"The Legend of Avant-Garde Architecture and the Rise of the Market-Fundamentalist City," A + U, July 2025.
The evolution of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s office, from Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio’s early interdisciplinary collaborations to the firm’s later work for major cultural, institutional, and business clients, tracks the systematic destruction of democratic society and the rise of market fundamentalist ideology.
The legend of Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s architecture dates back to the studio’s formation in the early-to-mid 1980s, when Liz Diller and Ric Scofidio participated in a series of avant-garde projects with sculptors and theater people as a part of Art on the Beach, an annual event sponsored by public art organization Creative Time, founded amid the collapse of the office tower market in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s. The photographs of these open-air projects show a spectacular scene of installations and performances on a vast empty terrain in the shadow of the Twin Towers. Soil and granite from digging the foundations of the World Trade Center had been dumped on the edge of the Hudson River to create new land. It was a vacant space quickly adopted for artistic experiments, at least at first. The mythology of these events suggested that they became formative of innovative urban development more sensitive to public needs and desires than they otherwise would have been. City planners reengineered the ground and converted it into a neighborhood of mid-rise brick-faced upper-middle-class dwellings that included a significant land art project at South Cove by pioneering earth artist Mary Miss in collaboration with landscape architect Susan Child and architect Stanton Eckstut along its extensive waterfront walkway. But as Miss learned over the years, a visual artist’s public art interventions could easily be readapted, neglected, mistreated, scrapped, and redeveloped against her will—even those of a figure as renowned as Miss—threatening her built legacy.
Diller went a different way. She left the world of downtown avant-garde interventions behind. She mostly refuses to talk about those days—that was far in the past. Her office became an influential architecture practice, in 2005 adding as a partner Charles Renfro—a member of the team since 1997—who would bring significant technical and building expertise, new clients, as well as a spirit of mischievousness. DS+R once prided itself on never taking real-estate development projects like luxury housing, focusing on cultural and educational spaces. But over the years, it has increasing claimed major institutional and developer clients like Lincoln Center, Columbia University, real-estate behemoth the Related Companies, and search engine monopoly Google, producing significant new features of the landscape in New York City and beyond. They even have a project for the US State Department to renovate the embassy in El Salvador, now among the havens of crypto-fascist governance in Central America, collaborating with the Trump fascist regime in extralegal detentions of US immigrants.
Yet, somehow, DS+R maintained the avant-garde cache of those early years. Among their claims to fame, they share credit with James Corner Field Operations for the redevelopment of the High Line in 2009 as a pedestrian thoroughfare along a former rail line, which passes through the increasingly absurd real-estate spectacle of Chelsea. Supermodernist gestures like the staggered patterns of walkways, view corridors onto 10th Avenue, and concrete formwork seating that slants down and merges with the ground bear the hallmarks of the office’s techno-optimist style. DS+R designs with a self-assurance at times bordering on hubris that architectural solutions can mediate any programmatic challenge.
In 2013, they parleyed their High Line cache into a commission for a new park in Moscow at the footsteps of the Kremlin, on the edge of Red Square. In Zaryadye Park, a procession of Eurasian birch trees, grasses, and shrubs winds downhill from a glass-crusted outdoor amphitheater topping the new Philharmonic Hall, framing photogenic views of the candy-colored cupolas of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The park’s verdant terrain folds onto the rooftops of four scalloped pavilions that shelter a botanical display, an educational center, a food court, and a screening room for an immersive 3D film on Russian history. Granite pavers resembling the High Line’s pedestrian pathways stretch onto a boomerang-shaped overlook that cantilevers over the Moskva River, where visitors of all ages and groups compulsively photograph themselves against the backdrop of the Kremlin. Completed in 2017 with Citymakers and Hargreaves Associates, it was meant to function as a public space in the fullest sense, offering a place for Russian citizens to gather freely, express themselves, and potentially foment social and political change. It didn’t turn out that way—for now—as a few years later Russian president Vladimir Putin, a sponsor of the project through the office of Moscow’s chief architect, invaded Ukraine, leading to a total collapse of Russian civil society.
To a large extent, DS+R’s New York City work offers a US counterpart to that story. As politics in the US verged rightward year after year and the society became rapidly dominated by market-fundamentalist ideology, architecture followed. To get built, everything had to serve the interests of financial capitalism. If a project benefited Wall Street and real-estate developers, it was considered good for everyone. A complicated relationship with the rising oligarchy unfolded. DS+R’s Shed, a cultural venue within the Hudson Yards luxury housing, office, and shopping mall development—built on top of an active railyard on the western edge of Chelsea—came to life as a result of Liz Diller’s dedication. It was originally conceived as a generic cultural space of undetermined function written into the planning guidelines of the Hudson Yards special zoning district, which specified what form future development should take on the site. Hired by the real-estate corporation Related Companies—headed by a conservative Republican who enthusiastically endorsed and donated to Trump’s election campaign—DS+R for the first time accepted a luxury housing commission, designing an adjoining residential tower alongside the cultural venue. Diller would personally shape the program for the Shed as a place for challenging performances and exhibitions requiring expansive open spaces unavailable within existing theaters and museums. A section of the structure cleverly expands on rolling steel wheels into a public space bordering the High Line. Diller had to build the institution from scratch, gathering tens of millions of dollars in donations from billionaire oligarchs to fund its construction and programming.
DS+R’s academic buildings for the Columbia University School of Business confronted another potential headache in terms of its rationale. Two slightly abstracted sculptural volumes—the eight-story David Geffen Hall and the eleven-story Henry R. Kravis Hall—sit on opposite sides of a quad-like grass park designed by Field Operations, encircled by benches and a stage. Shapely floor slabs expressed in the facades use glass inset from the structure on the student levels and fritted glass on faculty levels to give their forms a distinctively fashionable flair. When it opened in 2021, the business school pitched itself as a progressive alternative to the prevailing market-fundamentalist economic theory: it claimed the college would nurture community-oriented values, mentor small businesses in Harlem, and provide ample public space open to everyone. But the Columbia University campus extension project had an ugly history.
