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter tacked on a pair of 3D specs, to go with his 3D cover portrait and portfolio of exclusive images tied to key Kraftwerk compositions.

If I had to pick one favourite project it would be Zaha’s. Her cover was a gatefold construction using multiple die-cuts, while inside she produced a 16-page die-cut sculpture, which was a take on her ‘Lotus’ room installation at that year’s Venice Biennale. ‘I want to put a big hole in the magazine’, she told us. We dutifully obliged.

Zaha was profiled by art critic Matthew Collings, who visited her at her London offices and provided a pleasant distraction from discussions about cement. Collings and ‘Big Z’, as he affectionately called her, hit it off immediately. ‘Her architecture is the greatest art of the moment,’ he said.

So it’s a huge pleasure for me and I think a fitting tribute to Zaha (who tragically passed away 18 months ago) that this anniversary issue’s cover was created by Zaha Hadid Architects and its principal and torchbearer, Patrik Schumacher.

Enjoy this special issue and raise a glass to Big Z.

Tony Chambers, Editor-in-Chief

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

Our thickest issue yet, the spine also happens to measure a serendipitous 21mm, in keeping with our celebration of 21 years, and 21 guest editors

INFORMATION

The October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

On the quest for the ‘world’s best building’, the Royal Institute of British Architects launch the second edition of the RIBA International Prize, opening up entries to any qualified architect, for a building of any size, type or budget.

Leading the grand jury on the hunt is Elizabeth Diller, partner at US firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who is looking to discover architecture of strong civic value that ‘contributes to the culture of architecture while addressing the democratic values of our time’.

The winner of the 2016 prize showed exactly this. The UTEC (Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología) in Lima, Peru designed by Grafton Architects, was coined a ‘modern-day Machu Picchu’ by the jury members, who were impressed by the vertical environment for education, that prioritises the movement of people and its role as a civic monument to the city.

As well as the call to entries, Diller also launches a challenge to architects worldwide: ‘We are also launching a call to arms to the architecture community and to the public to consider the importance of challenging the status quo, of putting forward new paradigms, and of thinking broadly about architecture’s potential reach,’ she says.

The International Prize also includes an award for ‘Best Emerging Practice’, which last year went to Rural Urban Framework’s Andong Hospital in rural China. Built of traditional bricks, the facility encompasses friendly waiting room spaces and an open courtyard – challenging established hospital models in China and looking to improve experiences and preconceptions.

Joshua Bolchover, co-founder of Rural Urban Framework, accompanies Diller on the grand jury panel, bringing experience from his work in the research and design collaborative pratice as well as providing insight as a shortlisted and awarded practice from last year’s prize. Bringing a unique creative and technical experience of architecture to the panel is Wayne McGregor CBE, choreographer.

The full grand jury, that will be announced in due course, will put all shortlisted architectural projects through their paces – the judging includes up to three visits to the buildings in person, as the judges look for a building that is not just sensitively and skilfully designed, but also makes an active contribution to its community.

This year, the prize launches alongside the inaugural RIBA International Week which welcomes architectural professionals including Francis Kéré, Amanda Levete, Sir David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller, Odile Decq and Ma Yansong to the floor to share their own architectural challenges and to debate the future of the built world. Entries to the RIBA International Prize are open now, until 17 October.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the RIBA International Prize website

If you happen to find yourself staring at New York’s Dubai-esque Hudson Yards development any time soon, you’ll certainly notice a skeletal structure whose sharp, welded steel frame resembles a giant colander or some kind of space-age torture device. If you look a little closer, you’ll see the whole thing is resting on giant steel rollers.

Welcome to The Shed, a 200,000 sq ft theatre and arts space designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro in collaboration with Rockwell Group that— when construction is complete— will literally expand and contract depending on how it will be used. The facility is set to open in Spring 2019.

Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro calls the $435m building ‘architecture of infrastructure, that’s built for flexibility’. She adds: ‘We asked the question, “What will art look like in 20, 30, or 40 years?” and we realised we didn’t know.’

And so the building’s configurations are endless. At its core The Shed consists of an eight-level base building containing galleries, theatres, creative labs, and rehearsal spaces and a telescoping, ETFE-clad outer shell containing a vast, open hall for large scale performances, events, and installations. The shell, braced with bolted connections, moves on six steel wheels (each has a 6ft diameter) via a rack and pinion system whose horsepower is, somehow, just higher than that of a Prius. It can open in close in just a few minutes.

The wall-less hall, topped by a slatted steel theatrical deck and fitted with rolling blackout shades (that can also create an acoustic seal), can be become anything, from a giant opera venue to a public plaza. The base building’s interior spaces are also large and open so they can be configured in multiple ways through changing seating and temporary walls. They open to the adjacent hall via tall, continuous openings, allowing them to essentially become balcony seating. The permutations seem to be endless, which is exactly what the team wants.

‘It’s about flexibility being liberating, not confusing,’ said Rockwell, the frame of the hall moving around him. As the arts continue to morph along with changing currents and technologies this will no doubt come in handy. Why try to predict the future when you can create a building that will change with it?

INFORMATION

For more information, visit The Shed website and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro website

ADDRESS

The Shed (opening 2019)
545 West 30th Street
New York, NY 10001

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The word 'Thames' comes from the Latin 'Tamesis', meaning 'dark'. Hannah Rothschild, chair of The Illuminated River Trust, has set about transforming the murky sliver that winds its way though the capital, into a vibrant, light-flooded public installation.

Back in July, The Illuminated River competition challenged architects and artists to decorate central London's 17 iconic bridges with dazzling, permanent light works. It's where 'art, design and technology meet', Rothschild explains. A total of 105 submissions were received from around the world, whittled down to the six shortlisted entries now on display at the Southbank Centre.

To impress the distinguished panel of judges, it seems collaborative working was a must – the more interdisciplinary, international and unexpected the better. Adjaye Associates' group offering features ideas from 17 world-renowned artists, including Philippe Parreno, Larry Bell and Chris Ofili; while Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Synchronising the City project enlists the help of Arup and Oliver Beer among others.

These impressive collaborations have spawned some predictably brilliant concepts. Sam Jacob Studio and Simon Heijdens' The Thames Nocturne forms a ribbon of light connecting Chelsea to Wapping – a live data feed reads the ripples in the Thames' surface water, choreographing the light show. Meanwhile, Amanda Levete's design studio AL_A relies upon the movements of the moon for its installation. When the tide is low, the bridges' underbellies are exposed, flooded in light. When the tide is high, light rises up, bathing their elevations.

Although the complex, hard-won proposals are now in and awaiting final judgement on 8 December, Rothschild suggests that the hard work is only just beginning. Despite the Mayor of London Sadiq Kahn's full support, and £10 million already raised, there's a few hefty hurdles remaining – not to mention a further £10 million required to make the project a reality. All of the funding is expected to come from corporate or charitable donations, and Rothschild avows that 'absolutely no funding will come from the public purse'. With her evident passion, along with all those on team Thames (including Lord Rothschild, artist Michael Craig Martin, and Dame Julia Peyton-Jones), we're sure 'the dark one', as our great river has become known, won't be so for long. Rothschild says, 'The Thames is our liquid history and we must reclaim it.'

