ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Liz Diller - Designer
Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice.

Why you should listen

Liz Diller's firm, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, might just be the first post-wall architects. From a mid-lake rotunda made of fog to a gallery that destroys itself with a robotic drill, her brainy takes on the essence of buildings are mind-bending and rebellious. DS+R partakes of criticism that goes past academic papers and into real structures -- buildings and art installations that seem to tease the squareness of their neighbors.

DS+R was the first architecture firm to receive a MacArthur "genius" grant -- and it also won an Obie for Jet Lag, a wildly creative piece of multimedia off-Broadway theater. A reputation for rampant repurposing of materials and tricksy tinkering with space -- on stage, on paper, on the waterfront -- have made DS+R a sought-after firm, winning accounts from the Juilliard School, Alice Tully Hall and the School of American Ballet, as part of the Lincoln Center overhaul; at Brown University; and on New York's revamp of Governer's Island. Their Institute for Comtemporary Art has opened up a new piece of Boston's waterfront, creating an elegant space that embraces the water.

Learn more about the Hirshhorn Museum >>

 

More profile about the speaker
Liz Diller | Speaker | TED.com
EG 2007

Liz Diller: The Blur Building and other tech-empowered architecture

Filmed:
771,724 views

In this engrossing EG talk, architect Liz Diller shares her firm DS+R's more unusual work, including the Blur Building, whose walls are made of fog, and the revamped Alice Tully Hall, which is wrapped in glowing wooden skin.
- Designer
Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice. Full bio

Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.