The problem was that the humanistic claims of the business school sounded like hypocritical rationalizations given the undemocratic, anti-community development process the university deployed to expand the campus. The two new buildings joined an extensive medical school complex designed by Renzo Piano in erasing the neighborhood of Manhattanville. Acquiring seventeen acres from hundreds of existing property owners starting in 2002, Columbia ultimately used the state’s power of eminent domain to force landowners to sell their lots in 2008. This was explicitly against the local community board’s wishes. A group of small businesses sued in state court and lost.
By the time it opened in 2021, few people remembered the history of forced land sales and community opposition, but for those who did, no amount of beautiful architecture could compensate for the land expropriation used as a method of development. It would have been better if, within Columbia’s pristine new campus, a few spite houses of local mechanics plying their trade had survived among the Wall Street traders and tech startups designed to maximize shareholder value the school is churning out. To small businesses, the message of the project was clear: the wealthy and powerful could use their influence to get what they wanted. As in many of New York projects during the last decade, the possibility for a more diverse, more equitable city was being eliminated. Manhattanville was wiped off the map.
It was an echo of an infamous urban development project from another era. In the 1950s, New York City had built new cultural facilities for its major opera, philharmonic, chamber music, and ballet companies, along with a campus for Juilliard School of Music, hiring the most renowned architects of that time. Among them were Max Abramovitz and Wallace Harrison, close associates of the Rockefeller family—the major US oligarchs of that time—and Philip Johnson, scion of an aluminum manufacturing family and architecture curator at the Museum of Modern Art. To build the 16.3-acre development, the state had dispossessed 7,000 low-income predominantly Black and Puerto Rican families and 800 small businesses in San Juan Hill. It remains one of the more egregious examples of the early-to-mid twentieth-century state-run development process known as urban renewal, in which city planners used and abused their dictatorial authority to achieve public objectives. San Juan Hill completely disappeared.
When DS+R stepped in to realize a campus renovation masterplan for Lincoln Center starting in 2002, updating its public spaces for greater accessibility and openness, renovating and expanding the Juilliard school (2009), and designing a dexterous intervention, slicing through the façade of Alice Tully Hall to bring light into its lobby and create an urban plaza on Broadway (2009), no one expected them to restore the lost neighborhood of San Juan Hill. Eventually, a major renovation of Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall by Diamond Schmitt Architects and Tod Williams Billie Tsien effected a similar openness for the philharmonic building, adding a colorful mural on its northern façade, San Juan Heal by Nina Chanel Abney, as a gesture of remembrance of the violent urban development history. Architecture has limits of what it can do. It has little impact on public policy. But magical thinking about its beauty shouldn’t overwhelm our critical understanding of history. All of this development and redevelopment was funded by billionaires. The architecture tracks the systematic destruction of democratic society happening through the extreme concentration of wealth and the domination of economic and political spheres by the billionaire class.
More recently, DS+R designed new offices for the information monopoly Google, renovating a section of Pier 57 on the Far West Side of Manhattan, near the southern edge of the High Line. The design pitch, again, foregrounds the public-oriented functions of a few of the spaces—a rooftop garden and a food hall—with a visual openness toward the predominantly private spaces of the tech giant. The pier is owned by the Hudson River Park Trust, a nonprofit that operates the park along the west side of Manhattan. According to DS+R, the renovation “transforms an icon of New York’s twentieth-century maritime prowess into a democratic symbol of the city’s twenty-first century knowledge economy.” I would rather have Google share the wealth from its expropriation of advertising from print media. Among the industries systematically plundered by the way new “knowledge economy” now functions has been journalism, a theft of resources visible in the architecture and design press in grotesque ways, such as the lack of increase in the pay rate of journalists for at least two generations. A key sector of free society has essentially been destroyed, replaced with “information,” distributed without any regulation, tools of critical examination, verification, or protection against disinformation distributed by anti-liberal regimes. Google is a market-fundamentalist enterprise operating to produce short-term profits for shareholders. No matter how much the architecture offers transparency toward the inside, it cannot intervene in any meaningful way in the deeper social collapse that is being produced around it.
In October 2018, Diller collaborated with the poet Anne Carson, playwright Claudia Rankine, and the composer David Lang on the Mile-Long Opera, an extraordinary performance on the High Line hearkening back to her earliest work in Art on the Beach. Performers of especially diverse ethnicity and age groups (white, black, and brown, and many seniors) were arrayed along the entirety of the High Line, some of them singing in operatic voices, some expressing poetic lines naturalistically in their own voices. Actors were situated throughout the different levels of the pedestrian walkway, sometimes with dramatic new luxury towers under construction visible behind them, such as Bjarke Ingels’s twisting Eleventh tower. Carrying flashlights to illuminate the improvised staging, some of the performers were set off by street scenes of dumpsters piled with debris, others embedded in the complex landscape of the High Line, where the park extends onto a veranda and flows below the main promenade.
The mixture of everyday life, poetry, and operatic performance wove theater with the unscripted conversations of passersby, creating a visually compelling story evocative of the deeper resonances and political meaning of urbanism. It evoked the power of diversity and humanism as day-to-day experiences, difference and equality of opportunity embedded in the flow of urban society, the power of person-to-person interaction in public space as a mediating force for the democratic values of civic life. The piece recalled some of the values that are ultimately missing from the corporatized, privatized city colonized by tech billionaires, financial capitalism, and the now-predominant market-fundamentalist ideology of the US underlying the Trump fascist regime.