Watch an overview of Adjaye Associates’ Blurring Bounderies above

INFORMATION
’The Illuminated River’ is on view at the Southbank Centre until 29 November. For more information, visit the Illuminated River website

ADDRESS

Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

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The annual Wallpaper* Architects Directory was conceived in 2000 as the ultimate little black book of new architectural talent, in an effort to both celebrate and map out the world’s best young practices, year-by-year, spanning countries and continents; and what a journey has it been.

We’ve so far featured over 450 practices from all continents (OK, maybe not Antarctica – yet) and photographed over 100 of them in the most amazing architectural sites across the world, from Tokyo’s Shibuya Station by Tadao Ando, to Diller Scofidio and Renfro’s Lincoln Centre project, Richard Rogers’ Heathrow T5, the Neues Gallery in Berlin by David Chipperfield and the Shard in London, by Renzo Piano.

Not that the Architects Directory was the first time we supported budding talent. Leading names such as David Adjaye, Seth Stein, UNStudio and MVRD, all made an early, pre-2000 appearance in the pages of Wallpaper*.

Nurturing emerging practices and seeing them grow into global creative brands has been an exciting story in itself – and there’s been a lot of that. Our ever-growing roster includes now-internationally acclaimed names, such as Allied Works, Brian McKay-Lyons, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Niall McLaughlin, Sean Godsell and Grafton Architects.

For more on the Wallpaper* Architects Directory in our 20th anniversary October 2016 issue (w* 211)

dRMM 
Featured in 2001
Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan founded dRMM in London in 1995 and have been prolific, working with equal ease on projects of all scales, from large housing projects to smaller ones, such as artist Richard Wood’s home and studio, WoodBlock House (pictured here). Their innovative and socially relevant approach is renowned.

Atelier Oi 
Featured in 2004
Founded in 1990 in Switzerland by Aurel Aebi, Armand Louis and Patrick Reymond, Atelier Oï is a multidisciplinary firm that blurs the boundaries of design; its body of work features a diverse bounty of products, set design, architecture and interiors, such as stores for Rimowa and Pringle of Scotland.

Sean Godsell
Featured in 2001
Australian architect Sean Godsell is revered for projects like the St Andrews Beach house (pictured here) and RMIT Design Hub. He applies his minimalist, refined aesthetic to residential and commercial structures alike, keeping in touch with his country’s climatic characteristics and using a modern material palette - inspired by its locality - to perfection

Deborah Berke 
Featured in 2002
Apart from leading her namesake New York-based firm, Deborah Berke has also just kicked off her time as the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Her prestigious practice’s work includes the Bard College Conservatory of Museum and interiors for 432 Park Avenue in New York

Claesson Koivisto Rune
Featured in 2000
Swedish firm Claesson Koivisto Rune founded by Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune in 1995, started off as an architecture firm, but evolved into a successful multidisciplinary uber-practice, experimenting with furniture, textiles, and even confectionery. Their wide-reaching skill set soon propelled them to international design stardom.

MAD Architects 
Featured in 2007
MAD Architects, established in China in 2004 by Ma Yansong, started small but quickly transformed into a global brand, becoming one of the country’s leading firms. MAD is behind some of the world’s most striking structures, such as the Harbin Opera House (pictured here). 

Brian MacKay Lyons 
Featured in 2002
Brian MacKay-Lyons – currently the co-head of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects together with Talbot Sweetapple – is based in Halifax, Canada. The practice works on an array of cultural, commercial and, most notably, residential projects, such as the Sliding House and the recently completed Enough House on MacKay Lyons’ own famous farm and education project, Shobac

Grafton Architects
Featured in 2000
Grafton Architects, founded by directors Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara in 1972 are now globally acknowledged for their refined, contemporary style. The firm has a number of exhibition participations and education projects under their belt, such as the modern and minimalist Luigi Bocconi University building in Milan. 

Allied Works
Featured in 2002
Allied Works, the 40-person practice led by Brad Cloepfil, has offices in Portland, Oregon and New York City. They first graced our pages in 2002 but the firm quickly grew since, working on a roster of impressive projects. Key completions include the Sun Valley Residence (pictured here) and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York

Tuckey Design
Featured in 2006
A context-sensitive approach sits at the heart of all Jonathan Tuckey projects. Over the years, the designer has perfected the art of transforming historic buildings into chic, contemporary spaces. With offices in London and Andermatt, Switzerland, the firm is renowned for its seamless weaving of old and new. 

David Adjaye
Featured in 1997
With offices in London, New York and Accra, David Adjaye’s firm has acquired international prestige through a diverse range of projects. Works such as the Aishti Foundation in Beirut (pictured here) and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington – about to open its doors this month – are a case in point of Adjaye’s skilful architecture.

UNStudio
Featured in 1999
Amsterdam-based UNStudio’s early work includes architecture classics such as Mobius House and the Erasmus Bridge (pictured here). Not that directors Ben Van Berkell and Caroline Bos rested on their laurels after that. The firm is now working internationally and has recently expanded with three additional offices in China. 

MVRDV
Featured in 1999
MVRDV, founded in 1993 in the Netherlands by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, made a splash with early work such as the WOZOCO housing complex. They since developed into a global super-practice, applying their unique approach to offerings such as their impressive Rotterdam Market Hall, located in Rotterdam (pictured here). 

Seth Stein
Featured in 1998
Award-winning architect Seth Stein is a master of minimalism, combining a pared down approach with contemporary flair and luxurious materials. While best known for one-off houses in stunning rural settings or modern urban boltholes, his recently completed equestrian centre near Melbourne highlights the firm’s far-reaching skills. 

Diller Scofidio + Renfro seems to be the architects du jour for Columbia University. Not only is it masterminding the lauded Business School; but first, its 14-storey, glass cascading Medical Center tower is unveiled just in time for the start of the fall semester.

The tower is both an education and graduate centre. After heavily weighed considerations taken on the part of the architects, says Elizabeth Diller, which worked in collaboration with the firm Gensler, the pristinely modern building is anchored to become the hub of medical student life at the university. According to Diller, the students were asked, 'Where they want to spend time?' Thus, the architects in turn created a 'building you don’t want to escape from'. The Center is flooded with light, exploiting 'views to the south, north and east, and a celebration of the site' and factoring state-of-the-art everything, including study sky lounges, like those of an arena or taller tower. Add in smart-glass ensconced common areas, and chances are the students won't ever want to leave.

