Elizabeth Diller: Pushing the Creative Boundaries in Architecture

TRANSCRIPT

Elizabeth Diller: The priorities have changed a bit for students. Students don’t really understand, well, why it’s so necessary to think about the discipline itself, how you put things together, how you build aesthetics of architecture. What I try to do is connect up all the dots that there’s nothing of their concerns that should be forgotten. And it’s all very important, but not at the expense of thinking about how it all ties into our discipline, what we can do about it, our expertise.

Dan Rubinstein : Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years. And this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life.

And welcome to the first episode of season 12. We have a fantastic series of weekly episodes planned, so make sure you stay up to date by signing up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator, at the link in my bio on Instagram at the Grand Tourist Podcast or at thegrandtourist.net. And now let’s get started.

With everything going on in the world today, you’d be forgiven if you can’t remember a time when something like architecture seemed like a vital element in our everyday lives and a true marker of progress. And in New York, it can seem like a miracle for just about anything to be completed, much less something of importance.

It takes a bit more than just a solid understanding of good design to be a successful architect in the field here, but to rise to the level of success that the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has, well, it takes a lot more. A deafness with city politics, a zest for innovation and bold ideas, and perhaps most importantly, a special knack for creative thinking on par with the greatest artists.

With their new double-volume monograph titled Architecture, Not Architecture, published by Phaidon, the powerhouse firm gives two sides of their practice equal weight. They’re hugely influential built works that include Manhattan’s High Line, Alice Tully Hall, the Juilliard School, the renovation of the MoMA Museum, all in one volume. And then in the other, there are more artistic works including set design, site-specific installations, video works, and even a cocktail dress made from raw meats. More on that later.

At the center of this staggering output of creativity and design is our guest today, Liz Diller, one of the firm’s co-founders and preeminent thinkers, practitioners and educators in the field. Diller’s early life began as an immigrant to the United States from Poland, escaping post-war anti-Semitism, followed by an improbable love story in her college years where she met her future husband and her firm partner Ricardo Scofidio.

And would it surprise you to learn that Diller first toyed with a career in photography before architecture? I caught up with Liz Diller from her studio in New York to discuss what meaning her 16-year-old self today would be like, the tricky romance that changed her life, her firm’s first big project, lessons in the transformative power of architecture and more. 

What was your earliest memory of life that you can go back to? Was it life before you moved to New York? Do you have any glimpses of that in your deep memory?

Early life was a bit of a blur. I remember one very distinct episode, the family, there was a caretaker nanny person in the apartment house and she was braiding my hair and she had just plucked a chicken. And so, I remember the scent of chicken feathers in my hair. It was really disgusting. And of all the memories, it’s a scent memory and it’s a very vivid, involves sounds of chickens and smells of chickens, and I had long braids. So, that’s about it.

My family immigrated to the United States by boat. And then we settled here in the Bronx and then Manhattan. And quite frankly, there’s a big black hole really in my memory of until maybe the age of eight or so. And it probably has to do with going from a first language to a second language. My parents didn’t know the second language and it was very difficult for me at school because I really didn’t understand anything and I was trying to absorb.

And did you come over around, I think you were around six or so?

I was around, yeah, between five and six. So, I wasn’t quite reading. At that point, you weren’t necessarily reading at the age of five. My parents were quite preoccupied with all that was going on and trying to leave the country. And so, there was a time that there was very little learning in a typical way in a schoolroom, no storytelling and reading books and things like that. So, as everyone was getting settled and just finding work and a family moving really with very, very little stuff that we brought and trying to create a new life, it was probably pretty painful for my parents. And I remember very little of those times.

And what did your parents do or what was your father’s profession, if you can explain that?

My father ran a textile factory in Poland and he was a capitalist and he was a little bit frowned upon. And as a Jew, Poland was always anti-Semitic before the war, after the war. And I grew up very secular. So, it was the culture of Judaism and of being in a Jewish European family was always part of my upbringing. But from the religious part of it, no, not really.

So, we were very comfortable, let’s put it this way, in Poland after the war. But the problem was because of being Jews and not ever being able to put that away, it had to be pretty undercover. In fact, my brother and I were named Christian names so that we would never be subject to what happened with the Holocaust.

So, while my father, while were well off cafe society, my father was thrown in jail here and there and they wanted to get out and we were able to get an exit visa finally. We were sponsored by my father’s brother, who was in New York. And so, you had to be sponsored at that time to be able to get a visa.

And so, we were able to leave, but we had to leave everything behind, literally all resources, monetary also things of value. So, my parents moved with next to nothing. We moved into an apartment building, a walk-up. And my father took a job shelving groceries. And then he worked his way up to being a manager of a hotel. So, that was his trajectory.

My mom, to make money, was cleaning office buildings. Really, they gave up a life of comfort to come and start a life really from nothing. And then she in the end became a bookkeeper and then housewife and she was able to balance having a household with two kids and doing some work on the side later on.

And fast forward into your life in New York, I mean, if we can go back in time and meet a 16-year-old Liz Diller, how would you describe that person? What did you do for fun?

So, I was totally anxious and I was very self-aware. I was at the High School of Music & Art, which was at that time where City College is and I lived all the way in uptown Manhattan. I was very much entrenched in being in a high school in a college. So, there were a lot of folks around me and it was in Harlem, so it was very New York with layers of New York very present.

