New York-based, Polish-born architect Elizabeth Diller.
Image: Diller Scofidio and Renfro
New York-based architect Elizabeth Diller is the only architect named on Time magazine’s 2018 list of the world’s 100 most influential people. The magazine praised her vision and success in a male-dominated field.
Diller, co-founder of Diller Scofidio and Renfro, is just the second woman architect to make the Time 100 list as an individual after the late Zaha Hadid, who was named among the 100 in 2010.
Diller was previously recognized on the prestigious list in 2009 alongside her partner Ricardo Scofidio.
“Elizabeth Diller is a visionary,” writes entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad in the Time 100 citation. “She imagines things the rest of us have to see to believe. She can turn a metaphor into brick and mortar.”
Diller Scofidio and Renfro was the architect for Eli Broad’s eponymous museum, The Broad Museum, which opened in Los Angeles in 2015. In his citation, Broad praises the “veil and vault” design for the contemporary art museum, which comprises of a white, porous overlay bringing diffused light into the gallery and a large internal vault – visible from outside – that shows off the potential of the art.
Among the practice’s other high profile projects are the New York High Line, the Blur Building in Switzerland, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and redevelopments or expansions of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, Juilliard School, the School of American Ballet (at the Lincoln Centre) and the New York State Theatre lobby.
The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, designed by Diller Scofidio and Renfro
In Australia, Diller Scofidio and Renfro is collaborating with local practice Billard Leece Partnership to design the main building of the University of Sydney’s proposed health precinct, a building described as a “total health environment.”
“The building will offer oxygen and sunlight, biophilic spaces, active animated spaces, spaces of community gathering as well as quiet reflective spaces of repose,” write the architects.
Diller’s practice is also on the shortlist for the Adelaide Contemporary design competition, in collaboration with Australian practice Woods Bagot. Among the competing international practices on the “extraordinarily rich” shortlist is UK-based Adjaye Associates, whose Ghanaian-born British founder David Adjaye was the only architect to make the Time 100 list in 2017.
EXIT (installation view at UNSW Galleries), 2008–15. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris © Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan and Ben Rubin, in collaboration with Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart Smith.
Image: Silversalt
In addition to permanent built projects, Diller Scofidio and Renfro is known for its installation and performance projects and for its blending of architecture and conceptual art. The practice’s globally acclaimed exhibition, Exit, opened in Sydney in early 2017. Based on an idea by French philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio, the 360-degeree video installation quantified and interpreted the impact of urbanization, economic displacement, political disruption, climate change, natural disasters and deforestation on global human migratory trends.
Born in Poland, Elizabeth Diller studied architecture in the 1970s at New York’s Cooper Union School of Architecture, where she met Ricardo Scofidio – then her professor. She now teaches at Princeton University School of Architecture and is a visiting professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
“Maybe it’s because she’s a woman in a male-dominated field, or because she was originally a conceptual artist – along with her partner in art, architecture and life, Ric Scofidio – but whatever the reason, Liz sees opportunities where others see challenges,” writes Eli Broad. “She can do the impossible.”
