Architect Behind the Broad, MoMA Dies at 89

Architect Ricardo Scofidio, who helped reshape the landscape of American museums, died Thursday. His death was announced by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a company he founded with his wife Elizabeth Diller.

Working with Diller and corporate partner Charles Renfro, Scofidio expands from the Museum of Modern Art to the buildings in Broad in 2019, Los Angeles’ private museums Eli and Edythe Broad.

The company’s various projects include many that are not museums: Lincoln Center, redesigned new outdoor spaces at a cost of $1 billion; High Line, Rail Passaway-turned parks that run through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood; Fuzzy, a gazebo located in a Swiss lake; Brasserie is a restaurant in the Seagram building. But the museum at Diller Scofidio + Renfro has made its biggest impact. (Although Scofidio is not the main designer for everyone, he continues to play an active role in almost everyone.)

The first American Museum, the American Academy of Contemporary Art, designed by Scofidio, provides insights into the products the group will offer in future projects. The museum opened in 2006 and was the first museum to be built in Boston for a century. It towers on the nearby harbor with a clumsy cantilever form that sticks out toward the water.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s ICA Boston is not without quirks. Much of the art is confined to the spacious fourth floor of the building, which makes many parts of the considerable museum inaccessible to the public, and the hall is marked as a “clumsy leftover space” when the building’s debut. But, despite this, ICA Boston won an aesthetic aesthetic in the next few years: smooth but not too smooth, without heavy minimalist forms that weren’t nervous.

Perhaps for this reason, Scofidio won MacArthur’s “genius” Grant in 1999 with Diller, becoming the first architect of all time, and sometimes even regarded as an artist by himself. His company’s work is the subject of a survey conducted at the Whitney Museum in 2003. Last year, at the Maxi Museum in Rome, Diller Scofidio + renfro held a program called “The Restless Building”. In the description of the exhibition, the company asked: “Why should the building stay still given the rapid pace of change around us?”

Ricardo Scofidio was born in 1935. His father was a black jazz musician who insisted that he was Italian. As Scofidio once recalled, his mother was “light skin” but was actually “half black.” “When I was a kid, I was told that I couldn’t see it,” Scofidio told New York Times Magazine.

But his career as a leading architect will ensure he won’t be that way. He studied architecture at Cooper League and Columbia University. He began teaching in the Cooper Union in 1965, and eventually he met with his student Diller. They will co-found their company in 1979 and get married in 1989.

Before the start of the new millennium, Scofidio and Diller were considered important figures in the field of architecture. They are known for drawing overlaps in areas such as architecture and fashion, theory, and more. However, the ICA cemented their status as two preferred architects of choice seeking a redesign or expansion of the museum.

The ICA follows a series of museum projects: the renovation of the Berkeley Gallery and the Pacific Film Archive, a new building at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and is an expansion of the Nova Scotia Gallery in Canada.

Not everyone likes all their work. Designed in Los Angeles, the expansive museum, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, has proven to be particularly split, with many joking about its honeycomb-like appearance made of steel on its honeycomb-like exterior. Sarah Williams Goldhagen at American Art After opening in 2015. “But overall it’s disappointing, and the way it fails is not only worrying. Its inconsistency, poor urbanism and non-solar performance suggest that the transition from critics to manufacturers may put DS+R in a strait.”

The company’s $450 million MOMA expansion opened in 2019 has received widespread praise. It seamlessly adds 47,000 square feet of gallery space, and the museum’s programming is suddenly able to be more ambitious than it used to be.

In the same museum 30 years ago, Diller and Scofidio participated in Moma’s famous “Projects” series, which once served as a launch pad for artists, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers. They made their debut Para Locationcameras and hanging chairs were placed around the MoMA. The camera’s feed can be viewed in the sculpture garden, where visitors may get an unusual angle of the space they are familiar with. It acts as a mission statement for what Scofidio later seeks to do: changing the way people see museums.