So, we were constantly being liberated by protests. I remember there was a lot of pot on the scene. I was extremely interested in being an artist. I didn’t know exactly in what direction. I was interested in photography and film and I was very close friends with a lot of musicians in the school.

And it’s also a blur for me what happened, but it’s a different reason for a blur because I think in those days, it was a lot of unrest happening and also metabolisms were such at 16 interested in different things other than studies. So, I wasn’t the best student, but I was totally absorbed in the cultural part of being in the school and being exposed to many things.

And I believe you studied art before architecture, correct?

Well, after I left High School of Music & Art, it merged with a high school performing arts and became Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. And it’s different because at the time, it was a unique specialty school. High school for performing arts was a unique specialty school. There were science schools for science and so forth. So, there you felt like the program, the curriculum was really shaped around the interest of kids at that age.

So, I was very motivated to continue on an art path. I applied for various colleges and my parents weren’t in any shape to send me away. So, from my choices of living at home, I tried to get into NYU and Pratt and I didn’t want to try to get into Cooper, even though Cooper was a dream school for me, I didn’t think that I could get in. And so, I didn’t try.

I got into Pratt and NYU and I chose to go to NYU for unknown reasons. And when I was there, I absolutely misread the school and I wasn’t able to really be exposed. Art was really art education. This was before there were people that were advising, before there were professionals advising high school students about what to do. And before parents started to think about college [inaudible 00:12:10] kids were six years old. So, I was really on my own. I made some mistakes. In the end, I became more and more attracted to Cooper Union and I started to sneak in to Cooper.

But you were just walking into classes and stuff?

I was just exactly pretending I was a student. I thought I would never get in, but I wanted to learn photography. At the same time, I failed all my courses in NYU because I never went. So, I never got any credits. But at some point in time, I think after a year went by, I was invited by the head of photography at Cooper to meet him, to have an interview.

And I went to the interview and he said, “Would you be interested in coming to the school? I saw your photos in your high school yearbook and they’re really great and you should really come to the school.” And I said to him, “You know I’ve been here for the past year.” I thought I would impress him. And he threw me out the door.

But I was emboldened to somehow apply the normal way and I got in. And then I chose an art path. And architecture never entered into my mind, ever, ever, ever. My parents meanwhile never saw how a career in art could help me be independent. And my parents were very professionally oriented for their kids.

So, my mom gave me a choice of, well, I should somehow put my creative efforts into a profession like architecture and if not architecture, dentistry. So, I could never get that association out of my brain that those two were linked in some way and I was totally not interested in either.

Both can be painful.

Yeah. Very painful. Right. And so, I continued on the art path. Cooper was great at the time. I was learning a lot, but I was also sneaking out of the school and the downtown art scene was happening and I was super interested in performance. I was interested in what people were doing across disciplines. And so, it became as much of a learning experience for me as the school. So, I was half in, half out.

And then I decided to take an architecture class. I met a guy in the architecture school who became my boyfriend, and he pushed me into taking a course here or there. And I did. And I started to really appreciate architecture as a cultural investigation.

So, before I knew it, I got more friends in the architecture school and then I met the dean of the school, John Hejduk, who was this mysterious cult figure. And I was so intrigued by him that I decided to just change my major. And so, I went into the architecture school. I had to more or less start again. And it’s a five-year program.

And that was it. Never with the intention of becoming an architect, but just I was very drawn to critical way of thinking and to presenting my work and being accountable for what it meant. It was just everything at the art school, it didn’t give you totally free rein, it gave you some guardrails, which I appreciated.

And so, I went through the program. And it was time for graduation and I invited my parents to the graduation. I never told them I was graduating with an architecture degree. And they found out just at graduation. I somehow, I could not give them-

Really, that they never found out until literally graduation?

Yes. Right. And it was a five-year program, so I had to have all sorts of excuses. But it was a free school, so it didn’t torment them too much.

They must have been thrilled, no?

They were thrilled. They were really thrilled. But I just somehow, I don’t know what it was, I just couldn’t give them the satisfaction of giving in. But also, I don’t want to give them false hopes that I would be an architect. I just was graduating with an architecture degree. And then things started to change and one thing led to another. Art projects and architecture projects together, interesting exchanges between the two, and then that’s how our career was formed.

What was your photography like?

There were different periods of photography. There was a very abstract period where I was photographing things that were totally unrecognizable. And then there was a kind of chemistry period where I flirting around with all the chemicals and trying to see what materially I could produce with light and various chemistries without actually exposing film the traditional way or sometimes layering on different ways of making light.

So, I was experimenting across media. I didn’t feel like I could be good at it. But once I started to think in 3D, then photography, film, time-based media, all of that just started to become more and more intriguing because I let something in that was just weirdly left out of my consciousness.

And I also had this preconception that one had to be good in math and physics and architecture school. And actually, that’s not true. You could be a dreamer. You could be a poet. You could really come from any angle. And architecture is collaborative art form where the expertise comes in as you need it so you don’t have to know everything and be able to do everything.

And at what point after graduation, I believe you may have met your husband there and Ricardo, and how does that, sort of the practice come together?

Well, I actually met Ric when I was in school, and he was my teacher.

Is he the boyfriend you mentioned before?

I had a boyfriend. Well, actually it was an interesting story. When I was in my first year, doing classes first year, my boyfriend who was already in the third year, I somehow was in an elevator with Ric and Dan, my boyfriend and Dan introduced me to Ric as his former teacher. And then Ric said hello and shook my hand and then went off and Dan said to me, “You’re going to end up with him one day.” That was very strange. And I thought, “What are you talking about?” And somehow, he had this sense that we were very similar.