While most medical students are trapped in residency rotation rounds or the fluorescent-dimmed aisles of the library, this new educational outpost is actually 'distinctly different', says Diller, who also points out that the typical medical educational facility tends to be boxy, low in height and clunky. 'This is a challenge of that,' she says. 'For the students, there is a correlation between space and learning.' And while the classrooms and learning spaces within the building offer the latest and best technological setups available, including flexible teaching spaces and a clinical simulation center, the 'heart of the building', in Diller’s eyes, is really the 10th floor student common area. When researching for the project, Diller came across an anatomy map of a snake, whose heart is in the middle of the body, which thus became the guiding principle behind the building’s logic – expressed through a snaking 'study cascade', which vertically links the interior spaces through the building's 14 floors.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Diller Scofidio + Renfro website

City of culture and education, Berkeley is proudly inaugurating this week a stunning downtown landmark, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro designed building for its Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Anchored across the street from the UC campus, the shimmering white building with its steel veils and cantilevers strikes as an epic, multifaceted, yet stylishly unified 83,000 ft sq compound. It merges seamlessly the former 1939 Art Deco industrial printing plant – entirely restructured and revamped – and a brand new lateral wing, with its 232-seat state of the art movie theater. 

The high ceiling volumes have been cloistered into different exhibition spaces – lounges, auditoriums, atriums and galleries – both whimsical and airy thanks to skylight and lateral bays with street views. The whole visit has been purposely turned into a poetic wandering, spiced with peekaboos, like dramatic, syncopic undercuts, or electric orange areas. Without overwhelming the fascinating opening exhibition ('Architecture of Life'), the building offers a seducing experience, from its four subterranean rooms (with a second, intimate 33-seat screening room, and an Asian art dedicated gallery) to its second floor gourmet cafe Babette: nested into a walkway, the beloved local foodie-heaven overhangs the plunging lobby, with its warm wooden bleachers and artists-project wall. 

'We wanted a building that reflects the uniqueness is our dual identity, half art, half film', explained BAMPFA Director Lawrence Rinder during his inaugural remarks. Preserving the magic of the original building led the call to the NY based DS+R architects, the firm behind the High Line and Lincoln Center rehabilitations, as well as the Broad museum in LA (they are also currently in competition for the Obama Library). The brief stressed the notions of accessibility and transparency, for an engaging institution that strived to express itself as a welcoming hangout for all.

Symbolised also by the 30 foot wide outdoor LED screen (for street projections of the inside film programs), this mission was fully integrated as an architectural response in the shape of a 'permeable interface between the institution and the public'. Present at the press conference, Charles Renfro, the DS+R partner-in-charge, enumerated all the challenges – including excavating the entire existing footprint to double the floor area – to get to the resulting building, 'iconic and humble', 'completely porous'. Heralding its multimedia collections and activities, the BAMPFA is, as he summed it up, the perfect 'epitome of the 21st century museum'.

INFORMATION

Architecture of Life is on view from 31 January until 29 May. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704

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Due to open this year, the new Museum of Image and Sound in Rio de Janeiro – the recipient of the 2016 Wallpaper* Design Award for Best Building Site – will house a vast archive of photographs, film, documents and sound recordings that tell the story of the city’s cultural, artistic and social life since it was founded in 1565.

Designed by New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the 9,800 sq m, eight-storey building (two underground), in concrete, steel and glass, is partly funded by the government and the Roberto Marinho Foundation, and it takes its cue from Brazilian artist and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx’s famous undulating wave mosaics, designed in 1971, that run along the boardwalk of Avenída Atlântica at Copacabana Beach.

‘The building is conceived as an extension of the Avenída,’ says Elizabeth Diller of DS+R. ‘The beach is Rio’s great democratic site. It unifies the city. It’s a place of socialising around natural resources, a place of spectacle. We have taken the mosaic pavement and stretched the boulevard up through the building.’

The building’s front façade features a zigzagging set of stairs, which, as visitors ascend, plays with the view, teasing with glimpses of the city. ‘The postcard view of the beach and surrounding mountains is the museum’s most potent physical holding,’ says Diller. ‘The view is precisely curated through hundreds of tubes that orient towards different locations, producing a lenticular effect. The view is turned on and off and dispensed slowly, in small doses, as one moves up the stairs, from gallery to gallery.’

The foyer will feature a digital version of Rio’s distinctive street newsstands, showing the events and exhibitions on that day, while the first floor will celebrate the city’s party spirit, including a series of galleries dedicated to Carnival. Going up through the floors, the museum will also cover Rio’s musical history, television (especially Brazil’s infamous telenovela soap operas) and the Brazilian bombshell herself, Carmen Miranda. Finally, it will open up on to a rooftop terrace, with views out to sea and down to Marx’s boardwalk. At night, the building will take on a different quality, with the rooftop playing host to a bar, restaurant and outdoor cinema, while a basement nightclub will attempt to recreate the rowdy baile parties of the favelas.

Diller is hoping the museum will reflect the city’s democratic mix. ‘Rio is a gorgeous setting ringed by favelas, producing a super-juxtaposition of haves and have-nots,’ she says. ‘I wanted to help reconcile this polarity.’

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203) 

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges’ Awards - here

INFORMATION

Photography: Peixe Voador Produções

Providing not just a blueprint for urban regeneration since its completion in 2014, the High Line is held up as the quintessential example of working with what you have. It began life as a chunk of New York's West Side Line, a 19th century freight railway, abandoned for two decades and seemingly without purpose in a city emerging from a long period of economic stagnation. In 2004, a competition was held to explore ideas for bringing the elevated section of track back to life.

The winning scheme by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and James Corner Field Operations took a decade to bring to fruition, involving a carefully devised blend of architecture and planting that sought to emphasise the wilderness quality that had sprung up amongst the graffiti and retain as much of the hefty engineering structure as possible.

The High Line has been a triumphant success and this monograph mimics the project's horizontal slash across the urban landscape, with copious fold out pages that track the path, the plants, the process, the existing site and the state of the Line today. Written by the protagonists and charting the design process from first sketches to mature planting, it's the next best thing to walking the High Line yourself.

INFORMATION
The High Line, £49.95, published by Phaidon. For more information, visit James Corner Field Operations’ website

There are high hopes and low expectations about COP21, depending on who you talk to. Few would argue though that the latest UN Climate Change Conference, now up and running in Paris, is a potentially pivotal moment. And more than a sealed off talking shop/echo chamber, it is engaging a city in need of a positive engagement.

The Fondation Cartier is making its contribution to the debate with the presentation of EXIT, a multi-media installation, devised by architecture and design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro and based on an idea by the French information theorist Paul Virilio. The piece, on display at the Palais de Tokyo until January 2016, in an immersive 360 degree animation of six thematic maps, offering the latest geo-coded data on population shifts, remittances (the amount of money immigrants send back home), forced migration and the movement of political refugees, natural disasters, rising seas and deforestation. This is data-visualisation of huge imagination and inventiveness, intent of making ‘big data’ engaging and understandable.

In amongst this deluge of bad numbers, some startling stats stand out. There are, for instance, currently 19.5 million refugees worldwide and more than 38 million internally displaced people, the highest figure since the Second World War. In 2014, migrants sent more than €389bn to developing countries, three times the money received in foreign aid. Just for instance.

