From a distance, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2002–06) looks almost modest. A simple box on the harbor in scale with the other few buildings there, it seems to eschew the sculptural iconicity that many art museums have recently embraced. It is only when we round the austere edge of the building and see how its top floor cantilevers over the Boston Harborwalk that we are struck by its physical presence. From this vantage, too, we can grasp the diagram of the design overall. In effect the architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), pulled the narrow path of the water walkway into a broad platform of wood planks, which they then stepped up to produce a public grandstand for outdoor performance.1 This angle measures the height of the first floor, which, faced with glass, contains the admissions, “art lab,” store, and café. On the exterior the diagonal continues upward to describe the second and third floors, also faced in glass, where the theater, “digital studio,” education center, offices, and theater are located (the last is the indoor continuation of the outdoor grandstand, and it, too, fronts the harbor). Finally, the third floor supports the exhibition galleries of the fourth level, the 17,000 square feet of which are column-free; with twelve-foot squares of polished concrete flooring and sixteen-foot ceilings with skylights and scrims, this neo-Miesian pavilion is a luminous mediation of city, water, and sky (the glassed corridor that juts out over the boardwalk provides an uninterrupted view of the harbor). Suspended beneath the third floor, like the cockpit of an amphibious spaceship, is a media room—a wedge of broad steps and computer screens that drops down, vertiginously, to a long window that looks onto the water below. Here the loop of the building—the gradual rise out of the harbor, the strict angles that define its volumes, and the abrupt return to the harbor—is complete.2
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2002–06. Photo © Iwan Baan.
Such devices as ramps, spirals, and loops are pronounced in recent design. Zaha Hadid features ramps in her Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, for example, while Rem Koolhaas exploits the spiral in the Seattle Public Library and the loop in the Beijing CCTV. Yet the immediate precedent of the ICA design is a 2002 scheme by DS+R for an Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology in New York, which also features dramatic cantilevering. Given a program that called for spaces for both exhibition and production, the architects chose to weave the two kinds of spaces together: a two-ply slab of fiberglass and concrete was to snake up from the street, undulating side to side to shape each level, with floor becoming wall and wall reverting to floor at the turns, thus enfolding the two activities (exhibition and production) in multiple ways. Although the two projects differ in appearance—the Eyebeam would be all curves, the ICA is all angles—they share a logic of flow or circuit. Moreover, each scheme responds to a fundamental paradox, which they attempt to turn to advantage: with the Eyebeam the difficulty was a program that is half museum and half atelier, while with the ICA it was a museum dedicated to attention to art but sited on a harbor front inclined to distraction (not that the two modes are always so opposed). “The museum wanted to turn inward,” Ricardo Scofidio remarks; “the site wanted to turn the building outward. The building had to have a double vision.”3 What the architects thus produced, Elizabeth Diller adds, is both “a self-conscious object that … wants to be looked at” and “a machine for looking.”4 This last phrase sounds modernist in its pragmatic efficiency—if the house according to Le Corbusier is a “machine for living in,” then a museum might well be a machine for looking—but it also points to a postmodernist turn of mind that imagines architecture as a prosthetic subject, one possessed here of exhibitionistic and voyeuristic proclivities to boot (note again that, for Diller, this “self-conscious” museum “wants” to be looked at and to look).
Rendering of Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology, New York, 2002.
This conceit of architecture-as-subject has often guided work by DS+R. Whereas designers like Hadid have sometimes carried a mode of representation into the architectural object as such, DS+R have sometimes projected an aspect of vision into the very building. This approach was already programmatic in Slow House (1991), a scheme for a beach home on Long Island, New York, that is structured in its entirety as though it were a view—a vector of sight that bends and expands from a narrow entrance to a large picture-window one hundred feet away (the view was to be redoubled on a monitor that relays a live video feed of the water).5 Fifteen years later the ICA design complicated this idea of architecture as “eyebeam.” On the one hand, the architects wanted not only to disrupt “the touristic gaze” of the site (as the video screen would do at Slow House) but also to “disperse views” within the museum (along the building, across it, up it, and so on); they are “always partial and fleeting,” Diller says of these sight-lines; “they follow you and hide from you” (note again the subjectivizing of architecture here).6 At the same time, Charles Renfro adds, DS+R conceived the museum as an “optical instrument” in its own right; for example, the suspended mediatheque on the harbor front functions as a “viewfinder,” as does the large glass-enclosed elevator at the core of the building, and again the vista from the harbor-side corridor is panoramic.7 Along with the circuit up from the harbor, around and through the museum, and back down, it is this cluster of views that both opens up the ICA and ties it back together.