Anyway, when I went through the various year by year at Cooper in my second year, I had Ric

and he taught the second year. And it wasn’t until the end of the year that I started to think about, “Wow, this guy is kind of cute.” And he’s married and he is off limits. But I had an eye on him. He had an eye on me too, and apparently his marriage was not so happy.

After I was out of the class on my way to my next level at Cooper, we started a romance. And then it was complicated for several years after. At one point, I remember we were totally undercover. It wasn’t like it is today where everybody’s very hypersensitive about this. But in our case, it was just a mutual attraction and he was my professor. We didn’t want to make it known because we thought that it seemed inappropriate at the time while I was still enrolled as a student for people to know. And his marriage was still quite entangled.

At one point, we said to each other, we really need to tell the dean because if this were to come out in another way, it would be probably very bad for us. So, we went to the dean together, well, I think I was in the fourth year at that time that we’re a couple. And he said, “That’s great. You’re two people that I love and you’re meant for each other.” And that was so comforting. And then we came out basically as a couple, and it wasn’t until I graduated after the fifth year that we were already living together and we began to start a small practice. Now, Ric is 19 years older than me. He already had a practice, a small practice with several other partners, which he was really unhappy with. And he really wasn’t that interested in taking the professional route and much more interested in where I wanted to go, which is in this interdisciplinary work with space as one of the major component parts.

And we started to take on some invitations from Creative Time and Artist Space and so forth to do things out in the public realm. And this was the beginning of things. We also had some projects, some work that he was still connected to that we started to do together, like the Kinney House, which was one of our very first things that we did together. And we slowly started to see that it’s possible to have a practice that merged architecture and some independent work whose agendas we would identify. It wasn’t just problem-solving for others.

And to the totally uninitiated, how is your firm set up today in terms of the four partners if you met someone and said, “I know nothing about your firm at all,” and you can just sort of describe it?

So we are a firm of over a hundred architects, artists and administrators. There are four partners. There are two founding partners, Ricardo or myself. And Charles Renfro joined at some point, I think, around 2000. And then Ben Gilmartin joined a little bit later on after being in the studio and contributing to the studio for many years.

We’re organized in, I would say, a very fluid way, even though there are titles and categories for architects in the studio. The teams for projects are very much across different skill levels and experience levels. And so we try to make interdisciplinary groups.

So we’re doing large-scale building projects, sometimes master plans. Very often, we work in different parts of the world. At the same time, we’re doing self-initiated projects and invited independent projects, which are to curate a show or to design an exhibition or to participate in a public art project or we’re simply invited by a museum to contribute something.

And that has gone in different directions from media, robotics, working with an environment, and so forth. So we do different things depending on interests at the time. And we always follow our curiosity and the set of opportunities that unfolds.

So it’s fairly fluid. We don’t have a trajectory and a mission at the end to become bigger and more powerful. Not at all. We like the size that we are. We know everybody’s name. We work in groups that are constantly changing. The partners are involved pretty much in every project together. So it’s very old-fashioned in a way. And there’s a lot of different opinions.

Sometimes, the smartest idea wins. Sometimes, it comes from a partner. Sometimes, it comes from an intern. And we have lots of fights, and people get bloodied. Then someone wins, but usually based on merit and not on hierarchy. So it’s not like any other studio. It’s not structured in a formal way. And sometimes, that’s very disorienting for people, but it’s the way we like.

And one of the early projects in the book is the Kinney House, The Plywood House.

Yes.

Okay. So, yeah, one of those early projects is that Kinney House, also known as the Plywood House in ’81. And it’s a project that opens one of the volumes of the book, which it looks like it was built for $45,000 with funds from an insurance settlement. Something burned down, they got the insurance. And then you guys were able to rebuild with that limited budget on that site. Tell me about-

On the foundation actually.

Oh, okay. Tell me about when you now look back and you’re putting this book together and you’re looking at this house, can you look at it and recognize the sort of Diller Scofidio + Renfro DNA in it?

Absolutely. That’s one of the eye-opening things about doing this monograph, is I never put it all together. You just don’t see a trajectory except from a art historical point of view. If somebody writes a book on you, then it’s their take on your work. But when you do a book like this and you start to see the trajectory of ideas and how those ideas were woven together somehow unconsciously, because there were always agendas, there was always new inputs, new realizations. So it all folded together and increased in scale and permanence and so forth, even though independent work was never ever put aside.

But that Kinney House took on a kind of saltbox house, like something that was fairly generic, worked with generic materials like four by eight plywood panels, and found this kind of dissonance between the layout of the house and the module of the building material. And that discrepancy was what created the uniqueness of the house. So where the plan and the section met the skin was a way of showing distraction disturbance and something that would fpull you in because it was a challenge to the convention.

And the book outlines dozens of projects, both realized and not, and I would say all design and architecture fans love learning about what might have been the sort of speculative kind of alternate history. Is there a project that you put in the book as you were putting everything together and thought like, “Oh gosh, I really wish that one had worked out.” It still stings that you did it and-

If we put into the book all the projects that were not executed, it would be a 20-volume book. It wouldn’t be a two volume book. So we were very spare in the projects. We chose to show that that didn’t see the light of day.

