Diller Scofidio + Renfro - The Suspension of Disbelief - Architizer PDF

7/28/2017 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: The Suspension of Disbelief - Architizer
M
Michael Holt and Marissa Looby
Diller Scofidio + Renfro: The Suspension

of Disbelief
This article is the first in a new series, Reinterpretations, that

will identify a single construction component and trace it
across the body of work from an architecture practice. For an
in-depth explanation on the series and its aims, click here.
The American architecture practice DILLER SCOFIDO +

RENFRO (DS+R) defines itself as an interdisciplinary design
studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts and the
performing arts. A practice that began life through
explorations of art installation and theater has developed into
a force in architecture. It is argued DS+R has consistently
worked off its origins to create built forms that conceptually
explore the human condition. This article outlines that DS+R
uses a particular construction component to facilitate
conceptual investigations as architecture: the stair. Where the
stair began as experimentations in the individual activating
and engaging with space, it has resulted in the stair as the
main protagonist in the configuration of the individuals-as-
collective on display.
https://architizer.com/blog/diller-scofidio-renfro-the-suspension-of-disbelief/ 1/19
Section through the Eyebeam Museum of Art and

Technology, 2001; courtesy of DS+R
They contort the basic essence of a stairs

movement into a multi-directional component.
This does not suggest DS+R intentionally or consciously use
the stair, rather that we project analysis on to their work,
suggesting a concurrent deployment of the stair to enact the
essence of theatricality in the built environment. The
trajectory of this idea is mapped out across the earliest of
projects up until their most recent, advocating that DS+R use
the stair as theatrical stage and social incubator for public
use. To borrow a term from theater, DS+R create a
suspension of disbelief through their use of staircases not
merely as circulatory aspect taking building-users from one
level to another but as a form of communication
enabling and activating space either as an attractor or as a
visual platform.
They contort the basic essence of a stairs upward/downward

movement into a multidirectional, multifunctional component.
The idea of theatricality holds true in the stair; it
provides aesthetic distancing where the viewer is seeing the
banal street-view (High Line, New York) or block color (ICA,
Boston) for the very first time. This is, however, not a
discussion on framing; instead it is an understanding that the
stair is the activator, creating a self-referential effect on the
viewer through moments that distort perception and accepted
norm.
Walter Gropius Total Theater, 1927; via Shams Design

Space
The Preexisting as Backdrop

In Diller Plus Scofidio: Blurred Theater (2011) by Antonello
Marotta, connections are made explicit between the early
works of founding partners Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio,
noting Walter Gropius circular proscenium, or Total
Theater (1927), and also Frederick Kieslers Endless
Theater (1923), in which the Austrian-American architect
introduced the concept of dynamism into the theater
scenography, with the aim of mixing actors and public in a
new concept that abandoned the central, one-way public-
show model.
While it is unequivocal that DS+R was founded on the works

of theater, exhibit and installation, the article presents a
transition moment when the theatrical experimentations

become spatial, architectural investigations in the stair. The
stair is the device to incubate ideas borne in theater that
produces a tectonic resolution to conceptual moments that
sought to expose and question everyday life.
French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, in The Critique of

Everyday Life (1947), believed the trivial should not be
exempt from philosophical investigation. To Lefebvre critique
was not simply knowledge of everyday life, but knowledge of
the means to transform it. Everyday life, as defined by
Lefebvre, is everything that remains since everyday activities
have ceased. Lefebvre suggests ordinary moments in
everyday life could extrapolate as moments of the
extraordinary, which could lead to new modes of being.
Diller + Scofidio, Loophole, installation at Second Artillery

Armory, Chicago, 1993; photography by Diller + Scofidio,
reproduced by permission of DS+R
Many of DS+Rs early theater works or installations depend

on a preexisting context or building as the backdrop to enable
the questions each project raises. In Loophole (1992), for
instance, the twin staircase in the Armory of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, acts as an
ascending/descending narrative device.
Movement is chronicled or archived and

subsequently distorted.
A video camera records footage of the stairway, window wall
and views beyond, and as the video installation plays live
with views distorted it actively disorients the viewer
through the use of the stair and video sequencing. As the
viewer ascends or descends, their movement is chronicled or
archived and subsequently distorted. The viewer
moves through the preexisting space, recorded in action and
viewed elsewhere. There is a nod toward notions of
surveillance in the work, but more significantly, the viewer-
turned-voyeur is found looking at oneself in a staircase only
to then become the object to be viewed.
Diller Scofidio, Facsimile, 2002; courtesy of DS+R
Such a conflation of recorded imagery and live streaming