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Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space,
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architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine
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that delights and disturbs the senses.
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Our work is across media. The work comes in all shapes and sizes.
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It's small and large. This is an ashtray, a water glass.
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From urban planning and master planning
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to theater and all sorts of stuff.
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The thing that all the work has in common
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is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space.
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And these are everyday conventions,
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conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity.
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And I've assembled a sampling of work
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that all share a kind of productive nihilism
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that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect.
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And that is something like nothing, or something next to nothing.
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It's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference
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in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through.
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This is an image that won us a competition
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for an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002
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on Lake Neuchatel, near Geneva.
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And we wanted to use the water not only as a context,
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but as a primary building material.
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We wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere.
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So, no walls, no roof, no purpose --
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just a mass of atomized water, a big cloud.
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And this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation
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of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions,
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which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite
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for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity.
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High definition, in our opinion, has become the new orthodoxy.
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And we ask the question, can we use technology, high technology,
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to make an expo pavilion that's decidedly low definition,
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that also challenges the conventions of space and skin,
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and rethinks our dependence on vision?
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So this is how we sought to do it.
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Water's pumped from the lake and is filtered
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and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles,
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35,000 of them. And a weather station is on the structure.
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It reads the shifting conditions of temperature, humidity,
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wind direction, wind speed, dew point,
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and it processes this data in a central computer
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that calibrates the degree of water pressure
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and distribution of water throughout.
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And it's a responsive system that's trained on actual weather.
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So, this is just in construction, and there's a tensegrity structure.
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It's about 300 feet wide, the size of a football field,
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and it sits on just four very delicate columns.
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These are the fog nozzles, the interface,
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and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather,
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and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather.
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So, we're very interested in creating weather. I don't know why.
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Now, here we go, one side, the outside
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and then from the inside of the space
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you can see what the quality of the space was.
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Unlike entering any normal space,
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entering Blur is like stepping into a habitable medium.
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It's formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless,
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purposeless and dimensionless.
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All references are erased,
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leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles.
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So, this is an exhibition pavilion
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where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do.
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And we pride ourselves -- it's a spectacular anti-spectacle
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in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head.
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So, the audience is dispersed,
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focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax
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are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention
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that's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog.
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And this is very much like how the Victorian novel used fog in this way.
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So here the world is put out of focus,
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while our visual dependence is put into focus.
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The public, you know, once disoriented
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can actually ascend to the angel deck above
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and then just come down under those lips into the water bar.
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So, all the waters of the world are served there,
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so we thought that, you know, after being at the water
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and moving through the water and breathing the water,
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you could also drink this building.
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And so it is sort of a theme,
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but it goes a little bit, you know, deeper than that.
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We really wanted to bring out
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our absolute dependence on this master sense,
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and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses.
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You know, when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell,
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because the Swiss said, "Well, why are we going to spend, you know,
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10 million dollars producing an effect
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that we already have in natural abundance that we hate?"
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And, you know, we thought -- well, we tried to convince them.
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And in the end, you know, they adapted this as a national icon
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that came to represent Swiss doubt, which we -- you know,
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it was kind of a meaning machine
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that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of.
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Anyway, it's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed,
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and so it's now a memory of an apparition, actually,
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but it continues to live in edible form.
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And this is the highest honor
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to be bestowed upon an architect in Switzerland -- to have a chocolate bar.
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Anyway, moving along.
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So in the '80s and '90s, we were mostly known for independent work,
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such as installation artist, architect,
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commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations.
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And we did a lot of media work,
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also a lot of experimental theater projects.
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In 2003, the Whitney mounted a retrospective of our work
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that featured a lot of this work from the '80s and '90s.
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However, the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective,
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and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show.
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This was a piece on tourism in the United States.
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This is "Soft Sell" for 42nd Street.
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This was something done at the Cartier Foundation.
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"Master/Slave" at the MOMA, the project series, a piece called "Parasite."
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And so there were many, many of these kinds of projects.
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Anyway, they gave us the whole fourth floor, and, you know,
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the problem of the retrospective
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was something we were very uncomfortable with.
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It's a kind of invention of the museum
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that's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding
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to the public of a body of work.
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And our work doesn't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all.
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And one of the recurring themes, by the way, that in the work
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was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself,
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and asking about the conventions of the museum, like the wall, the white wall.
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So, what you see here
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is basically a plan of many installations that were put there.
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And we actually had to install white walls
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to separate these pieces, which didn't belong together.
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But these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time.
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We used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project
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and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation.
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And what you see is -- actually,
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the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element,
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which was a new piece that created -- that we created for the --
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which was a robotic drill, basically, that went all the way around,
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cruised the museum, went all around the walls and did a lot of damage.
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So, the drill was mounted on this robotic arm.
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We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain.
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Honeybee Robotics designed the Mars Driller,
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and it was really very much fun to work with them.
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They weren't doing their primary work, which was for the government,
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while they were helping us with this.
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In any case, the way it works is that
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an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls.
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So, unfolded it's about 300 linear feet.
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And it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix.
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It selects a point, it guides the drill to that point, it pierces the dry wall,
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leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location.
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Initially these holes were lone blemishes,
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and as the exhibition continued
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the walls became increasingly perforated.
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So eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned,
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opening views from gallery to gallery.
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Clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall.
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And so this was a three-month performance piece
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in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element.
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And also the acoustic separation was destroyed.
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Also the visual separation.
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And there was also this constant background groan, which was very annoying.
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And this is one of the blackout spaces
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where there's a video piece that became totally not useful.
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So rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display,
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the wall now actively competed for attention.
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And this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance
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basically exposed the discomfort of the work
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to this encompassing nature of the retrospective.
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It was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text.