The notion of architecture as a visual matrix is smart, but it raises two concerns. First, in the trope of a machine for living, the house is still an environment for people; in the metaphor of a machine for looking, the museum becomes a quasi-person in its own right. Prepared by the modernist notion of film as a prosthetic “kino-eye,” with the new human defined as “man with a movie-camera,” this museum-as-cyborg suggests a postmodernist reversal—as if the architecture could do the looking for us. In the guise of our activation, then, architecture-as-vision might almost displace us as engaged viewers. Second, a museum that makes such an insistent claim on our visual interest might challenge the art at its own game: though the galleries are given pride of place in the cantilevered pavilion, they might seem secondary to the other space-events of the building. Perhaps, in this regard, the ICA represents a new moment in the art-architecture complex: if it declines to compete with the art at the level of sculptural iconicity, as at the Guggenheim Bilbao, or, for that matter, at the level of awesome scale, as at the Tate Modern, it vies with the art in the register of the visual—that is, in the otherwise privileged dimension of the visual artist. Of course, with the boardwalk, grandstand, and theater, the ICA also emphasizes the performative. This, too, is a field in which these architects excel, yet, as artists explore the building as stage and/or as site, they might feel somewhat subordinate to it. “We began the project with the assumption that architecture would neither compete with the art nor be a neutral backdrop,” Scofidio comments. “It had to be a creative partner.”8 Collaboration here, then, is a given, and this relationship might not always be welcomed by others. Have we reached the point where interdisciplinarity is designed in, as it were, as a value in its own right?9
Slow House, Long Island, 1991.
“DS+R is an interdisciplinary studio,” we are told, “that fuses architecture with the visual and performing arts,” and it has pursued this fusion as actively as any office.10 The relevant work here divides, roughly, into multi-media pieces (usually in collaboration with theater and dance companies); site-specific installations; images and objects that reflect on desire, gender, and display; and electronic interventions that blend architecture and media. An early instance of theatrical work is The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate (Delay in Glass) (1987), a collaboration with Susan Mosakowski inspired by The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (a.k.a. “Large Glass,” 1915–23) by Marcel Duchamp. Here DS+R suspended a large mirror at a forty-five-degree angle above the stage in order to divide its space vertically into two visual zones, as the Large Glass is divided. The mirror could move up and down, a wall panel could rotate as well, and the result was a “perpetual motion machine” of bodies, prosthetics, and images that, again like the Large Glass, kept the performers in a state of continual (dis)connection.11 This simple use of the mirror was a pure act of architecture, for it transformed the stage into the basic modalities of architectural representation: the movements seen on stage counted as the plan, and the movements seen in the mirror as the elevation. DS+R have exploited this device to transform the space of dance, too, as in Moving Target (1996), which, based on the diaries of Nijinsky, explored various states of emotion deemed “normal” and “pathological.”12 With Inertia (1998) DS+R again collaborated on a dance piece, in this case one that investigated different representations of motion in a way that reached back to the photographic studies of time-motion undertaken by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Broadly, then, a cluster of concerns emerges from such performances: the staging of desire and emotion, the imaging of movement and work. Architecture might seem to be extrinsic to such topics, dear as they are to postmodernist art, but, pace the discourse of “fusion,” the interdisciplinary thrust of these projects is first to suggest that architecture is always already present somehow—as unseen setting or frame—and then to disrupt this normative use of architecture with a critical intervention.
The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate (Delay in Glass), 1987. Multi-media performance.
Some of these interests carry over into DS+R installations, images, and objects, which tend to interrogate “spatial conventions of the everyday.”13 An early instance is The withDrawing Room (1987), in which they cut up and repositioned parts of the former home of the Capp Street Project, an art space in San Francisco. With sections removed from the walls, and table and chairs suspended from the ceiling, the structure of everyday domesticity was disarticulated in a manner at once surgical and dadaistic. Bad Press (1993–98) also treated home life, with the focus here on the work done by women (work that was once subject to time-motion studies as well—that is, to the overt disciplining of the laboring body). In this “dissident housework series” (its subtitle), white male dress shirts were ironed into bizarre twists and folds; reminiscent of the “involuntary sculptures” of Brassaï and Dalí, these shapes also recalled the contorted poses of hysterics, as if unpaid women had struck back directly at white-collar men.14 In a related installation titled Indigestion (1995) DS+R allowed visitors to do the rearranging of the social unit, represented here by a dinner table set for two. Through an interactive touch-screen one could mix-and-match various table-partners with different gender and class designations, even as the same recorded conversation droned on. Once again architecture intervened in everyday space, but it was also there all along.