And I think among them, maybe two stand out. The Slow House, which was the first project where we became convinced that it’s possible to be an architect, do an architectural project with an idea, because we were turned off to the profession and thought it was morally corrupt, and it was just bankrupt intellectually. That’s what we felt. But when we had this opportunity to do it, and then we got on the cover of magazines and the project was requested for the permanent collection of MoMA and other places like that, we realized, “Wow, this idea is really appreciated.”

Unfortunately, it was the victim of the art market collapse at the time, and it was the value of two Cy Twombly’s that the client was going to be selling. So it had to stop while the foundations were already in the ground. So it was mid-construction. And many of the pieces prefabricated, and then it had to stop. So that was heartbreaking. But it was still recognized as an important project in 1990.

And tell me about the house itself. Can you describe it for those who haven’t seen a photo of it?

Yeah. Let’s see how I could describe it. The panelization was only customized where there was a core or something that really didn’t fit into the module. So the module of the plywood was disturbed. There was basically half the house was a two-story double-height space. And half of it was two stacked stories. So that was also celebrated in a way, and where windows that were sort of typically on a rhythm were, let’s say, hidden by a closet or a stair. It became plugged like a blind window.

And of all the projects you’ve done, obviously. The high line is of course one of the most pivotal and on a variety of levels. And of course, it’s in the book. It’s funny to see it now as a plan and not the sort of state, this sort of spine that runs through Manhattan today. Can you share the origin story of this project that was so unique at the time and not so widely copied and everyone started doing their own version of this? Tell me about that story, and why do you think it was a success in the way that you executed it?

So the west side of Manhattan and the Meatpacking District and Chelsea was extremely run down. And there was a point at which a lot of the industrial and warehouse needs of the city was actually moving out of the city. And it was trucking, ultimately, that changed a lot of things. And it was less expensive for some of these industrial areas to be someplace other than New York.

And so the High Line was abandoned in 1981. And it was the source of distribution for meatpacking plants before that. So when highway system trucking took over all of that, there was less and less need. So the High Line was abandoned. And at some point in time, there was a piece cut off of it from the south. And the property owners around the High Line had been lobbying to demolish it for a long time because they felt it devalued their properties.

And so if you think about, quite long at that point, at Gansevoort all the way to 34th Street, a lot of properties to the east and west, and across that mile and a half almost. So Giuliani was in office at the time. And Giuliani decided as his last act as mayor, he would sign a court order to demolish the High Line.

At the same time, citizen activists, really young guys that just found themselves at community meetings thought that it was really cool. There was all this growth on the High Line that happened by chance. It was just air blown, self-seeded seeds from the train cars sort of landing in the ballast. And the site was just very wild and weird. It was also illicit. So people came up there, snuck up there to shoot up, have sex, throw out their furniture. It was kind of a wreck of a site, but there was this incredible growth on the site of what we would call weeds, but there weren’t. They were really like plants and vegetation. It was really interesting.

So it was just at that moment when the Bloomberg administration was coming in and Giuliani was leaving, that the Bloomberg administration was convinced at least to hold off on the demolition and ultimately to reverse the court order. Amanda Burden was involved at the time. And she was the city planning commissioner. And this is Robbie Hammond and Joshua David, who are the two citizen activists, young guys that just felt like, what if this could be turned into a park?

So it was their initiative that brought the city there. And this was compounded by the fact that there were no parks in this part of the city. And it was really also a place that needed to be transformed into something. There was a kind of economic growth issue there because it was burnt out. There’s a lot of sex trade and drug trade also happening there. And the incoming mayor saw it as an opportunity for economic growth. So anything good that happens for the public always happens when somebody makes money.

And so the way that this site was argued, because no one could believe that there could be a park in the air there, who would go and what would it be? It was sort of argued in the same way that Frederick Law Olmsted argued Central Park: this is a park that could be a catalyst for economic growth. People would come around the park except this wasn’t Central Park. It was a linear park on a industrial rail line.

And so nobody believed that could happen. There was an ideas’ competition first that was mostly students participated and put forward some kind of crazy ideas. And then there was a formal competition. And we were invited into that formal competition, and we were on a team with James Corner at the time and Piet Oudolf. And it was basically open-ended. How could you make this into a park, into a public asset?

And the competition was formidable. And when we presented, we had a feeling of the vibe of the space and what could be done. And I’m going to quote Ric here, where he said, “What an architect needs to do here is protect the site from architecture. That was one of the key things, one of the key ideas because it was successful and you don’t want to do too much. It’s kind of beautiful as it is, but you have to basically clean it out. You have to replant it. You have to figure out a new way of getting up and down, and you have to figure out what features could be and how the paving could be and what the language would be of the whole thing and so forth. So there was a lot of design to do, but you just didn’t want to put a lot of hard stuff on it. That wasn’t the idea.

And then you wanted to protect it in the end from the encroachment of architecture that could come around it if it was successful. So the city, in the zoning and the rezoning of the site, put in some rules around being able to do setbacks and no connection with the High Line for any buildings that would be built there, so forth.

So the city was very open to trying something out, and we were selected for this. I think we touched a nerve that it was well-designed, and it was a thoughtful proposal. And one of the things that I was told later, actually this year, that one of the things that charmed the selection committee was that when we presented, we didn’t all agree our group as presenters. We argued with each other as we were making the presentation. Everybody else was very slick. They knew exactly what they were doing.

We were sort of trying to figure it out. And I think that resonated a lot because the team, the client team, the city, city planning, and we were all doing this for the first time, we brought them to the Promenade Plantée in Paris, which was the only other piece of infrastructure viaduct in Paris that had been turned into a park.

