Ricardo Scofidio, 1935–2025

Today, DS+R is made up of more than 100 architects, designers, artists, and researchers — large for an architecture firm, but also an unlikely size considering the studio's beginnings. Scofidio was teaching at Cooper Union (one of his alma maters, alongside Columbia University) from the mid-1960s and there met Diller, an art student who got more interested in design and graduated with an architecture degree in 1979. They started working and living together the same year, not long after Scofidio, who actually wanted to be a musician, “had become disillusioned with architecture,” as the couple told Deane Simpson in 2006 for The Ciliary Function. Similarly, Diller “never [had] the intention of becoming an architect,” so appropriately the couple's early works consisted of so-called guerrilla installations, as well as site-specific installations, videos, theater sets, and other projects outside of architecture. (Appropriately, their two-volume monograph released just last month is called Architecture, Not Architecture, reflecting these divergent yet overlapping aspects of the couple's four-decade-long career.) 

Although Diller and Scofidio designed a house that was built north of New York City in 1981, the year they formally established Diller + Scofidio as a practice, it would take them ten years to gain another architecture commission (the Slow House, which broke ground in 1991 but was never completed) and nearly twenty years for the completion of their next building, Slither, in Tokyo in 2000. That year they also opened the Brasserie restaurant in the basement of the Seagram Building in New York:

Appreciation of the couple's work is evident in them jointly receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1999. Everything changed dramatically for the couple's studio in the new millennium, when a number of important projects and personnel changes signaled a transition toward more-traditional works of architecture and the accompanying growth of the firm, both of which continued to the present:

• The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston selected Diller + Scofidio in 2001 to design a new waterfront building that would open in 2006.
• The mist-shrouded Blur Building was built for Expo.02 in Switzerland in 2002.
• The studio was selected for the transformation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2003.
• The studio, working with Field Operations and Piet Oudolf, won a competition for turning an abandoned elevated railroad viaduct in Manhattan into the High Line park in 2004.
• Charles Renfro, working at the studio since 1997, was made partner in 2004, leading to the firm becoming Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
• Benjamin Gilmartin joined DS+R in 2004; he became a partner in 2015.

Growth was never important for Scofidio, who told Fred Bernstein in 2019, “I’m always a little shocked when people try to make me realize we’re a big firm doing big projects, because that was not the goal.” A similar sentiment comes across in a candid conversation Vladimir Belogolovsky had with Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio in 2016, recently posted to YouTube as a 10-minute clip with a slideshow of the firm's projects:

Scofidio's death was announced by DS+R via Instagram and on the firm's website: “It is with great sadness that we announce DS+R founder Ricardo Scofidio has passed away peacefully on March 6, 2025 at the age of 89. He was surrounded by his family, including his partner in life and work, Elizabeth Diller. Ric had a profound impact on our architectural practice, establishing the studio with a mission to make space on his own terms. The firm’s partners and principals, many of whom have collaborated with him for decades, will extend his architectural legacy in the work we will continue to perform every day. A memorial service to celebrate Ric’s life is being planned and will be announced in the coming weeks.”