While some of these stats seem only tangentially related to climate change, the installation makes clear that it is impossible to talk about climatic disruption without talking about economic development and movements of people, particularly from rural areas to urban areas.

The piece was first presented in 2008 at the Fondation Cartier but all the data has been updated. And it seems more urgent now than ever, as if it were designed for this particular moment. Needless to say, the bad news of 2008 has only got worse. We caught up with Liz Diller to discuss the inspiration behind EXIT and how it has developed since the original.

Wallpaper*: What inspired or prompted the project?
Liz Diller: EXIT began while speaking to Paul Virilio about the complexities of global migration in relation to political, economic and environmental causes. We wanted to expose these issues without resorting to narrative media—whose familiarity and realism is often desensitising. So, we challenged ourselves to use only data—the driest and most abstract information—to create an immersive experience.

What were you trying to accomplish or make sense of through data visualisation?
Environmental information about human migration is typically seen in isolation from political information, and from economic information. Using panoramic projection of geo-coded data and an immersive soundtrack, Exit aims to expose relations about their interconnectivity, which is otherwise invisible.

Did you work on updating the piece or is it a matter of just feeding in new data?
It’s a different world from when we originally produced EXIT in 2007—the global population has grown by a billion and the number of refugees has increased fivefold. The 2015 update to Exit was about feeding in new data to reflect these types of dramatic changes.

Are you optimistic about COP21? Some people see this as a pivotal moment?
COP21 was an opportunity to speak to a more diverse audience, but we’re not pushing any particular agenda. Exit exposes inconvenient truths that are relevant to people outside of policy making.
We hope the show attracts others, maybe people who wouldn’t usually go to art museums. This project began with philosophers and grew to a collaborative team of artists, geographers and statisticians. Similarly, I think the world needs to think and work across disciplines when addressing these issues.

INFORMATION
EXIT is on view until 10 January 2016. For more information, visit Palais de Tokyo’s website

Photography: © Luc Boegly © Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin. In collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith.

ADDRESS

Palais de Tokyo
13 Avenue du Président Wilson
75116 Paris

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Los Angeles is undoubtedly experiencing a moment in the cultural spotlight. But beyond the hypebeast of this current creative boom, a scene is being built to last on the West Coast: Los Angeles currently counts around 400 modern and contemporary art spaces,  with an estimated 50 opening up since 2013.

This sudden influx of new galleries – with a high concentration migrating into the gentrifying downtown arts district – includes new enterprises as well as established names setting up second spaces here. Hauser & Wirth will unveil a 'museum quality' venue in 2016, with a bookstore, bar and restaurant; Sprueth Magers also have an LA outpost in the works; while other blue chips from New York and London have already set up in the city.

The very recent addition of the Broad Museum – now the city's largest free contemporary art spot, opened in September – has confirmed the Downtown neighbourhood's status as a permanent cultural destination for Angelinos and visitors. So what's so special about LA? 

One appealing aspect is the space available in LA that allows gallerists and artists to grow and stretch out in a way they couldn't in other cities. The lifestyle quality is of course a factor in the west's glamour capital, and with so much creativity moving into LA, new spaces are being spectacularly repurposed to maximise the year-round sunshine, with rooftops and gardens to showcase work outdoors and capitalize on the warm weather. This architect-led transformation enhances the distinctive experience of viewing art in LA, and unites further the city's autonomous art with its historic, pioneering design scene. 

Here, we took a pick of some of our favourite new architecturally minded art spaces: step inside, and you'll get the feeling that this is how art is supposed to be seen - with plenty of room to breathe, in symbiosis with its environment...

David Kordansky Gallery: Kulapat Yansatrast at wHY architecture is one of the go-to firms for cultural spaces on the West Coast, working closely with curators in order to understand and address programming concerns. Past collaborators in LA are on the institutional level, and include CalArts, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. Emerging gallery David Kordansky is their latest offering. 

For this gallery, the approach was a little different. They renovated a space that had been used as a martial arts centre, a specialty food store and a car repair workshop in the past. 

Completed in 2014, the original bow-truss wood ceilings arch over two separate galleries, a mezzanine library, lounge, and entry court and garden - all enclosed by an exterior wall, designed to give the feel of an ’inner sanctum’. 

Regen Project: Regen Projects’ current building, clad in distinctive white plaster, protrudes proudly onto Santa Monica Boulevard in the centre of Hollywood’s art hotspot. 

The creation of LA-based architect Michael Maltzan, the sweeping 4,000 square foot space was designed to be highly flexible, to be adapted to the needs of Regen’s diverse roster of artists from Raymond Pettibon to Matthew Barney, as well as incorporating the galleries offices.  

An equally spacious rooftop sculpture garden offers outdoor exhibition space, and of course, makes the most of the Southern Californian weather.

Gallerists Liv Barret and Nelson Harmon came to Los Angeles from Melbourne and Vermont respectively to set up their gallery, opened in summer last year. In their search for a spot in the burgeoning downtown area, they opted for a 4,000 sq ft space in an 80-year-old building on West Pico Boulevard, close to the Staples Centre. 

Nelson says they chose the space for its light, and set about transforming the interior themselves (with the aid of takeout pizza) building walls over ragged brick and plaster, refurbishing the floors and replacing the exterior windows, keeping a minimal aesthetic in mind, the perfect tabula rasa for their roster to work on dimensional exhibitions across two floors. It never looks the same twice. 

LA-based, Paris-born Francois Perrin assisted fellow Frenchman Francois Ghebaly on reimagining the interior of a 12,000 ft. warehouse space, within an industrial complex next to the 10 highway. The space was so huge that Ghebaly invited four other tenants to share it - a mix of commercial and non-profits - that makes the site a genuinely diverse and autonomous creative ecosystem.

Perrin specializes in exhibition design with a concern for site-specificity and environmental context and helped Ghebaly to work with the space and structure its divisions for the various needs for all its tenants’ projects (an artist book publisher, residency programme, and media resource centre also reside here). 

Museum as Retail Space: MaRS is a new addition to the gallery scene, located in a still relatively unchartered terrain, under Los Angeles’ largest bridge on the banks of the East River. Like many galleries in LA, you need a car to reach it, and you won’t necessarily find other cultural spots nearby - but also like many spaces, you’ll have plenty to see in one place.

Under the guidance of gallery director and owner Robert Zin Stark, the space was remodeled into a mitochondrial layout, comprising five separate spaces, and an ample succulent garden offset by a cinder block exterior. 

The redesign reveals another fascinating facet of local history: the previous tenant at MaRS ran it as an illegal marijuana nursery, which was exposed when a fire in 2012 destroyed everything but the brick walls. The fire-scarred walls were left visible with the renovations.

MAMA: One of downtown’s newest gallery spots, MAMA has just celebrated its first anniversary. The building dates back to 1908 and was constructed around the walls of a former residential house and its vineyards. When gallery director and partner Eli Consilvio designed the layout of the interior gallery space, his aim was to keep as many of the original brick archways and features as possible. 