No one knows about it. And it’s not really used except by people that live right near there. And it’s very French. And it doesn’t really feel like it’s celebrating the fact that it was infrastructure and had it passed. In our case, we said, “This has to be explicitly New York.” It has to provide new ways of seeing New York, understanding New York, being able to reinvent the promenade, but without having to stop for red lights.

And also, this sort of prospect of a park where you can’t do anything, you can’t really bring your dog, you can’t ride a bike, can’t bring your rollerblades, you can’t throw Frisbees. You really basically can sit or walk. And I think that was also the trick. It’s very old-fashioned idea, but doing nothing was a discovery for New Yorkers.

And we even made a special place with a sunken overlook over 10th Avenue to just look at the taillights of cars going up 10th Avenue. And you didn’t do anything there except look into what could be like a fireplace or is something that was totally non-dramatic, but this sort of feel of New York, this mesmerizing sense of the continuity of things.

And we succeeded in a way that we never could have predicted. It grew in pieces, sort of like sausage links whenever the city and private philanthropy could afford the next part and were convinced that it was successful. We continued to build northward.

And at some point, even in 2009 when the first section opened, it was already an incredible success. People went up, and they had never seen anything like that before. It continued to lead to more growth and more success. And then all of a sudden, the property values started to also-

Yeah. Well, it became the spark that lit a sort of succession of years of starchitects building, condos on the High Line is one of Zaha’s last buildings and on and on. It wasn’t just the success unto itself. It also kind of spurred all of this growth.

Well, what was initially thought of as an eyesore, the High Line, that needed to be demolished was now seen as an asset that escalated property values that kept getting traded and flipped, and then these buildings started to grow out of the ground and started to crowd actually, the High Line. So it was very good that it had these setbacks that were already foreseen. But I don’t think anyone could have imagined that, when we predicted maybe that there would be 400,000 people a year that would visit and that would be a really good goal, that before COVID hit there were 8 million people annually. And now that’s pretty much restored. And so not only that, but it became the hottest tourist attraction. So everybody that visited New York had to go to the High Line. And sometimes it became overcrowded so that wasn’t totally great.

But what I thought was really a terrific outcome, outside of this asset that it made for New York and allowed it to grow into the west where the west was just full of infrastructure and left abandoned, really, by the city. So it allowed it to grow, maybe not all in the best way, I’ll come back to that. But what was really satisfying was that it ignited a kind of viral effect all over the world, where city-makers would all of a sudden value potentially, their highways or infrastructure that was no longer working. And rather than tear it down, maybe figure out if they could produce a kind of High Line effect of their own, which meant both catalytic growth, but also a great public space and a great park. So there are High Lines that were popping up all over the world, whether on highways and bridges, train trestles, aqueducts, viaducts, everywhere.

And we were very proud of the fact that we were able to prove out, whereas the Promenade Plantée didn’t do it, was very singular and really no-one knew about it, that somehow the High Line became world-renowned. And it is our most known project, everyone seems to know the High Line. Wherever we go in the world, they know it. And I think it proved that, even though we’re wedded to our screens and we think that public space is over, it’s actually not. People love seeing each other, being together. The city is very much alive and it means something to have public space. So we’re very proud of that accomplishment, both on the limited resources front, adaptive reuse of infrastructure, one. Two, public space is still very much alive.

In 2018 you conceived of a mile-long opera on the High Line. Tell me a little bit about what that was and how it fits into your thinking of what the High Line is for.

Yes. So over time, the success of the High Line was very clear to everyone, and it made us question what success really looked like. And when people complained that it was too crowded or that artists were driven out of their cheap apartments in the area, for new condos that were being built, or people that lived in the neighborhood, in the projects, no longer had a place to shop because there were now fancy cafes everywhere. The speedy gentrification was really something to think hard about. A lot of things went right, but not everything went right. And we should have speculated about another future where the city could grow proportionately there and you could have low-middle income social housing as well as condos and that 1% issue.

So it brought me, specifically, to a thought that I wanted to do something using the High Line, I wanted to make the High Line a sight, but to do an intervention there that would be a performance. And I’ve always wanted to do an opera. And the idea that I had was to do an opera on the High Line that dealt with the fast gentrification, this fast pace of change at the High Line. But it wouldn’t only be there in New York, it would be many post-industrial cities that are seeing the same thing. And so the opera would be very big. It would be very, as operas are, big in thought and big in scale, and it would be about the winners and the losers of that growth.

Because it was to be musical in nature, I asked David Lang, who was a collaborator prior to that, to work with me and to write the score. And we together, identified some writers that could do the lyrics. And so Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine were the two poets that would work on the words, and the words were to be separated in sung and spoken.

The structure of this, and I’ll just explain because it came out of this notion at the very, very beginning, rather than have an audience and performers on a stage, the whole High Line was the stage. New York was the backdrop. And so in this case, the performers would be many, many and they would be, basically, strewn across the mile-and-a-half of the High Line. And there would be 1,000 performers. We decided to pick a number, 1,000. All singers and would all be spoken or sung and they would be selected from non-professional and professional sources. So there were 750 non-professional singers from churches, school choirs, church choirs, community choirs, and we would make selections from those. And then there were 250 professional singers among them.

