__ Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio want architecture to change everything. __
Even in the current upsurge of architectural and design experimentation, it takes a considerable leap of independent thinking to dream up a building made of 12,500 high-pressure water nozzles and fog. So the Blur building, conceived for the Swiss National Expo 2002 (see "Freed Form," Wired 7.09, page 168), is the perfect calling card for Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, partners in spectacularly unexpected creations since 1979. They've designed a partially submerged sushi restaurant (also for the expo), engineered a stairway of LED panels, proposed transforming a hockey rink into a giant video screen, and created a set of ironic drinking glasses inspired by cigarettes, alcohol, and pharmaceuticals. Their New York loft is less a drafting studio than a skunk works: a laboratory where they play with ideas about space and culture - and the materials that best capture these ideas, however briefly.
The architects first broke ground on a project in 1989, when a Japanese entrepreneur and art collector commissioned them to build a beach house on Long Island. They produced a design for a retreat whose immense picture window faced the water - in tandem with a large video monitor offering live and recorded versions of the same view. The Slow House was never completed (as the foundations were poured in 1991, the art market took a dive and the client's finances went with it), but it made Diller + Scofidio's reputation for painstakingly serious ideas that come kinetically to life in a given space. Diller + Scofidio's adventurous use of materials - concrete, glass, Mylar, video, liquid crystal, electro-luminescent panels, hologram-like elements, ice, water vapor, grass (the suburban kind), sound, even irony and humor - makes their schemes feel improbable, unpredictable, almost whimsical, but also immensely powerful. In a way, Diller + Scofidio are masters of the fun house, inventing buildings that mirror - and distort - the world around them. Their approach to structures has little in common with the huge, slow-moving brick-and-mortar projects of mainstream architecture but has much to say about morphing, real-time design. Step inside.
Restaurant redesign: The Brasserie
Location: Manhattan
Client: Restaurant Associates
Construction: Steel, molded plywood, poured resin
Cost: Not disclosed
Structural engineer: Alan Burden
AV collaborators: Ben Rubin and Scharff Weisberg
Project leader: Charles Renfro with Deane Simpson
Status: Completed in January
Diller + Scofidio's renovation of the famous Philip Johnson-designed restaurant in the lower level of the Seagram Building involves an elaborate package of high tech elements. In one part of the restaurant, a 40-inch plasma panel displays live footage from an exterior camera, while 15 LCD monitors above the bar show motion-blurred freeze-frames of the last 15 people to pass through the revolving doors. The plan is part homage to the Brasserie's glamorous past, part comment on the omnipresence of surveillance-system cameras.
Permanent installation: Travelogues
Location: JFK International Airport, Queens, New York
Client: JFK International Air Terminal LLC
Construction: Steel structure, backlit lenticular panels
Cost: $300,000
Funding: corporate sponsorship
Technical collaborator: Tom Brigham
Project leader: Deane Simpson with Matthew Johnson
Status: First phase will be completed in March
When Diller + Scofidio won the commission to design an installation in two sterile corridors at JFK's new international terminal, there was a stipulation: The artwork had to be maintenance-free - no moving parts, no electricity. They decided to use lenticulars, the images that often turn up in Cracker Jack boxes. A lenticular screen is a lens in sheet form that can produce an image with depth and motion.
As the eye moves across the surface, the lens focuses it on a series of interlaced images beneath, revealing an animated sequence. The Travelogues images are produced from 35-mm film, large-format transparencies, or medical X rays - all digitized.
Because lenticular technology relies on a moving viewer to animate the images, it works well in the long, narrow corridors. The architects transformed the passageways - which bleary-eyed passengers traverse on their way to customs - into a sort of movie theater, lined with 38 4- by 4-foot panels. Each panel holds a 3-second animated series; viewed in their entirety, the screens tell the tales of four travelers.
Permanent installation: Cold War
Location: National Car Rental Center, Sunrise, Florida
Client: Broward Cultural Affairs Council, Fort Lauderdale
Construction: Steel structure, video system with prerecorded programs, live broadcast
Cost: $2 million
Funding: Public arts sponsorship
AV engineer: Casantini Associates
Project leader: Paul Lewis
Status: Designed in 1995. The money earmarked for the installation was commandeered when basic construction costs for the arena exceeded the budget.
In 1995 Diller + Scofidio were chosen to build an art installation at the National Car Rental Center, home of the Florida Panthers. Aware that NHL fans aren't necessarily art patrons, the architects designed something even sports lovers wouldn't ignore - they proposed transforming the 85- by 200-foot ice field into a video-projection screen (it would have been the largest ever built), fed by a grid of 24 overhead projectors. Cold War (intended for pregame and midperiod entertainment) includes prerecorded clips of the ice melting, game highlights and instant replays, and - making the architects' larger point - a series of animated verbal and visual puns that critique the "culture of conquest."