For their inaugural show, Erection, in 2014, MAMA invited artists to respond to this interior - which since then has been transformed and evolved for each presentation. The gallery bookstore now stands in the shell of the old house, with its windows out onto the main gallery space.

Until 2013, Night Gallery - founded by artist Davida Nemeroff and dealer Mieke Marple - inhabited a space in an insalubrious Lincoln Heights strip mall; its walls were painted black, its opening hours strictly nocturnal, and its parties were legendary. You wouldn’t know it walking into its current lofty location, designed by Peter Zellner (principal of Zellner Naecker Architects), who specialise in public and private gallery spaces in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. 

The clean white walls (separating the space into two huge open areas) and soaring ceilings reflect the growing needs of a serious commercial gallery. The owners are now widely recognised as a pair of the city’s premier contemporary dealers, but still favour artists who work on the edgier side of high art - and the parties now happen in the courtyard space out front. 

Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City: Zellner is also the name behind the architectural plans for art dealer Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City, which opened to the public in 2010.

Susanne Vielmetter, who moved to Los Angeles from Berlin fifteen years ago, showcases here her roster of mid and established level artists from Europe and the region. 

With a budget of almost half a million, Zellner and his team created almost 8,000 sq ft for art inside the former industrial warehouse, divided into four exhibition spaces - currently housing an exhibition by William Pope.L. Zellner has also led designs for art venues such as LAXART and more recently, Matthew Marks Gallery, in Los Angeles. 

Various Small Fires: VSF originally opened up on the main strip at Venice Beach in 2012, but in tandem with the migration East for many galleries, moved to Hollywood last year. Their current space is an example of current LA trends in the scene, where commercial galleries frequently inhabit spaces as grand as museums, allowing them to flexibility in programming screenings, performances, installations and large-scale sculpture, all of which are interests at VSF

The North Highland Avenue venue was designed in collaboration with Johnston MarkLee Architects - the firm behind the designs for the UCLA Graduate Studios, the new MCA Chicago and Harvard Architecture School

The innovative design features include an outdoor sound corridor, architecturally fitted with hidden speakers, a ’roofless’ outdoor gallery, as well as 3,000 sq ft of interior project space with light streaming in via skylights and extensive sliding doors onto the garden

Kayne Griffin Corcoran: KGC is a complete fantasy in terms of gallery design and reflects the ambition and approach of its creators. David Lynch and James Turrell are among the major contemporary artists who to have shown at Kayne Griffin Corcoran - one of Los Angeles’ most impressively designed spaces

Turrell is in fact one of the gallery’s collaborators - alongside Maggie Kayne, Bill Griffin, and James Corcoran - and was the subject of the space’s inaugural show at 2013

The four designed the fantasy space - Turrell was responsible for the lighting and landscaping the outdoor space that includes a gorgeous bougainvillea-clad courtyard

Ashes/Ashes: The historic American Cement Company’s building on Wilshire Boulevard next to MacArthur Park is a local architectural icon and proof that concrete can be beautiful. Designed by Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall (DMJM) the building was originally designed to house the Company’s HQ, and was completed in 1964. 

The striking 13-storey building is now home to the offices of some of the cities top architectural firms, as well as new contemporary gallery Ashes/Ashes, on the ground floor. 

The gallery has plans for a new interior in 2016 to showcase their avant-garde and inventive curatorial programme. 

While there's still four months to go until its official grand opening in January, the new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [BAMPFA] is shaping up to be a blockbuster addition to the Bay Area's active creative scene. 

In an inspired case of adaptive reuse, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have transformed a 1930s-era former printing plant into an expansive, multifaceted ode to multimedia. What once was a kind of 'bunker,' says BAMPFA Director Larry Rinder, is now a fully fenestrated, natural-light-filled haven that achieves the dual goals of accessibility and transparency, guided by a serene sense of flow and interplay from the exterior, and throughout the interior. Coupled with the bold red and grey highlights, it achieves an almost 2001: A Space Odyssey-like effect. 

The existing buildings included a disused factory and adjacent office. They were largely intact, but beset by seismic structural issues - a major factor in the earthquake-prone Bay Area - and abandoned for years in the centre of the bustling downtown college city. Diller Scofidio + Renfro kept the original structures, complete with Art Deco inflections and a trio of skylight bays in the expansive main event space, and united them with a second-story cafe 'dropped' in between. This angular addition cantilevers out over Center Street and cuts a modern silhouette against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. 

Excavating the entire footprint doubled the square footage, and allowed for a series of subterranean spaces that include four additional galleries in the more traditional, four-white-wall style, as well as study centers with resources once only available to specialists. 'The goal is to store and preserve artifacts, but also allow people to engage with art in ways they haven't before,' Rinder says. 

A pair of purpose-built theaters will offer screenings both intimate - in the smaller, 32-seater - and robust - in a Meyer Sound-optimized auditorium that can accommodate 230 viewers - plus a 12-piece-band for silent film performances. And in dedication to its role as a true boon for the community, a 30-foot-wide LCD screen will adorn the facade on the flip-side, opening up the possibility for '24/7 public programs and screenings,' Rinder says. 'Our role is as a part of the life of the city-and the city doesn't close down at 5pm.'

INFORMATION

Photography: Iwan Baan

Although Diller Scofidio + Renfro's museum commission, The Broad, nearly broke the internet when it opened last month, the new 100,000 sq ft McMurtry Building they designed to house Stanford University's Department of Art & Art History is an architectural marvel in its own right. 

'We've been working in the arts and academia for some time,' says partner Charles Renfro, referring to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Brown University Creative Arts Center. In the latter, the New York-based firm made a building that was offset by half a floor from one side to the other, essentially creating one continuous space. 'The building acted as a protagonist to the creation of work. It not only demonstrated cross-disciplinary work with the flow of one space to another, it also assisted in the creation of projects that take advantage of the continuous space,' adds Renfro. 'That's where we started thinking about the Stanford project.'

After rounds of early meetings with the students and faculty, it quickly became clear to the MacArthur Genius Award-wining architects that the art-making and art history sides of the building had very different needs, while demanding equal but separate spaces. 'It occurred to us that we could make two separate buildings that would be roughly parallel, so apart but equal,' says Renfro, who took inspiration from the classic Stanford quadrangle design; green areas arcaded with the faces of surrounding buildings. 'We thought it would be interesting to arcade an outdoor space with the two programs in the building.'

As such, the two buildings intertwine in a 'productive face-off' via spiraling glass volumes that are meant to look like 'DNA strands' that wrap around each other diagonally, all while suspending a floating art and architecture library. Inside the spirals, there are also partially glazed windows that allow for serendipitous views into the respective spaces. In addition to the voluminous interiors – which will not only increase class offerings by 35 per cent but allow for art history students to work opposite practicing artists for the first time in the university's history – the firm doubled the outdoor space. There are glass garage doors on the shop and gallery that open to the main courtyard. The painting studios spill out onto the upper sunlit courtyard and even the classrooms have their own open air space, on the third floor, which can be utilised for al fresco lectures.