And the idea was that the audience would, basically, promenade the entire length of the High Line from the southern point to the northernmost point. And would, in their walking through, individually would be eyeball-to-eyeball with singers, and singers would sing directly to audience members as they came along. So the audience mixed down the sound as they walked. It’s complicated structurally, there were 25 musical parts that were all interconnected like pearls with spoken word. And they were all blended together one into the other, so it was like an entire event. And it took some people 45 minutes to get through it, if you race through it. Some people took two-and-a-half hours to get through it.

And I have to say it was very, very hard to do. I was the creator with David, and I was the producer. I knocked on doors and I got the money together to do it and the director. I worked with a co-director, Lynsey [Peisinger], who worked with Marina Abramović and who was an expert in endurance singing. So we had to train singers to actually be there for the duration and do a lot of repetitive singing.

So this was, I don’t know, it could take a day to describe this piece, but it was one of the most, I think, adventurous things that I’ve ever done. And I just had this will to do it. I have no idea how I did it, how I managed to pull it all together. I definitely had help from experts, but I learned for the first time what it was to market, how to get tickets, how to organize an audience, how to do people flow through a very skinny space, how to set up an ambulance just in case somebody has a heart attack, and at the same time, the content. So it was a very, very interesting learning experience. And now I feel like the best advice I could give to anyone is to do something you’re totally unqualified to do, because you do your best work.

And the other volume of the book is called Not Architecture. And there’s a 1981 art project called Traffic where you’re taking over this roundabout in Manhattan that’s at the corner of Central Park. And there are hundreds, it looks like traffic cones in a certain pattern. Tell me about what that is and how that helped start the trajectory of the firm as it is.

So while I was in school at Cooper, one of the great institutions uptown that gathered architects for lectures, and it was a… I would say it’s like New York’s AA. It was a social space, but also one of education and it was called the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. And Peter Eisenman ran it, and there were many scholars and architects that were part of this and also intersected with October, with an art history. And so there was a really interesting intellectual core there. They had many programs and among them was a competition to imagine a solution for Columbus Circle. And this was the time where the Coliseum that had been there was slated to be torn down and that whole area was going to be redeveloped in some way.

So it was an ideas competition, effectively. Everyone was to present an idea on a board, a certain size, anyone that wanted to participate. It was an open call. And those proposals were exhibited in a show and then there was a party. And I think then and there they decided that they were going to select a winner of this competition and they selected us, with the cones. And everyone else took a much more planning, organizational traffic and building approach and tried to make that traffic circle, which is an inevitability, into more of a European strategy where the buildings would hug the shape of the roundabout and the plaza. And of course there’s no plaza there. It’s not for humans, it’s just for cars.

And that traffic circle was also cut up by traffic moving in all different directions. Broadway was diagonally going through it, and it was just a lot of bits and pieces. And it was actually hazardous to cross the street there. So our approach was very different. We just thought why not use a material that’s indigenous to this site? Traffic, traffic cones. They’re bright orange. We could just make a serial arrangement of the cones and bring this broken traffic circle together into more of a pure form by situating several thousand of them at a regular interval, and creating a sense of snow, the way that snow connects unlike things after a snowfall, you just see white. And it doesn’t matter whether it was a road or a tree or whatever, or a car. It just covers over everything.

That’s what we wanted to do with that traffic circle. It was a formal and Duchampian move, I think, at the same time. Just playing with the system, having a bit of irony with it. And it wasn’t trying to fix this permanently, but it was trying to make a one-day event to appreciate the issue. But we didn’t really know what the response would be and people really loved it and asked us if we could pull it off for a day. And so we said, “Oh, my God, how are we going to get 2,500 traffic codes?”

And they were able to organize the opportunity for us to do this, which meant working with the MTA and working with other city agencies to be able to control, a little bit, control the traffic during the time that we were setting the cones. And to get them delivered on site. We set them all. We produced this. We started at 4:00 in the morning I think, and then worked for several hours and with several friends to get these cones organized. And then it was this incredible day. And the cones did exactly what we thought they would do. The traffic still ran through, but it formed a continuity through color and light, and this landscape element that united all the bits and pieces of that so-called traffic circle.

So it was a great opportunity to do something. It was totally unexpected that we would get away with it. And then once we did, we got the taste of doing things in public spaces. That was really fun. It was interesting to be noticed. It was interesting to affect the way the city functions even a little bit. And that gave us a taste for public art.

Of course, I’d love to know about a single spread from the Not Architecture book, The Meat Dress.

The Meat Dress was a response to a competition from Miss Meat Meatpacking District, which was held by the folks that were doing the High Line and that were involved in that whole area of town. It was a half a drag queen affair and half a just fashion affair. It was great fun. We decided to actually make a dress out of the very product that had been made on site, which was basically cured bacon and salami. And we came up with the idea because we wanted to do something extra-architectural that would involve a way of putting materials together that didn’t need mechanical fastenings. So we were using the fat clinginess of lunch meats to stick to one another. And so we produced with our staff, this design on a model, physically trying it on and seeing what worked, what worked with the gravity, what worked with her figure. And that’s how it came about. And we won.

And obviously, so much of your work and the firm’s work has left a mark in New York and a good one, in my opinion, of course.

Thank you.

What do you feel you’ve learned over time about the city of New York, as a place where good architecture can happen? Because sometimes it’s just a regular Joe walking down the street. We’re constantly looking at things being, like, “Oh, why is that there? Why isn’t this better?” And you’re someone who has left such a positive mark and such a good and critically received remark, from a critical point of view and from an everyday tourist point of view. And what did you learn about that?

