Archinect - Features

Soapbox: Elizabeth Diller

2018-04-25T09:00:00-04:00

Soapbox is a weekly series delivering a curated set of lectures, talks and symposia concerning contemporary themes but explored through the archives of lectures past and present. With the plethora of lectures, talks, symposia and panels occurring world wide on a daily basis, how can we begin to keep up and if not, find them once they are gone? Soapbox looks to assemble a selection of recent, archived and outlier lectures surrounding a given theme. Soapbox looks to curate this never-ending library of ideas into an engaging and diverse list of thoughts and provocations. Soapbox is just that, a collection aimed at discovering the occasional needle in a haystack.

The Reluctant Architect: 15 Minutes with Liz Diller

2016-04-20T08:49:00-04:00

Elizabeth Diller, co-founding partner of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, almost didn’t become an architect. In her student years at Cooper Union, Diller expressed a greater interest in pursuing film than in taking up traditional architectural practice, partly because the profession seemed like too much of a commercial pursuit. Some thirty-six years later, from the Broad Museum to Lincoln Center to The High Line, DS+R’s built work consistently pushes the visitor to experience space in an unanticipated way without providing a ready-made interpretation.

Op-Ed: an Open house?

2011-06-21T19:18:00-04:00

Written by Nick Axel

The recent project of Open house by Droog with Diller Scofidio + Renfro is refreshing in the sense that it engages a pervasive condition and experience of the built environment that often goes unthought. The idea of envisioning a ‘future suburbia’ has strongly provoked the attention of architects and the non-architect, better known as the resident. The content of the project has to this date contained a one day event that included a seminar taking place in New York City, polemical installations within the archetypal suburb of Levittown, New York, visionary representations of a potential life in suburbia (1), and a host of online journalism. Open house uses traditional architectural conventions as provocative mediums in order to communicate, what I would like to show, a much deeper and significant concept that is at the root of the project. By employing the potentiality of a service economy, Open house fundamentally works on an ideological level that seeks to...