The separate but equal paradigm plays out on a material level as well, with the making side constructed of 'rough and tumble' exposed concrete walls, steel ceilings and white drywalls, while the art history strand features high tech lighting, projection and speakers in every room, carpeted floors and dropped ceiling (for acoustic absorption), sand stained wooden walls. 'It's a neutral color palette through that strand, 50 shades of gray,' jokes Renfro. Stanford wanted a contextual building that fit in with its vernacular architecture, so DS+R employed stucco on the facade of the art history strand while applying custom zinc panels to the outside of the making strand. They also wanted to make the ground floor interior courtyard 'feel like a room' by installing a warm wooden ceiling, like they did at the ICA, to warm up the sculpture critique and gallery spaces.

While students have been utilising the space for a few weeks, Renfro hopes they use it as a tool that expands their practice. 'There's a matter of dualism we like to bring in to all of our projects,' says Renfro. 'It's a much more casual but super-charged work environment.'

Liz Diller is one of the founding partners of New York architectural studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), and has helped reshape America’s urban landscape. Here, she speaks with graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister about the High Line effect, beauty in the grotesque and DS+R’s design for The Broad art museum in LA

As one of the founding partners of New York architectural studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), Liz Diller has helped reshape America's urban landscape. In conversation with fellow New Yorker, graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, she reflects on the High Line effect, beauty in the grotesque and DS+R's design for The Broad art museum in LA, which opened on 20 September, before giving us an exclusive photographic tour.

Stefan Sagmeister: I find the most amazing thing about Diller Scofidio + Renfro's work is how it's embraced by the public. Not just the architecture projects such as the High Line and Lincoln Center [in New York], but the avant-garde independent work as well, such as the Blur Building [a Swiss Expo 2002 pavilion at Lake Neuchâtel], which I visited with my mother. She was blown away. Is the engagement with the public intentional?
Liz Diller: The Blur Building was the first time we became aware of the importance of audience. Before that, the studio had an academic and subcultural following. Blur was an environmental-scale, man-made, immersive fog bank on a Swiss lake. Water was pumped from the lake, filtered, controlled by smart weather technologies and shot through 35,000 high-pressure water nozzles into a cloud the size of a football field. Blur had no walls, no space, and no function; it was an architecture of atmosphere, a whiteout with white noise that you could explore and get lost in. It was a hit – everyone, from your mother and mine to visitors of all backgrounds came to see it. People attributed many meanings to it – some thought it referred to art-historical notions of nature and the sublime, some thought it was a surrealist fun house, some thought it was about ascension into heaven, and others read it as a symbol of the indeterminacy of Swiss identity. This loose fit between meaning and a work motivated us to take pleasure in projects on a large scale for an expanded audience in which meaning is layered like an onion. Publicness became a large part of the ethos of our practice.

The High Line came next. It was an urban-scale intervention using a stretch of elevated industrial infrastructure that had become obsolete in the 1980s, turned into a ruin, and saved from demolition by two citizen activists with a vision to turn it into a public park. We joined the effort and then had to invent nature 10m in the air, 8m wide, and 1.5 miles long. Early projections expected 300,000 visitors annually. Last year there were six million.

It's probably the most influential piece of architecture built in Manhattan in decades. It's gone global, no?
It became one of the top tourist attractions in New York and then went viral – there are over 60 new parks currently in planning stages worldwide that reference the High Line. We unwittingly touched a global nerve. Why tear down bridges, viaducts, highways, train trestles, if you can turn them into public promenades?

As urban space is getting more and more privatised and every square inch has commercial value, we have to be vigilant about protecting as much non-programmed public space as possible. But our reading of the High Line's success has to do with discovering a new virtue – that of doing nothing. This is new for urban dwellers, especially New Yorkers. We are always productive. When we're not in our offices working, we're in the gym burning calories or on our devices reading and sending messages. On the High Line you can't do much. You can't ride a bike, walk a dog, or throw a ball. There is nothing to do but walk and sit and watch people. In the Sunken Overlook, a little theatrical space over 10th Avenue, you can stare at car tail lights disappearing into the distance. Limiting the visual field and framing the banal makes it sublime – like staring into a fireplace, an urban Zen.

And of course in that way, it's very clearly connected to Blur, in its nothingness.
Precisely.

I like that. There's essentially nothing to do. One of my favourite quotes about the difference between art and design is from Donald Judd: 'Design has to work, art does not.' Art can just be. Much like the High Line or Blur. I think that has a lot to do with why contemporary art museums are so popular right now. From MoMA to Tate Modern, people go not just for the art, but also because of nothingness, the possibility of space that doesn't have to do anything.
It's an interesting theory – the museum is a cultural form of sanctioned down time, a hole in the day in which expectations are loose, like in a public square, a place to be with others, one that provides a cultural atmosphere as opposed to an explicit place of leisure. I've been thinking a lot about our [studio's] roots doing installations on borrowed or stolen sites. We militantly resisted the museum and stayed outside its walls. Years later, we became more comfortable going through those walls with our curatorial and installation projects. And now we're building the walls of museums.

How would you define the role of architecture in the art museum?
Rather than the conventional arguments, in which either architecture is protagonist and art is subservient or architecture is in a supporting role for art, we prefer to think of architecture as a collaborator with the museum in promoting the public's appreciation of both art and space.

This is my experience of the Institute of Contemporary Art, which you designed in Boston. The programme and the architecture are collaborative.
The building curates its relationship to the site somewhat cinematically. You enter the lobby, where the view to the harbour is pinched, then you take a glass elevator that scans the view vertically, you enter the theatre that appropriates the view as a backdrop, you walk across the north gallery and scan the view horizontally, and you descend into the mediatheque that edits all but the texture of water. It's hypnotic and timeless. The only place where the view is turned off is in the galleries. Having spent much of the early part of our career on the art side of the wall, we believe in letting artists and curators have the freedom to rescript gallery space without the distraction of the architecture.

Which DS+R has also done at The Broad [in Los Angeles]. I've heard you mention the 'veil' and the 'vault' when describing the idea of the museum. Can you explain?
As the home of a contemporary art collection, the building is half exhibition space and half art storage. Typically, storage in a museum is off-site or in some back-of-house space that nobody sees. This large, dark part of the programme was a design challenge as it faces a particularly prominent building – Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. Also, Grand Avenue [The Broad's location] is a key street in the initiative to urbanise downtown LA and we thought having a warehouse on this major artery was bad. We decided to turn this liability into an asset. The art will be stored in the 'vault', a heavy opaque and sculptural volume that floats in the middle of the building. The 'veil' is the five-sided outer layer, comprising facades and roof, that nests over the vault and brings in diffuse natural light. The veil and vault are always in dialogue: you see the vault through the veil from the street; you enter through the veil into the lobby with the vault hovering over you; you shoot up an escalator through the vault and arrive on its top surface at the main gallery under the filtered light of the veil; you return to the ground floor via a stair that snakes through the vault and offers glimpses into the live storage space. One of the unique aspects of the veil system is that it spans 200 feet over the 35,000 square foot main gallery.