Thank you, Dan, first of all, because it’s so important to me to have, first of all, an opportunity to work in my own city, to be able to appreciate what I’ve done by living here. Also, I see all of New York as an unfinished punch list, that’s the downside. All the things that need to be kept up in and that were unfinished. But when I started out, the notion of doing something in New York seemed really remote. Most architects don’t have a chance to change and shape their own cities. So the way it has typically worked and the way that I saw the world and other architects at the time that I started out, it’s mostly when you’re in your 70s and 80s when you’ve maybe made a name for yourself someplace else, and you get back, invited into your own city to do something. And sometimes it’s out of pity and it’s often too late.

But what happened to us, which was just a beautiful and fortunate alignment of the stars, is that just as we were joining architecture, it was the intersection of the Bloomberg administration. It was just post-9/11 and there was this incredible spirit in New York of renewal. We pick ourselves up and we do something for the city. And I think a lot of people felt, professionals even felt it, for 9/11. Everybody rushed down to the site to see how they could help. There was this sense of citizenship in New York that I had never felt before.

And so when Bloomberg came in, a lot of things became possible because the administration was full of very smart people that wanted to make a change. It wasn’t bureaucratic. And we had a lot of opportunities. Now, before that, and the reason I say that it seemed not possible before, was that New York is and has always been a real estate-oriented city. Developers have run New York, made decisions about properties. They still do, in a sense, not that much has changed. But during Bloomberg’s administration there was also a kind of concentration of culture and education, and this lack of bureaucracy made just knocking on the door possible to do something. And I think we just were the beneficiaries of being at the right place at the right time.

Lincoln Center was starting just around 2003. And it was after the project was held up for a year because Frank Gehry was supposed to make a presentation right at 9/11 on his scheme. And everyone was trapped in New York, apparently. He made the presentation and no one wanted to do it. And by chance it looked a little bit like a pile of rubble, so it didn’t help himself. But it was Frank’s twisted forms in the Josie Robertson Plaza. And he was making a kind of interior space.

Anyway, there was a pause for a year, and then there was a search for an architect to propose something. And we were by chance invited to propose something. And we were among very established firms, and we were not established at all. And so we showed some very unlikely things because we thought we had nothing to lose. And by some miracle, we were selected. And I think it was maybe a case of false identity or something, people, they didn’t really know what we were doing. And I think that some of the things we said, maybe we just caught on and we touched a nerve.

We got an opportunity to start that project. And it was almost parallel to The High Line. Bloomberg had just come in. The Friends of The High Line just were on the other side of that demolition order that Giuliani signed into action, which was to demolish The High Line. When Bloomberg came in, there was this moment of reversal of that court order and Friends of The High Line were able to open up the discussion again. And one thing led to another, and that led to a competition that the Friends of The High Line put together. And we were among the architects selected for that, and again, we touched a nerve.

Those two projects sent us in a direction we had never expected to actually do large-scale projects. Lincoln Center, we didn’t even expect; it just snowballed from a very small project to a bigger and bigger and bigger project across 12 years. And those two projects matured us in a huge way, our studio. We started to understand public process, what’s involved in doing a permanent project for the big city and a large-scale project working with all the entities that one has to work with, not just landing a big idea but educating people around you.

Thomas Edison said something like, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.” And for me, especially for us as a studio, but for me especially, it was exactly that 1% inspiration in terms of the ideas, 99% having meetings and a torturous process of convincing people, getting consensus, the patience that it takes to bring people along and so forth. And then I had this big realization that that 99% was actually very creative in order to actually convince anybody to do anything that’s permanently rooted to the ground. It took a lot of creative energy to do that, creative thought.

And so that was the maturing point. I realized how hard it was to do it, but I actually had the fortitude to do it. And my studio, everyone, there were so many parallel projects going on for Lincoln Center; was not one thing. It was Alice Tully Hall while we were doing the expansion of Julliard while we were doing public spaces on the North Plaza while we were doing the restaurant, the Hypar restaurant while we were doing South Plaza work. And then we were doing School of American Ballet.

Each of these was an independent project with a separate team. And it was crazy. It was almost like our entire studio was fueled by Lincoln Central while we were doing The High Line. And that was really complicated in and of itself because no one had done anything like that before, so convincing the city that was a good thing was really difficult and crazy.

And it sounds like you wouldn’t even have time to learn a lesson about New Yorkers, just that there’s this, New York tends to chew people up and spit them out, whether or not they like it it seems like. If you can survive the spitting out or if you can survive the chewing, then I guess you’re in a good place.

Yeah. I think that’s where the post-9/11 helped us a bit, because there was this spirit, something, some kind of generosity afforded people just in that period. And I think both Lincoln Center and The High Line were not advertised. People didn’t really know. They weren’t paying attention to what was happening. We were working with the local community boards and with the city, but the general public just didn’t know until the changes started happening. And they were really happy. It was like a big gift because it came from nowhere.

We have to find the generosity, basically.

Yes, we do, again.

Which is a tall order for any New Yorker, I guess. The book is divided into architecture and not architecture. I’m wondering how that plays into this next question, which is for the next decade or two of the firm, how do you want to divide those two things? Or do you have a vision for… We had this post-9/11, pre-COVID era of expansion and in New Yorker generosity and hopefulness, and now we’re in a completely different space in various ways to… In your best wishes and your best hopes and dreams, the next almost 20 years of trajectory that were going on, what phase would you hope for in your own thoughts?