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Moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago.
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It's the ICA -- the Institute of Contemporary Art -- in Boston,
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which is on the waterfront.
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And there's not enough time to really introduce the building,
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but I'll simply say that the building negotiates
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between this outwardly focused nature of the site --
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you know, it's a really great waterfront site in Boston --
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and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum.
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So, the nature of the building is that it looks at looking --
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I mean that's its primary objective,
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both its program and its architectural conceit.
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The building incorporates the site,
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but it dispenses it in very small doses
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in the way that the museum is choreographed.
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So, you come in and you're basically squeezed by the theater,
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by the belly of the theater, into this very compressed space
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where the view is turned off.
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Then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall.
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This elevator's about the size of a New York City studio apartment.
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And then, this is a view going up,
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and then you could come into the theater,
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which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop.
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And many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open.
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The view is denied in the galleries
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where we receive just natural light,
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and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view.
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The original intention of this space,
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which was unfortunately never realized,
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was to use lenticular glass
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which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out.
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In this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries
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the intention was really to not get a climax,
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but to have the view stalk you,
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so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other.
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This was eliminated because the view was too good,
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and the mayor said, "No, we just want this open."
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The architect lost here.
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But culminating -- and that's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk --
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is this Mediatheque,
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which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building.
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So this is an 80-foot cantilever -- it's quite substantial.
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So, it's already sticking out into space enough,
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and then from that is this, is this small area called the Mediatheque.
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The Mediatheque has something like 16 stations
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where the public can get onto the server
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and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web.
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And this was really a kind of very important part of this building,
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and here is a point where architecture --
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this is like technology-free -- architecture is only a framing device,
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it only edits the harbor view, the industrial harbor
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just through its walls, its floors and its ceiling,
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to only expose the water itself, the texture of water,
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much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow
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or a lava lamp or something like that.
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And here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence
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of the technological and the natural in the project.
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But there is just no information, it's just -- it's just hypnosis.
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Moving along to Lincoln Center.
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These are the guys that did the project in the first place, 50 years ago.
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We're taking over now, doing work that ranges in scale
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from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions.
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But we're doing it with a lot less testosterone.
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This is the extent of the work that's to be completed by 2010.
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And for the purposes of this talk,
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I wanted to isolate just a part of a project that's even a part of a project
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that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects,
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and it happens to be our current obsession,
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and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction.
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It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building
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and descends several levels under the street.
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So, this is the entrance to Tully Hall as it used to be,
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before the renovation, which we just started.
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And we asked ourselves, why couldn't it be exhibitionistic,
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like the Met, or like some of the other buildings at Lincoln Center?
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And one of the things that we were asked to do
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was give it a street identity, expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible.
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And this building, which is just naturally hermetic, we stripped.
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We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease,
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where we're framing with this kind of canopy --
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the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard,
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about 45,000 square feet -- cutting it to the angle of Broadway,
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and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall.
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Before and after shot. (Applause)
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Wait a minute, it's just in that state, we have a long way to go.
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But what I wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that I have left
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to just talk about the hall itself,
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which is kind of where we're really doing a massive amount of work.
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So, the hall is a multi-purpose hall.
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The clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall.
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Now, that's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats.
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Chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons
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and small-scale performances. They asked us to bring an intimacy.
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How do you bring an intimacy into a hall?
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Intimacy for us means a lot of different things.
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It means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy.
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One thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall.
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Another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall.
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It's like a coffin, it basically sends all the sound,
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like a gutter-ball effect, down the aisles.
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The walls are made of absorptive surface,
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half absorptive, half reflective,
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which is not very good for concert sound.
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This is Avery Fisher Hall, but the notion of junk -- visual junk --
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was very, very important to us, to get rid of visual noise.
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Because we can't eliminate a single seat,
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the architecture is restricted to 18 inches.
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So it's a very, very thin architecture.
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First we do a kind of partial box and box separation,
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to take away the distraction of the subway noise.
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Next we wrap the entire hall -- almost like this Olivetti keyboard --
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with a material, with a wood material
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that basically covers all the surfaces:
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wall, ceiling, floor, stage, steps, everything, boxes.
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But it's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house
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and back to the stage. And here's an acoustic shelf.
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Looking up the hall. Just a section of the stage.
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Just everything is lined, it incorporates --
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every single thing that you could possibly imagine
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is tucked into this high-performance skin.
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But one more added feature.
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So now that we've stripped the hall of all visual distraction,
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everything that prevents this intimacy
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which is supposed to connect the house, the audience,
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with the performers, we add one little detail,
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one piece of architectural excess, a special effect: lighting.
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We very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall
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is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival
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as it is when the concert starts.
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So what we wanted to do was produce this effect,
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this lighting effect,
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which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls.
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And what it entails is the use of resin, of this very thick resin
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with a veneer of the same kind of wood that's used throughout the hall,
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in a kind of seamless continuity
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that wraps the hall in light, like a belt of light: rather than separating,
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like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers,
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it connects audience with players.
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And this is a mockup that is in Salt Lake City
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that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale.
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And this is a guy from Salt Lake City,
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this is what they look like out there.
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(Laughter)
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And for us, I mean it's really kind of a very strange thing,
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but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down
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when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin,
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very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier,
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the walls will just exude this glow, temporarily stealing attention from the stage.
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And this is Tully in construction now.
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I have no ending to say, except that I'm a couple of minutes over.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Liz Diller - Designer
Liz Diller and her maverick firm DS+R bring a groundbreaking approach to big and small projects in architecture, urban design and art -- playing with new materials, tampering with space and spectacle in ways that make you look twice.

Why you should listen

Liz Diller's firm, Diller Scofidio & Renfro, might just be the first post-wall architects. From a mid-lake rotunda made of fog to a gallery that destroys itself with a robotic drill, her brainy takes on the essence of buildings are mind-bending and rebellious. DS+R partakes of criticism that goes past academic papers and into real structures -- buildings and art installations that seem to tease the squareness of their neighbors.

DS+R was the first architecture firm to receive a MacArthur "genius" grant -- and it also won an Obie for Jet Lag, a wildly creative piece of multimedia off-Broadway theater. A reputation for rampant repurposing of materials and tricksy tinkering with space -- on stage, on paper, on the waterfront -- have made DS+R a sought-after firm, winning accounts from the Juilliard School, Alice Tully Hall and the School of American Ballet, as part of the Lincoln Center overhaul; at Brown University; and on New York's revamp of Governer's Island. Their Institute for Comtemporary Art has opened up a new piece of Boston's waterfront, creating an elegant space that embraces the water.

Learn more about the Hirshhorn Museum >>

 

More profile about the speaker
Liz Diller | Speaker | TED.com