Temporary building: Blur
Location: Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Client: Swiss National Expo 2002
Construction: Steel tensegrity structure, fog-making system
Cost: $7.5 million
Funding: Federal and corporate sponsorship
Structural engineer: Passera & Pedretti
Mechanical engineer: Toni Reisen
AV collaborators: Ben Rubin and Scharff Weisberg
Swiss partner: Stephan Gauer, G.I.M.
Architectural partners: West-8 (Rotterdam), Morphing Systems (Zurich), Vehovar/Jauslin (Zurich)
Project leader: Eric Bunge with Karin Ocker and Charles Renfro
Status: Construction begins this year; will be completed in April 2002
In 1998, Diller + Scofidio joined a team of architects competing for a role in the 6-month-long Swiss National Expo 2002. The team won, and the duo set about designing a temporary structure for the lake site. They wanted to use an indigenous material, and what could be more indigenous to a lakeside resort than water?
"Originally, we were thinking of some kind of tilted plane with water running down it, as though the lake were tipping," says Scofidio. "But a wall with running water reminded us too much of something you'd find in the men's room."
After thinking through various structures - some buoyant, some partially submerged - Diller + Scofidio hit on fog, which was not only a local phenomenon but a dynamic one. To test the possibility, the architects rented a barge on Lake Neuchâtel and held a fog-off to test the nozzles of three companies. According to Scofidio, they chose the one that produced "the densest, richest fog." By last fall, they'd finished the structural engineering. The cloud building is an open-air system of glass-and-steel walkways enveloped in a thick haze created by 12,500 high-pressure jets. A built-in weather station controls the fog system: Measuring wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity, it then sends the appropriate fog-demand signals to the 13 output zones.
As you enter the 300- by 200-foot cloud, the passage divides: One half leads to a restaurant partially submerged in the lake, while the other rises through pockets sculpted by forced air and spaces constructed by artificial light. In a central media "pod," networked video projectors create a 360-degree image fed by live buoy-cams on the lake and live streaming video from the Web. The intention, say Diller + Scofidio, is to reinterpret the immersive environment of 18th-century panoramas with 21st-century technology.
The glass-walled, open-roofed sushi restaurant sits just below the haze, half-submerged; fish swim between the double-paned walls, creating an inside-out aquarium.
Permanent installation: Facsimile
Location: Moscone Center West, San Francisco
Client: San Francisco Arts Commission and Moscone Center
Construction: Steel armature, motion system, video system
Cost: $2 million
Funding: Public arts sponsorship
Structural/motion systems engineer: Pol-X West
AV collaborator: Ben Rubin
Project leader: Lyn Rice
Status: Will be completed in early 2003
A 16- by 30-foot high-resolution LED video screen (just 8 inches thick) will slide along the exterior wall of this square-block conference building, suspended by a vertical steel armature that rides a track on the roof. A live video camera fixed behind the screen and pointed into the building will capture footage of the scene inside. That voyeuristic show will be combined with prerecorded video imagery of fictional vignettes and imagined spaces. The contraption is part scanner, part architecture, part War of the Worlds.
Permanent installation: Ventilator
Location: Chicago
Client: Museum of Contemporary Art
Construction: LED text-display boards
Cost: $1 million
System engineer: Sunrise Systems
Project leader: Paul Lewis
Status: Never built
Like the rink project, Diller + Scofidio's 1994 proposal to line the 7-inch risers of this neoclassical building's steps with 32 networked LED boards takes architectural signage to new levels. In this plan, characters, words, and messages would scroll across the giant electronic billboard, in effect crawling up and down the steps of the first digital stairway.
The MCA building had just been completed at the time, and the tab for ripping out the expen- sive granite risers and replacing them with LEDs added up to more than the museum was willing to shell out.
Housing: Slither
Location: Gifu, Japan
Client: Government of Gifu Prefecture
Construction: Poured concrete, perforated aluminum skin, sliding interior walls of extruded polycarbonate panels
Cost: $25 million
Funding: Federal sponsorship
Structural engineer: Alan Burden, SDG, Japan
Local partner: Misaki & Associates
Master planner: Arata Isozaki & Associates
Project leader: Paul Lewis with Patrice Gardera
Status: Will be completed in March
Unlike most of the duo's works, the apartment building in Gifu's Kitagata public-housing project involves no video or media elements. The reptilian structure is made of 15 interlocking towers, each set at a slight angle to its neighbor to create a shallow curve along the building's length. Each tower also slips 8 inches down from the next, so that no two units have the same elevation. This design gives every unit its own minifacade (in spirit, at least) and a semiprivate balcony - features that quietly contradict the idea of standardized housing. Moreover, the apartments are adjustable: Walls slide and shift, depending on the tenants' needs. Academics may someday discuss Slither as a classic of real-time architecture. Until then, it's classic Diller + Scofidio.