I never think ahead. I never have. And our studio was just riding a wave of good luck and being at the right place at the right time and actually going after things we were interested in. The proportion of independent work to professional work, let’s say, it was always in parallel. Sometimes it was more professional stuff going on, sometimes an equal amount of independent work. And it depends. I was always on the independent side, but I was also doing professional work. Not all of my partners are doing the independent work. Ric is with me, and Charles does some of his own, but the studio, we have carved out in our 100 misfits that to the studio that work with us, there are some that are interested in this independent work and work with us on it. And they have this other gene that it takes to translate some of this architectural independent thinking into independent projects, but with the architectural thinking too.

I was more optimistic a month ago about how far architecture can go and all it can do. I think we all have a tremendous concern about our institutions, our ability to think freely in our schools. Can life be the same? That’s the question. And I’m optimistic and I hope that we can and that maybe there’s a silver lining someplace that if the economy changes in some way that helps architecture. I don’t know. I’m trying to find a silver lining.

We are committed to doing our work and we’re committed to our independent work. We’re committed to not changing the way we operate. In the end, it’s the economy, it’s our relationship with Europe and the rest of the world that we’re very used to working with. It’s going to be also America in the eyes of everyone outside. And we’re American architects and inevitably connected with all that’s the States right now. I don’t know, maybe we can look through the politics and just continue our move forward in architecture.

I think what we have to do actually independent of that is reform a lot of institutions. We’re working with a lot of conventions that we just sleepwalk through, and we haven’t really thought about how our culture has changed and how the speed of change affects everything, and including the speed of technological change and as well as social change and our relationship to institutions. All of that has to be rethought.

I say this a lot, but architecture is very slow and inert, and it’s very slow to respond to the speed of change. And we’re left with buildings that are very difficult to adapt, having to raise everything and rebuild all the time. And in a time of limited resources and consciousness about the environment and how wasteful architecture is, there are a lot of things that we have to change the way we work and also what constitutes architecture and how buildings could be responsive in new ways. This is something that I think about a lot independent of who’s in the White House.

And how’s that going? How’s that thought process going?

We’ll see.

Any breakthroughs?

I think it’s a big conversation. We just finished an exhibition called Restless Architecture, and it’s a show at MAXXI in Rome that we curated and designed. And it looks at the whole 20th century, this relationship, mostly post-war and its relationship to shifting cultural issues and technologies and program changes and touches on projects that were not rooted to the ground and that were more responsive and more agile. I’m not saying that we make Sheds, we make more architecture that moves or anything like that, but I think the thinking about densification of cities and how we make the most use of limited space of how sometimes the architecture has to get out of the way to survive. There are many issues, and I won’t bring them all up, but the show touches on multiple thematics of how architecture has become lighter or more in touch, more in sync. But it has a long way to go.

Are you still teaching?

Yes.

Okay. On top of everything, you teach as well. In this crazy age that we’re in today, what do you think is the most important lesson that you think needs to be drilled into your students’ heads that maybe you didn’t need to 10 years ago? Is there anything in this world of design where you go, “The one thing I really need to make sure that these kids understand about this profession is X”?

Well, that’s a loaded question. There’s a lot of stuff. First of all, I teach mostly graduate students at Princeton. And these students are somewhat entitled. They’re worldly. They come to Princeton with a focus on learning architecture plus history and theory and to be involved in a broader university. I think maybe the thing that I had to do 10 years ago that I felt was critical was to teach them how to unlearn all the bad things that they thought they knew about architecture and basically to screw around with their brains and liberate some new thinking.

What kind of bad thinking do they come into that graduate program with?

Well, they feel like they know what architecture is about. Maybe they see it a little bit too professionalized. Maybe they used to see architecture as too static. Anyway, the idea was to shake them up, destabilize them, create doubt in their brains. That was the main thing.

I think after post-COVID, post-George Floyd, we’ve gone through a lot culturally, socially. And also with climate change and political upheavals all over the world, the priorities have changed a bit for students now, and everyone is really interested and… Well, everyone should be interested in environmental crisis and also in issues of identity. And in a very, very good way, there’s a sense of consciousness about the world around us as opposed to more hermetic pursuits in the discipline.

And I think that one of the casualties of this new set of concerns is that design goes by the wayside. Students don’t really understand, well, why it’s so necessary to think about the discipline itself, the history of the discipline and responding to the evolution of the discipline through whatever work you do and whatever concentrations you have, which has to do with how you put things together, how you build, the aesthetics of architecture, materiality. Look at what happened in the 20th century and all the ruptures and why we ended up where we ended up, all the interrelationships of other aesthetic disciplines and architecture, including literature, including art and performance and so forth.

There’s a lot on the plate. I think it’s very hard for students to make out the world today and how architecture could help shape it. There’s a lot of disillusionment, and I don’t blame them. I would be confused if I were a student today. But what I try to do is connect up all the dots, that there’s nothing of their concerns that should be forgotten, and it’s all very important, but not at the expense of thinking about how it all ties into our discipline, what we can do about it, our expertise.

This is my last question. If you had to describe your architectural point of view in three words, what words would those be?

Critical approach, unapologetic. And the other one is not three words, but it’s jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Thank you to my guest, Liz Diller, as well as to Alex Coumbis from Phaidon for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next time!

(END OF TRANSCRIPT)