Q: How would you describe our particular time, architecturally speaking?
Elizabeth Diller: It’s more a time of collaboration, and a deeper contemplation about what buildings can mean and how they can have more social value. I think it’s a time where you have to make a case for architecture to still be relevant.
— Interview Magazine
Interview Magazine sits down to talk with OMA partner Ellen van Loon and Elizabeth Diller of DSRNY. Both are currently working on projects for long-awaited cultural spaces—van Loon on the Factory Manchester, a £110 million theater and arts venue, and Diller with the Shed, a major new arts center opening at Hudson Yards in New York. Through the discussion, the two address an array of topics: New York and Berlin in the 1970s, club design, anti-glass sentiments, the privatization of public space, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the role of a client, and fighting to keep your voice as an architect.
It would be interesting if Diller would teach Princeton students something she does know: the methods she and her partners employed to become starchitects, and what one has to do to remain in the media spotlight for years on end.
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Elizabeth Diller:
“I just basically like to destabilize students and screw with their minds and make them doubt everything that they thought they knew about architecture.”
Plus, mind games are fun. Especially when people look up to you.
https://www.architecturaldiges....
I wish someone would destabilize the media's obsession with a handful of boring starchitects. OMA and DS+R stopped being "radical" a long time ago. Both would do well to hush up and instead focus on improving their work.
it’s like Metallica still pretending to be edgy.
Be edgy all you want. Messing with people's mind, especially when they want to learn this beautiful art is a shame. How these people keep their jobs when openly admitting this kind of behavior is beyond me.
Indeed. I don't know why prestige schools think being a starchitect means a person will automatically be a good teacher.
If she has a good teaching act to follow after the statement, I'd say why not? That statement is not anything new.
Not a fan of her either but let's not decontextualize her words by picking it partially.
“I like to teach not what I know, but what I don’t know . . . . What I want to impart to the students is that possibility that you’re not there to receive someone else’s hand-me-down programs: You can make them up yourself.” She pauses for effect, then laughs: “I just basically like to destabilize students and screw with their minds and make them doubt everything that they thought they knew about architecture.” And will more multidisciplinary thinkers come out of it? “I hope,” she affirms.
Makes sense to me. She is being provocative in a conformist world.
That's why she always wears black, right? To communicate one shouldn't conform. Right.
It makes no sense in any context. When student's enter, they are not conformists, they are noobs (as my kids say). And you don't teach what you don't know or else you'd hire any fool off the street. You need to learn to walk before you can run and students are just learning to walk.Lastly, if there's so much freedom from convention, why does all academic work look similar (ly unbuildable)? You ever see a bungalow come out of her studio? How about an intelligent space plan?
She wasn't kidding when she said she likes to fuck with students heads because that's the same line the early modernists sold, that everyone is stuck in some culture that ...built yet people still flock to the cities built when architects where all conformists. Oh right, people don't know what they want. Thanks Bauhaus and all those other authoritarian ideas.
Far from breaking the conventional mold, this teaching method spreads cynicism and apathy, exactly what we don't need in today's world. Everyone knows it's an act, just like Trumps, except for the lemmings and boot lickers of this world. This kind of teaching is malpractice, but she's a star, and everybody likes the glow of fame.
At least FLW was honest about breeding an army of clones.
The default assumption among these starchitects seems to be that if highly-educated, intelligent lay people admire and travel to classic cities and buildings, like the old city centers and great cathedrals of Europe, then something is deeply wrong with such people. They evince no appreciation of the classical buildings and are not interested in the least how those architects solved the same problems architects today face. There is no way they would ever teach the lessons of these buildings to their students.
It would be interesting if Diller would teach Princeton students something she does know: the methods she and her partners employed to become starchitects, and what one has to do to remain in the media spotlight for years on end.
https://famousarchitect.blogspot.com/2014/12/100-diller-scofidio-renfro-and-star.html
and of course https://famousarchitect.blogspot.com/2014/12/101-diller-scofidio-renfro-and-star.html
Wow! thank you posting these.
thisisnotmyname makes a very interesting point. Why don't they not 'joke around' and tell it straight. Instead they teach the lessons of starchitecture by fucking with people, and everybody gets it. The one who can sell the longest wins. Schumaker is the king of this hustle. That's what I understood at my first year at Pratt even though it took a while to fully appreciate how deep seated this cynicism was.
I don't say there isn't a place for her brand of "finding your self" or "thinking outside the box", but maybe it should be dolled out similar to the number of commissions like this students might expect to find. The small percentage that do "edgy" is simply not what most people are asked to do. For the 99% of commissions where you need to spend the client's money as if it where yours while pleasing the public, who's teaching that?
I love the Highline, possible because it walks you through a maze of NYC Architectural history :) in a green oasis of peace, while still 'smelling' the city, wow. But that was an idea in a book I read to my kids. Most of their output, if not a Museum, is the same old minimalism who's candy coating aesthetics wear pretty quickly. Nice sculpture, killer streetscape.
". . . a deeper contemplation about what buildings can mean and how they can have more social value. I think it’s a time where you have to make a case for architecture to still be relevant."
Where, exactly, are the deeper meanings, the relevance, the social values in the work of DS+R? Or are these just trendy buzzwords intoned to show they are OK guys, put aside when they get down to work?
Whatever DS+R's professed intentions are, their built product can be summed up as no more than fashionable designs for wealthy and powerful clients.
Which accurately describes the vast majority of architecture.
Yes, but please don't pose as a "radical" as you produce it.
Telling the truth is posing?
Reading articles over the years, it seems that Scofidio built the firm, Renfro does all the design work and Diller is the public interface, client control. They were always a shallow pretentious art firm, which makes their talking about social values kind of insufferable.
Which is sad, because if they just owned up to being a shallow pretentious art firm, they'd be the best shallow pretentious art firm around.
Social values are the current architectural fad, so I think DS+R sees the need to talk that talk in order to keep the media interested.
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