No columns?
None. One acre of column-free art space.

I think the veil is beautiful. Does beauty have a role to play in your own work?
'Beauty' was stricken from architectural vocabulary over a century ago. However, architects never quite stopped the active pursuit of it. I don't deny using the adjective often but also in the context of the grotesque, the disfigured, and the oddly disproportional – I love things that are off, a bit too fat or too thin or too long or too short.

The veil is beautiful for me because it's distorted, incomplete, ragged at the top where the cellular system is sheared. Its geometry converges the parallel lines of the city edges and the 43-degree angle of true north to capture natural light. The consequent inside and outside corners and the meeting of the ceiling and walls are the product of intensely studied aesthetic decisions. The veil is also both structural, spanning a city block, and a filtering system for light. Beauty for me means capturing complexity in a simple way. I know you're bringing up beauty to be provocative.

Since Marcel Duchamp, we're not supposed to speak about beauty. But it's a serious concern and should be reconsidered. Beauty is part of what it means to be human. We crave it. Not necessarily natural beauty either, but artificial beauty, beauty we've created. We often ignore the impact that it has on function. A tool can actually function better because it's beautiful. I think beauty is what people get about your work. But perhaps more than that, I think people get the sense that a lot of time – dare I say love and care – has gone into making spaces that are meaningful, that become co-opted by the people who visit or work in those spaces. I see this on the High Line. People behave differently. Somehow DS+R has altered people's behaviour towards public space; they treat it as their own. I don't know if it's still true, but I read an article in The New York Times that discussed the unprecedented low crime rate reported by the police precincts around the High Line, even though there are millions of visitors a year. No major crime. That's sensational. How can that be?
It's true. When we designed the High Line in collaboration with James Corner Field Operations and Piet Oudolf, we carefully considered the quantity of access points connecting to New York streets. Would the park feel safe with one access point every ten blocks or would the sensation of no escape feel creepy? Is one every three blocks too many? How would you secure and patrol the 1.5-mile stretch? I think we solved those problems but what was a surprise was the positive attitude on the High Line. People are considerate. They don't litter the way they do in the street. There's definitely affection and respect for the place.

We didn't set out to alter behaviours there like we did at Lincoln Center, where we sought to create a social consciousness and civic pride in a neglected and desolate site designed in the 1950s and built in the 1960s as a citadel – a fortress for the rarefied domain of the arts for a well-to-do suburban public arriving by car. We wanted to break down the walls and bring the city in, to make the campus a destination for the general public, not only for patrons that could afford a $300 ticket to the opera.

You make it sound easy but I know that's not true. I have visited so many architectural catastrophes around the world. I assume that everyone had well-meaning intentions, that the city officials, the planners, the designers set out to create vibrant spaces, not empty spaces that are devastatingly unsuccessful. Just because you put a bench or a stair somewhere does not mean the public will just show up and sit on it. So what does DS+R do differently? Why does it work for you?
[Laughs] We start by assuming that we're not the first to the table. There's a history to a site, to an institution, to a place, to a neighbourhood, all of which precedes us. So understanding context thoroughly before we act is important. Typically, our work is not alien to a place but it critically interprets what's already there and alters it. We think of ourselves as the users. Would we want to sit on that bench?

I think it's more than that. To impact the world in the greatest possible way, we must not be myopic. Designers must have the wherewithal, the broad curiosity, and the tenacity to commit to their cause. Designers must be politicians, leaders, and consensus builders. I know this is how your firm must operate. Was this always the case?
In the ten years it took to conceive and build Lincoln Center our thinking matured. To change anything would require convincing 12 constituent organisations, donors who would pay for it, city officials who would have to change policy, the preservationist community that would have to accept why we couldn't embalm a historically sensitive site, local residents who needed to be part of the future of the place... I could go on and on. We resented the fact that we were in perpetual meetings with no time to design – like Thomas Edison's adage about one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. Then I realised the 99 per cent hard work selling the project was just as creative as the one per cent to conceive it. To make a significant, large-scale impact on a city involves educating people, seeing the world through their eyes, winning their trust over time. In this period, we became more and more interested in the intersection of architecture, politics, policy, and economics. That led to pushing back against the limited agency of the architect as a receiver of existing programmes and logics. What if the architect could be more entrepreneurial – work outside the typical client-architect relationship?

We've only touched upon the architectural work, but in fact, that represents just a portion of DS+R's effort over the years.
We do independent projects like art installations, curatorial projects, theatre works, and dance productions. We're working on two operas right now. We just finished a book and we're starting a new one. We collaborate with an array of experts in different disciplines: from robotics engineers to composers and choreographers, to climatologists and material scientists. We follow a vision and do all the research necessary to get there. We did not know how to make a cloud before we started Blur. Much of our work shares one thing in common: we jump of a cliff without a parachute and we hope that we make a soft landing.

As originally featured in the October 2015 edition of Wallpaper* (W*199)

INFORMATION

Website

View a gallery from Phaidon’s new book, The High Line, with a design log narrated by DS+R and James Corner Field Operations, at Wallpaper.com

ADDRESS

The Broad 
221 S. Grand Ave.
Downtown Los Angeles
CA 90012

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After years of hype, development and anticipation, philanthropist Eli Broad's contemporary art museum, The Broad, is finally opening this weekend on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The 120,00 square foot, $140 million project, designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, contains almost 2,000 of Broad's contemporary art pieces as well as storage, conservation facilities, offices, an auditorium, and an adjacent restaurant and park. 

It's arguably the most significant new building - both culturally and architecturally - in the city since its neighbour, Frank Gehry's Disney Hall, opened in 2003. And in many ways, the Broad is a direct response to Disney's riotous, gleaming form. How could a new edifice try to out-Gehry Gehry? Instead it's a very different, eroded structure, covered by a 'veil' of tapered, honeycomb-shaped fiberglass reinforced concrete panels. That form - and pretty much everything else about the building - wraps around its heart, known as the 'vault', which contains storage for the prodigious collection behind heavy concrete walls. DSR Project Director Kevin Rice calls the vault the 'protagonist' of the design, despite the fact that the veil gets all the attention. 

On the underside of the vault is the lobby, a carved out, (relatively) dimly lit first floor space with smooth, cool walls evocative of a cave. Its organic shape was concieved to contrast with the rigid, computer-produced uniformity of the veil. 'Throwing you off your expectations with its organic form is the perfect way to transition from the street to taking in the art itself,' says Joanne Heyler, Director of the Broad Art Foundation. The entrance level also contains simple but spacious galleries - in most museums their 18-foot height would be formidable - for temporary exhibitions. 

The third floor contains the building's highlight: the 35,000 square foot, 23-foot-tall gallery space, glowing with rhythmic, controlled natural light from huge scooped and angled skylights, and from repeated cuts in the veil. The dinosaur-like scale of the skylights, and the lack of any columns - thanks to giant steel girders hidden above - has a mesmerizing impact, especially coming from the darker, more compressed spaces below. 'I'm incredibly pleased with how the collection lives under the diffuse light,' says Heyler. 