The interrogation of the everyday led DS+R to the production of sleek objects, such as monogrammed towels and highball glasses, with each given a surrealistic twist: some towels express gender conflicts, for example, while some glasses dispense pharmaceuticals. Along with these (dis)agreeable objects of private desire and disgust came ambiguous images of public seduction and aggression, as in Soft Sell (1993), a large projected image of a luscious female mouth on the façade of an abandoned porn theater on Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. In the audio the disembodied feminine personage solicited passersby with such questions as “Hey you, wanna buy a ticket to paradise? Hey you, wanna buy a vacant lot in Manhattan?” Finally, DS+R have explored the tokens of tourism and the spaces of travel. Tourisms (1991) is an installation of fifty Samsonite suitcases, one per state; suspended from the ceiling in ten rows of five, each is opened to reveal a “suitcase study” of a tourist attraction represented by a vintage postcard (for example, the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan in Illinois). If Tourisms brings the sights to us (it is also a play on the traveling exhibition), the multi-media performance Jet Lag (1998) brought us to travel. This collaboration explored two stories of bizarre voyaging: an American grandmother who took her grandson across the Atlantic 167 times in order to elude his father, and an English sailor who disappeared in a solo round-the-world race after faking his positions to officials.
The “fusion” of architecture with art was the distinctive move made by DS+R during its first two decades of work. Whereas architects like Hadid have pursued a neo-avant-garde strategy, whereby design was to be advanced by a selective return to historical precedents in art and architecture alike, DS+R have followed a postmodernist strategy, whereby design was to be complicated by a lateral turn to contemporary practices in art.15 This interdisciplinary move allowed DS+R to skirt many of the battles over “history” and “theory” that beset the architectural discipline in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet often their blurring of genres might be too dependent on postmodernist art, indebted as their investigation of exhibition and display is to Conceptual practice, and their concern with desire and spectatorship is to feminist practice (some of the aforementioned projects echo the work of Dennis Adams, Laurie Anderson, Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko…). In short, what might be innovative in an architectural context might appear less so in an artistic one. Moreover, this involvement sometimes implicated DS+R in the ambiguous position of much postmodernist art—that is to say, in a deconstructive position that, as it spoke within the conventions and institutions that it sought to question, often shaded into complicity with them. Might it be that interdisciplinarity, once thought to be transgressive, has become almost routine, not only in art and academic worlds but also in architectural practice, and even normative in the “new spirit of capitalism” at large—that is, in an economy in which we are invited (indeed compelled) to connect, collaborate, network, and so on?16
This difficulty is sometimes touched on, gingerly, in the reception of DS+R. For example, Aaron Betsky describes DS+R as “display engineers” who participate in the culture of consumption in order to expose its workings. “These artists display display,” yet, in doing so, Betsky claims, they “frustrate” this culture even as they “surf” it.17 For his part, Michael Hays sees DS+R design as “a tool of social cartography” that “discloses the extrinsic, ideological structures that contaminate and complicate the intrinsic, supposedly pure forms and techniques of architecture.” Yet this “scanning,” Hays continues, is but “a placeholder for a critique that has become impossible” because “critical distance and difference have been annulled.”18 However sophistical Betsky is, and however dire Hays, both have their points: often contemporary design does appear to be located between display and engineering—the function that connects image and structure—and often it does seem merely to scan the culture (a euphemism for “to mirror”?). This is a vanguard DS+R should not be so eager to lead.
Less effective when they fuse art and architecture, DS+R are more pointed when they demonstrate its sub rosa disciplinary presence and when they bring their architectural expertise to bear on cultural questions, such as the effects of new media and technologies on space and subjectivity.19 This constitutes a second topos of their work, and initially it was based on two propositions. The first is that a prime condition of contemporary culture is a convergence of immediate seeing with mediated viewing. DS+R underscored this convergence first at Slow House, with its juxtaposition of picture window and video monitor, and later at the ICA, with its mise en abyme of window and screen in the mediatheque (where the harbor view might initially be mistaken for another digital image). The second proposition is that the flow of video has become the telltale form of media visuality and temporality today, perhaps as cinematic montage was in a previous moment of modernity; several projects by DS+R refashion the contemporary façade as imagistic and mobile in this way.20 Indeed, to put it broadly, if much modern architecture focused on structure and space, and much postmodern design on symbol and surface, then much contemporary practice à la DS+R is drawn to a zone somewhere in between—to a mediated blend of screen-space.21 Of course, one danger here is that to further the confusion between architecture and media is to serve an already pervasive culture of special effects and faux phenomenologies. Ironically, for all their theoretical attention to the body, DS+R do not engage corporeal experience very deeply.
