Last week, Diller Scofidio + Renfro announced that Benjamin Gilmartin had become their fourth partner. I had a chance to ask Gilmartin about his past history as a writer, how that has influenced his working relationship with DS+R, and what the future holds for both him and the firm. 

JI: You've been with DS+R since 2004, and been a principal there since 2011. What is the biggest change now that you're partner?

BG: I think day-to-day not a lot. [laughs] I've been collaborating with Liz, Rick and Charles for years on most of the projects that go through the studio, and that continues to be the case. I think that in truth there's not really a plan for the studio but there's a sense that there's a potential future beyond the founding partners. That's not for sure, but there's definite optimism about the possibility of that. 

JI: You wrote for PRAXIS. How did writing shape your concepts of design, and what did you bring from that experience into the design process with your new partners?

BG: I started out in college doing degrees in English and Architecture at the same time. It was interesting both writing and designing. It has been a good number of years since I've been contributing to PRAXIS, but I did do it for about 10 years. I think that what we do here, the way that we collaborate, in fact the way we communicate our ideas, has a complementarity between things we draw and model and present in graphic form or physically and the way we speak about our work and present it in writing as well. And usually there's both sides to that. I think that it's true that Liz, Rick and Charles are all very strong writers in addition to being strong designers, there's a lot of intuition that happens in our collaborative process, where we're simply working through ideas together. Often through drawing and sketching and models and what not. And there are moments along the way where we reflect on what's strong about what's been produced and what kind of guides the ideas, and how do we communicate those things to other people and to ourselves so they become a shared endeavor, and how do we communicate to it clients and people we collaborate with outside. So I think the writing part is something that's really helped with that; your brain switches gears and you process the design through a kind of analysis through writing. That's how we are able to be discursive and collaborative.

JI: I wanted to ask you about the Museum of Image and Sound. I love this concept where you're having a dialogue with the coastline. Can you speak about that?

BG: Not many projects are a kind of lightning bolt where we do a competition and you get the idea in two weeks and you decide "that's it, it can't be any other idea" but that was a really rare one where we all agreed. Rio is a very diverse place. A lot of people on the beach who live there are wealthy, but people of every background, rich, poor, visitors, locals, go the beach. It's a place of pleasure, for hanging out in the sun, but it's a place also of political protests, and where festivals and events take place, and where the Rolling Stones and whoever else play. It's a versatile, democratic space. We view the promenade as very emblematic of that. The mission of the museum is to tell the story of Rio culturally to the people of the city who need to remember and be aware of what their own heritage is, and obviously for people who come there who want to know what the heritage of the place is. Symbolically, turning the pathway up, and folding it back onto itself, and then turning it to become the building, so there's a kind of promenade all the way through the street seamlessly to the top as a kind of public gesture, seems very symbolically appropriate and but literally appropriate too. It's a very public gesture that extends the public way into our building and makes the building. It came very quickly and the form followed very quickly. We loved the project for five or six years [laughs]; we're hoping they complete it soon.

The Museum of Image and Sound (image via dsrny.com)

JI: In terms of the tempo of your design collaboration, has your working process been refined to a point where you can expect to stumble upon the initial seed of the idea within a certain timeframe, or is it always evolving?

BG: I think we're skeptical of what we do and we tend to challenge it and question it for as long as we have to do it. I think thankfully [The Museum of Image and Sound] was only a three week competition process, it was super short. But, in most competitions or design concepts, we'll start with main ideas and then through a kind of Darwinistic process, selection through many points of view, hopefully get to the strongest solutionn. However, even when we fell like we're going in the right direction, we still tend to push it and challenge it and question it and poke it from every direction until the clock runs out. That's part of the process. [laughs] The process is "it takes as long we have to do it."

JI: Is there anything in particular you're excited to tackle in the next year?

BG: There's a couple of projects out there, some of which I can talk about, some of which you can imagine if you follow the news. There are some projects in the U.S. and elsewhere. There's work that we already have underway that I'm excited about. The big things are new projects at a different scale. I'm super excited for a new challenge. On a personal note, I used to teach for six or seven years. I've taken about three or four years off from that, and I'm probably not going to go back to it full-time, but it's something I'd like to try to get involved with again. It's something that has always given energy to the studio, to the partners, and certainly to me when I was doing it. So I want to return to that a little bit.