That’s a lot for a firm that until not long ago was essentially a husband-and-wife operation. Diller, now 65, and Scofidio, 84, began working together in 1976, founded their firm in 1981, and had their first major success in 2002: the Blur Building, a cloud of water vapor over a lake in Switzerland. (On opening day, Diller and Scofidio, known widely as Liz and Ric, worked with a laptop to balance the output of the 34,000 high-pressure nozzles.) The Blur was dismantled after six months, and its creators, viewing their work as a kind of installation art, said they were fine with that. But then, with the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, which opened in 2006, the firm (renamed when Renfro, now 55, became a partner in 2004) showed what it could do with glass and steel: create spaces that both challenge and enhance perceptions. Projects started rolling in. Winning the competition to design the High Line in 2004 gave the firm its first big break in its hometown, where its only built project had been a restaurant in the Seagram Building. “It’s not like we set out to capture the city,” says Scofidio. “We’ve had great opportunities, and we just hope not to mess them up.” The firm’s Manhattan Project was under way.
Now DS+R has another world capital in its sights. Last year, it won a competition to build a new concert hall in the center of London, a project that may take a decade to complete and will be “hugely transformative to that city’s public realm,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, 49, who became the firm’s fourth partner in 2015. And it recently released plans for an extraordinary new institution in East London: a storage facility for the Victoria & Albert Museum that will be open to the public, with some 250,000 items on display. The so-called V&A East will be “like stepping into an immersive cabinet of curiosities,” Diller says. But London isn’t the firm’s only new outpost. DS+R is working on a music center in La Paz, Bolivia, which the firm is designing pro bono in an effort to bring both performance and education to the masses. It is a passion project for Renfro, who says, “We’ve gotten ourselves into a position where we can have an influence on how institutions are made. I would like to use that power to address important issues like inequality and sustainability and access to culture—issues that architects aren’t usually able to impact.”