Connecting varied spaces through dramatic transition is a particular specialty of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and they follow through deftly here, creating moments like the veil lifting up to welcome visitors at ground level, the tube-like escalator (and magical glass cylinder elevator) cutting through the bulk of the vault to the main galleries, and the voyeur-like peeks into the vault along the winding stairs back down. 'We like to think of our projects as cinematic,' said DSR principal Charles Renfro. 'There's a kind of narrative unfolding. There's foreshadowing. There are glimpses ahead. Things get stitched together to form a complete experience.' Rice adds, 'It's not a secret we always wanted to be filmmakers.'

The pierced solidity of the veil excels inside, where slivers of glowing light create a radiating, mysterious effect. From the street it takes on a more solid appearance, albeit lightened by the fact that (thanks to what Rice calls an "epic" second floor cantilever) it only touches the ground once on Grand Avenue. Still the relentless patterns and sharp edges can be mesmerizing as you walk closer to, and around, the building. In the upper gallery, the necessary measure of dividing art through temporary walls breaks up what is a glorious space, perhaps minimizing its potential. The dividing walls are still a few feet from the ceiling, connecting you to the whole. 

But in all this is a spectacular addition the city; a dynamic, fluid, and cohesive, if not radical, monument to L.A.'s quickly ascending place in the cultural universe. While it won't singlehandedly mend the scorched earth urbanism of Bunker Hill, it has already infused an already white-hot downtown Los Angeles with more energy, clout, and, of course, attention.

We have explored the brand new Broad in a bespoke photoshoot in our October 2015 issue, where Liz Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is one of our two esteemed Guest Editors. In the issue you can also find Diller's conversation with graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, where she reflects on the practice's significant body of work and, of course, the Broad. 

A leaky ceiling, in simplest terms, registers as an unusual way to celebrate an architectural landmark. But when each drop has been precisely orchestrated by Diller Scofidio + Renfro for a conceptual work titled 'Musings on a Glass Box', and when that glass box happens to be Jean Nouvel's iconic Fondation Cartier in Paris, the effect is a stirring performance of playfulness and respect.
 
Twenty years have passed since the acclaimed French architect conceived a centre for contemporary art clad entirely in layers of glass, with vegetation providing lush density between the façade - at street level - and the main building. This month also marks the 30th anniversary of the Fondation Cartier itself, which from inception, approached patronage and curation with a multi-disciplinary mindset.

Fittingly, 'Musings on a Glass Box' (opening on 25 October) uses sound, video, industrial design and countless engineering elements. 'We began to think very minimally,' said Elizabeth Diller from the Fondation's eighth floor, overlooking Paris. Partner Ricardo Scofidio offers: 'We wanted to be aware of the architecture in a distinct way.'
 
At the installation, this is imediately clear. Visitors enter and looking left, discover a robotic red acrylic bucket coasting around the floor, seemingly aimless until it senses that a droplet of water will be released from one of 12 points in the ceiling. It then pivots and darts to collect the leak. Simultaneously, a series of signals are sent via wireless transmitter to the second gallery to the right, where a giant LED screen suspended horizontally 1.2m from the ground projects a wavy, watery view of Nouvel's ceiling. Visitors can watch this play out from caster-footed loungers that slide under the screen.
 
Also inside the bucket, a microphone synced to the drop's impact amplifies the thump, while an external receiver converts it to a choral swell with ambient aftershocks. For this, Diller and Scofidio enlisted longtime collaborator Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, who worked with sound designer Jody Elff in order for hundreds of recorded ethereal choir and instrumental options to trigger what he describes as 'a wild, randomised musical experience.' Lang notes how the remarkable cathedrals around Paris nudged him to think about the sound and its reverberations as a duality: 'absurd' in one room and 'sublime' in the other.
 
Meanwhile, the gallery windows have been coated with 'smart film' from Glass Apps whereby an electrical current turns the panes progressively transparent or translucent every few minutes. 'Anyone who has used this space has had to contend with the light,' said Diller speaking from experience. This is now their third time working with Fondation Cartier, however, the first in which there has been such a 'flirtatious and mischievous' interaction with Nouvel's design, she quipped.
 
And that levity couldn't be more satisfying for Hervé Chandès, the foundation's general director since 1994 and admirer of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. 'What they've done this time, it's a game - it's an intellectual pleasure, it's a visual pleasure, it's an audio surprise,' he says. 'Of course, it's a birthday for us; but with them, I am always learning new things.'
 
Turn to Wallpaper's October 2014 issue (W* 187) to read an interview with Elizabeth Diller on Diller Scofidio + Renfro's work and their ongoing relationship with the Cartier Foundation

ADDRESS

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris

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While architects are generally in the visual business, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s design for a new show at the Museum of Arts & Design privileges a less tangible sense — smell.

'The Art of Scent 1889 – 2012' is an exhibition dedicated to perfumes that represent an aesthetic or innovatory leap forward for the art form — ranging from the Victorian-era 'Jicky' (Aimé Guerlain) to the smoky, metallic and compelling 'Untitled' by contemporary perfumer Daniela Andrier.

'It was an exercise in self-restraint,' says principal Elizabeth Diller, who worked on the project with the curator of MAD’s new Centre for Olfactory Art, the former New York Times scent critic, Chandler Burr. 'How to make nothing, but make it beautiful.'

DS+R has a history of experimental projects; Diller previously worked on the Blur Building — a temporary pavilion made of fog designed for the 2002 Swiss Expo. The other challenge, says DS+R project leader Ilana Altman, lay in exhibiting intangible art in a museum context.

'We were interested in the convention of a white wall. The technical challenge was to figure out how to make it atmospheric, and how the surface could give a holistic display but still appear to be empty.'

Twelve identical dimples set seamlessly into the walls have space for one visitor’s head, which triggers the release of a dry version of each perfume, dispensed by hidden, high-spec technology so far only found at trade shows.

In the adjacent 'salon' a glass table holds the same perfumes in liquid form, into which visitors dip blotters and then add their 'smelling notes' to the online database projected onto a nearby wall to build up a vocabulary of scent criticism.

'Tresor', the 13th scent, has been broken down into its five constituent stages to reveal its design process, each version delivered automatically on a card with a peel and sniff panel through slots in the wall similar to a car park ticket machine.

Each perfume is exhibited without packaging, and is attributed to the perfumer (rather than the brand) through small pieces of projected text that fades on and off. 'The visual sense is dialled down,' says Diller. 'We considered audio, but decided it would just be a distraction.'

The challenge for architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro lay in exhibiting intangible art in a museum context. Each perfume is exhibited without packaging, and is attributed to the perfumer (rather than the brand).

Twelve identical dimples set seamlessly into the walls offer space for one visitor's head, which triggers the release of a dry version of each perfume, dispensed by hidden, high-spec technology so far only found at trade shows.

ADDRESS

2 Columbus Circle
New York, NY 10019

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