In the exploration of architecture and media, DS+R first addressed the spatial effects of video surveillance. In Para-site (1989), an installation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they positioned cameras at three thresholds of the museum (the entrance, the escalators, and the doors to the sculpture garden) and set up monitors in a gallery that was radically rearranged in the manner of The withDrawing Room (for example, four chairs were set on the ceiling and the walls); here viewing was aligned with surveillance, and both were disrupted in the process. Later, in Jump Cuts (1995) DS+R installed a horizontal bank of twelve screens on the façade of a cineplex theater in San Jose, California, on which was carried a montage of live footage of patrons in the lobby and scenes from movie trailers; here viewing was juxtaposed with being watched, and movie-going with monitoring. Finally, in Overexposed (1994–2003) and Facsimile (2003), DS+R also relayed images of the interior of a building to its exterior. In the first work a video panned the former Pepsi-Cola Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, pausing at intervals so that fictional images from office life might be projected, while in the second piece a video monitor moved along the façade of Moscone Convention Center West in San Francisco, showing a live feed of the lobby mixed up with scripted scenes in the offices.
Para-site, 1989. Multi-media installation.
Such projects led DS+R to consider the uses and abuses of architectural transparency. Historically, glass worked to dematerialize the traditional wall and so to expose the hidden interior of buildings, and many architects have associated this disclosure not only with professional honesty but with democratic openness. DS+R are rightly skeptical of this shaky analogy; the technology of glass has also proved useful for purposes of surveillance by corporations and governments alike, and this use, DS+R assert, “spawned new paranoias.”22 Yet this is only the first transvaluation of transparency; in our exhibitionistic culture, they claim, it is followed by a second, as “the fear of being watched has transformed into the fear that no one is watching.”23 And with this change has come another: “Once considered invasive, electronic surveillance is now the accepted social contract in public space, a welcome assurance of security, and a performance vehicle.”24
This narrative of the vicissitudes of architectural transparency seems a little neat, and certainly in the wake of illegal wiretaps, “Patriot Acts,” and the like, our ease with surveillance is not so obvious. Nonetheless, the postulate of a “post-voyeuristic, post-paranoid vision” is provocative, especially given that our primary accounts of the gaze, whether Sartrean, Lacanian, or feminist, are indeed tinged with a paranoia that positions the subject of the gaze as its object-victim as well.25 Moreover, DS+R have put this notion to suggestive use not only in media interventions like Overexposed and Facsimile but in actual designs such as the Brasserie restaurant (2000) in the Seagram Building in Manhattan, where surveillance cameras relay images of arriving patrons to a bank of video monitors above the bar, even as these same patrons make a grand entrance down a prominent gangplank into the dining area.26 However, to call this exhibitionistic relation to vision “post-voyeuristic” makes little sense in psychoanalytic terms, for in the Freudian account the exhibitionist is the voyeur in disguise, who acts out precisely for his or her own imagined viewing—and this might well be the case at the Brasserie.
DS+R have worked to alter our relation to the gaze in other ways, too—first with Duchampian gestures at the disturbance of vision (a topos of the work from The Rotary Notary to the ICA), and then with the calculated deployment of outright obscurity, as in the Blur Building (2002), a pavilion designed for the Swiss EXPO on Yverdon-les-Bains. This structure jutted out like a jetty onto Lake Neuchâtel, where, through a high-tech system of pumps, nozzles, and computer programs, it produced an immersive cloud into which visitors were invited to wander. On the one hand, its lightweight framework represented an extreme of structural transparency; on the other hand, the Blur Building was “devoted to obscurity” in a way that sought to challenge the usual spectacles of such expositions with literally “nothing to see.”27 And yet the very opacity of a project like Blur, enigmatic as it is, can be converted into a spectacle in its own right.28 The postmodernist strategy of “blurred genres” assumed that categories like “art,” “architecture,” and “media” are given as separate; today, however, that separation seems a matter of modernist doctrine more than ontological fact, and, as with the transvaluations of architectural transparency, DS+R have adapted accordingly. In effect, they have moved from a practice of “fusion” to one that understands “blur” to be always already at work in a site—a practice that often elaborates mixed conditions into appropriate structures.29 This thinking is evident in two recent commissions in New York, the first involving Lincoln Center, the second involving the old elevated railway on the West Side known as the High Line.
Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002. Photo © Beat Widmer.
