Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Founded in 1981, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) is a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print. With a focus on cultural and civic projects, DS+R’s work addresses the changing role of institutions and the future of cities. The studio is based in New York and comprises over 100 architects, designers, artists, and researchers, led by four partners—Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro, and Benjamin Gilmartin. DS+R’s cross-genre work has been distinguished with TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first grant awarded in the field of architecture from the MacArthur Foundation, which identified Diller and Scofidio as “architects who have created an alternative form of architectural practice that unites design, performance, and electronic media with cultural and architectural theory and criticism. Their work explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.” DS+R completed one of the largest architecture and planning initiatives in New York City’s recent history, the transformation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ half-century-old campus. The studio also completed the 35-acre Zaryadye Park, adjacent to St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square in Moscow. They are currently working on large urban public spaces in Madrid and Milan. 

DS+R has worked with global cultural institutions to expand access to culture and public space. The Broad is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles with the youngest and most diverse demography of any museum in the United States, while the V&A East Storehouse, under construction in London, will bring much of the collection out of storage and into public view for the first time. The studio also completed two projects that have reshaped New York’s cultural landscape: the surgical renovation and expansion of MoMA, which brings the museum’s vast collection closer to the public, and The Shed, a start-up multi-arts institution originally conceived by DS+R.

DS+R’s approach to rethinking cultural institutions and civic spaces grew out of self-generated and alternative projects that blur the boundaries between architecture, art, and performance. the studio’s most recent self-generated work as co-creator, co-producer, and co-director is The Mile Long Opera, a choral performance featuring 1,000 singers atop the High Line that reflected on the alienating speed of change in the contemporary city. DS+R has also researched, curated, and designed a number of interactive installations covering a wide range of subjects, including the Costume Institute’s Charles James: Beyond Fashion and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which recorded two of the highest attendances for any exhibition in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The studio has collaborated with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain on multiple installations including Exit, an immersive data-driven installation investigating global human migration patterns; Musings on a Glass Box, which used the Fondation Cartier building itself to raise questions about transparency, perception, and one’s relation to space; and Master/Slave, which presented analytical x-ray scans of Rolf Fehlbaum’s collection of toy robots on a dynamic conveyor belt. Diller most recently designed an interpretative installation for The Hare with Amber Eyes at the Jewish Museum in New York and an environmental design for Deep Blue Sea, a collaboration with choreographer Bill T. Jones that debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in 2021.