First Thinking, Then Building

By Richard Lacayo / Boston

Here's the best evidence I know of that the past 10 years have witnessed a revolution in architecture. Diller and Scofidio are getting work. For decades the husband-and-wife designer team of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio was known mostly--make that entirely--as architectural theorists, deadpan funny conceptual artists and intellectual bomb throwers. In all those roles, they made a name for themselves by questioning the most basic premises of architecture. It would be hard to imagine, for instance, a more thorough rethinking of what makes a building than a project they completed for the Swiss Expo 02. The Blur Building, as it was called, was a "structure" made entirely of water vapor, produced by a framework of 31,000 computer-controlled spray nozzles configured on a multilevel platform in the middle of Lake Neuchatel, near the town of Yverdon-les-Bains, and linked to the shore by a walkway. Visitors could approach and enter this hovering fog bank while asking themselves high-minded questions like, What really is an enclosure? Where is the line between inside and outside? And, while we're at it, where am I?

Although the Blur Building was both a crowd pleaser and an ingenious intellectual conundrum--just how many elements can you subtract from a building and still have it feel like a place?--working with fog did nothing to contradict Diller and Scofidio's image as thinkers in no hurry to operate with more solid materials. So it's a sign of significant clients' openness to new ideas that the pair have somehow joined the ranks of sought-after, real-world architects, the kind who work with poured concrete and get major commissions. In the past few years their firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro--they brought in Charles Renfro as full partner two years ago--has been chosen to redesign large parts of the glamorous marbledom that is Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City and to convert an abandoned elevated railway line in lower Manhattan into a very unusual park. They had already completed a housing project in Gifu, Japan. And on Dec. 7 their first major building in the U.S., the new home of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), will open on a prominent waterfront site as the first segment of the city's grand scheme to redevelop Boston Harbor.

The ICA is dedicated to the newest works of art, so if there is any institution likely to seek out unconventional architects, it's that one. All the same, who expected that Diller and Scofidio, well known as skeptics about the whole idea of museums, would end up designing one? When New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art gave them a big retrospective three years ago, they underlined their ambivalence about becoming insiders by having a little robot programmed to roll around for the duration of the show drilling holes in the gallery walls.

But by the time of the Whitney retrospective, Diller and Scofidio had already been at work for two years on the ICA project. So for all their ambivalence, they were plainly well on their way to making peace with the idea of museums--or at least the ones they could have a hand in shaping. Plus, they say, there had been a generational shift in the people who run the art world. "People were coming into institutions," explains Diller, "who were rethinking the contemporary museum." One of the people she's talking about would have to be Jill Medvedow, the cheerful locomotive who has been director of the ICA since 1998. Back then, says Medvedow, the place was "striving to be marginal"--organizing thoughtful shows that not enough people saw. Soon after she arrived, she convinced the trustees that the only way to survive was to grow, abandon the cramped former police station that the institute had occupied since 1975 and set out to build a sizable new home with, as it turned out out, architects who had built almost nothing. "It was a huge risk," she admits. "But it was the right risk. If we had everything at stake, so did Liz and Ric. We knew they would dedicate themselves to this job."

In the end, it would be a $50 million risk, but one that paid off beautifully. The new ICA is a fascinating combination of public and private spaces, as well as a building that comments ingeniously on its own chief purpose, which is to foster the art of looking. It can only have helped that Diller and Scofidio came to the job with experience as artists. When architects think of themselves that way, it's usually because they see themselves, like Frank Gehry, creating sculptural form. But Diller and Scofidio have been conceptual artists, more concerned with ideas than the objects they shape them into. Now they have made their biggest object yet, and the main idea embodies how we see. Or, as Scofidio puts it, "The building, for us, is a kind of viewing apparatus. It's a machine for seeing."

For that reason, the new ICA has glass everywhere, both clear and translucent, which is unusual for a museum, a place that has to protect artworks from direct light. The architects have got around that problem by clustering the galleries in enclosed space on the fourth floor while placing most of the public spaces on the lower, more light-filled, levels. Even the 325-seat theater space is bounded on two sides by double-height glass walls so that performances can take place against the backdrop of the harbor. (The walls can also be closed off with scrims when necessary or blacked out completely.) The elevators are transparent, so you experience the view vertically as you move from one floor to the next. And along the upper floor there is a lengthy, glass-enclosed corridor facing the water that visitors will enter when they leave the windowless gallery spaces.

But viewing decks and glass elevators are things you can find in a lot of buildings that don't come with elaborate theoretical justifications. The truly impressive aesthetic gamesmanship at the ICA takes place in the deceptively simple Mediatheque, a sloping room with grandstand-style seating, each tier equipped with computer stations for looking at digital artworks and downloading videos about artists. Suspended at an angle from beneath the long, cantilevered upper story, the room culminates in a window wall that looks down directly onto the surface of Boston Harbor, roughly 40 ft. below. The result is the kind of view you might get by looking down onto the surface of a pool through a diving mask: a horizonless sheet of water that fills the entire rectangle.

That glimmering water wall is more than a spectacular variation on wallpaper. It's an ingenious visual trick, an instantaneous conversion of nature to art by the mere act of framing the scene. Europe in the 18th century saw a vogue among painters and travelers for the Claude glass, an optical device that framed views in the manner of landscape painter Claude Lorrain and lent them something like his subdued tones. The Mediatheque functions in a similar way, but with even simpler means, aestheticizing a bit of nature simply by pointing us toward it just so. In a room where people will examine art on computer screens, reality becomes one more screen. As Scofidio likes to say, "It's the ultimate screensaver."

Since the ICA is one of the linchpins of the city's plan to redevelop the waterfront, it was important to Medvedow and her architects to make the building a place where people could gather even when they weren't there for the art. It sits on a gray wood esplanade that, if all goes as planned, will become part of 47 miles of new harborside walkways. Diller and Scofidio have used the same wood to create a wide outdoor staircase that doubles as a bleachers-style seating area. It's located just under the ICA's major exterior flourish, a fourth floor that cantilevers 80 ft. into space like a giant diving board. The hope is that the stairway will become a gathering spot like the Spanish Steps in Rome. It won't have the advantage of being surrounded by Rome, but unlike the sunbaked and overcrowded Spanish Steps, it will have a sheltering overhang and a harbor view.

The gray wood then flows into the museum, forming the floor and ceiling of the theater space before flowing back outside to coat the underside of the cantilever. It all has to do with obscuring the distinction between inside and outside--there's that blur again--and is another example of how Diller and Scofidio have managed to work their ideas about space into an actual space. Not only that, but into a museum that, though it functions as a platform for first-rate, intellectually ambitious shows, must also struggle for revenue in less pristine ways. So like any other museum these days, it will have rentable party spaces and a gift shop, this one with an entrance pointed strategically in the direction of new retail development that's planned for an area across the way. (Yoo-hoo! Shoppers! Over here!) But why shouldn't it? For better or worse, no museum can survive today if it doesn't make itself visible in the marketplace. Diller and Scofidio would know that, of course. They think a lot about visibility. For many reasons, they ought to be very pleased with what this building will do for theirs.