Initially hired to refashion the public spaces at Lincoln Center (including the information kiosks), DS+R were soon given an expanded portfolio: an addition within the School of American Ballet, an extension of the Juilliard School, a renovation of Alice Tully Hall, and a new restaurant in front of the Vivian Beaumont Theater on the North Plaza. At the American Ballet they added dance studios in the form of glass boxes suspended within the given space, and at Juilliard they provided new rehearsal and class rooms for jazz, orchestra, and dance, as well as a black box theater. Alice Tully is transformed in both appearance and acoustics, with its walls now wrapped in a super-fine wood that, with an internal lighting system, also brightens and dims, as if naturally. Moreover, as the horizontal thrust of Juilliard is continued toward Broadway, Alice Tully has a proper front and urbanistic presence for the first time. Here the design draws on the ICA: faced in glass, the hall cantilevers out; it includes a suspended dance studio exposed to the street (reminiscent of the ICA mediatheque); and it leads to a stepped terrace (as with the ICA grandstand) where people can gather and performances occur. In short, DS+R develop their own language here, yet they do so in the service of the program.
Alice Tully Hall renovation, New York, 2006–09. Photo © Donna Pallotta.
Finally, the restaurant (which looks onto the pool in front of Vivian Beaumont) helps to bridge Juilliard and Alice Tully with the other halls of the Center, and its wavy wedge of a roof animates the rectilinear geometries of these adjacent buildings.30 This slope also provides a field of grass for visitors, like a bit of Central Park transplanted to the Center; clearly, this reconnecting of Lincoln Center to the city is the thrust of the project overall. Built during the 1960s, the Center was conceived as a modern acropolis of high culture; literally elevated on a giant plinth, it appeared to disdain its run-down neighborhood. DS+R wanted to close this distance as much as they could (over the years the area has gentrified in any case): as they sought to “intertwine civic and museum space” at the ICA, so here they wanted to interconnect urban and cultural activity—and in the process to develop a design that was also an alternative to the imagistic architecture of many institutions of late.31
If the Lincoln Center brief was to refashion a grand cultural space, the High Line project was to refunction a derelict industrial structure. An elevated freight-train track of steel and concrete built during the Depression, the High Line runs for nearly a mile and a half from Gansevoort Street (where the Whitney Museum plans to build) to the old depot on the West Side at Thirty-Fourth Street. Not used since 1980, it was condemned when Rudolph Giuliani was mayor, but a group called Friends of the High Line formed to save it, and the movement was galvanized after photographs taken by Joel Sternfeld revealed how extraordinary this ruin was—how many little ecosystems of urban nature had flourished there, how many views it might open up, how many activities it might entertain. The Bloomberg administration was responsive, and eventually DS+R were commissioned, in collaboration with Field Operations led by James Corner, a landscape design studio, to develop it as a new kind of urban park (the area is just under seven acres overall), with regular points of access to the streets eighteen-to-thirty feet below.
The High Line, New York, 2005–09, in collaboration with James Corner Field Operations. Photo © Iwan Baan.
A first principle of the designers was to keep the promenade slow, in counterpoint to the speedy esplanade along the Hudson given over to bikers and skaters. A second principle was to maintain its unruly nature, to protect it from too much design. To this end they conceived the notion of “agritecture,” a hybrid of agriculture and architecture, that has helped them to shape the High Line as a walkway that weaves green, planted areas with grey, surfaced areas. Via various paths, with ramps down to “pits” and up to “mounds” and “flyovers,” one passes through a range of micro-environments from wetland to mossland to meadows, with abundant sites along the way for sitting, talking, and observing. Such a topological operation is one effective way for designers to avoid the temptation of mere image-making.32 Like the ICA, then, the High Line is a platform for looking as well as walking; its design thus suggests an intelligence attentive to sight and site alike. It also suggests an intervention in the expanded field of architecture whereby the designers extrapolate from the mixed conditions on the ground (or, in this case, slightly above it). This is in keeping with a strong tendency in recent art toward a model of fieldwork, of projects produced out of site research, and this points in turn to yet another moment in the art-architecture complex, one that is rich with democratic potential.
Today, however, DS+R are at a crossroads, one telling of the times. On the one hand, their blurring of genres, their fusion of architecture, art, and media, is part of a postmodernism that has little purchase left on capitalist modernity—indeed, that might front for that modernity as much as anything else. On the other hand, DS+R have also learned to discover a different kind of mixed condition at work in the sites and the programs given them to develop—a condition of tensions, even of conflicts, that their designs have begun to open up, to mediate in ways that do not simply smoothen.