occurs some years later in Facsimile (2004), where a video
monitor is suspended on the faade of the Moscone
Convention Center, San Francisco. The monitor moves slowly
across the elevation, transmitting either live or fictionalized
footage from the interior of the building for the voyeurism of
the street passersby. Actual building occupants and actual
interior spaces are confused with prerecorded impostors. It is
a scanning device, a magnifying lens, a periscope and an
instrument of deception.
The deception of live footage and, in this instance, fictional

prerecorded video toys again with the idea of surveillance
somewhat similar to Overexposed (1995), in which a 24-
minute continuous video recording pans across the
preexisting curtain wall of Gordon Bunshafts Pepsi-Cola
building. These projects question the Modernist glass curtain
wall by suggesting its overexposure leaves, according to
DS+R, few shadow zones of privacy [ ] glass has
assumed the role of a representational surface, a
performance screen.
Diller + Scofidio, Overexposed, Getty Center, 1994;

composite photograph by Ricardo Scofidio, courtesy of DS+R
Predating each of these examples is Withdrawing Room (San

Francisco, 1986) a project that centers on the
domesticated language of the home (drawing room) to align it
with the anxiety of social orders of privacy in the
aforementioned.
As a series of spatial meditations, DS+R exposed a conflict

in the way we live through a focus on four aspects: the
property line, intensifying codes of privacy and publicness
with regard to the buildings envelope; etiquette, where the
resident is offset against culturally determined rituals;
intimacy; and an internal order. Withdrawing Room identified
constructs so to break them down. The key component is
what represents the property line/building envelope. To
correspond the example projects, the envelope
https://architizer.com/blog/diller-scofidio-renfro-the-suspension-of-disbelief/ just as the 6/19
stair is the preexisting component that succeeds in all it

can expose or transmit.
Diller + Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp

Street Projects, San Francisco, 1989; photography by Diller
Scofidio, reproduced by permission of DS+R
In a final but most prescient theater example, The Rotary

Notary and His Hot Plate (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987),
DS+R split a stage in two with an opaque pivoting panel
where the front is revealed and the back is ignored. Samuel
Beckett, the Irish avant-garde playwright and a key figure of
the Theatre of the Absurd, conceived his first play
(Eleutheria, 1947) as concerned with a mans efforts to cut
himself loose from his family and social obligations where the
stage is divided in the middle.
On the right the hero lies passively in his bed; on the left, his
family and friends discuss him without ever directly
addressing him. Gradually, the action shifts from left to right,
and eventually the hero summons up the courage to rid
himself of his shackles. DS+Rs Rotary Notary is akin as it
subverted the space of the stage. They offer a concurrent
view of the actual (authentic), while the mediated characters
are viewed in space. All the while, the focus is on the
individual-in-space and the audiences perceived
understanding of the locations, states and identities.
Diller + Scofidio, set design for A Delay in Glass, or The

Rotary Notary and his Hot Plate by Susan Mosakowski;
photography by Diller + Scofidio, reproduced by permission of
DS+R
The individual is physically located in space

in Loophole,Facsimile and Overexposed, as the stair or
envelope is the thing that permits a surveillance and is
subsequently transmitted as the individual is watched. The
act of transmission is dependent on the existing building
playing its part as the backdrop for a viewer to be observed
seemingly without their knowledge. In Withdrawing Room, the
viewer is complicit in the spatial deception and is acutely
aware of their role.
The Suspension of Disbelief

The Theatre of the Absurd portrayed the world as an
incomprehensible place, where spectators see the
happenings on the stage entirely from the outside, without
ever understanding the full meaning of the strange patterns of
events. Theater critic Martin Esslin described the term as a
kind of intellectual shorthand for a complex pattern of
similarities in approach, method and convention, of shared
philosophical and artistic premises, whether conscious or
subconscious, and of influences from a common store of
tradition.
A building has conventions that depend on

preconceived notions: You know that a stair
means to ascend or descend.
Theater is dependent on its audience accepting a scenario
whereby they know what they will view is not a real event but
a fictionalized account a transgression from written word to
performed sequence. This does, of course, require a willing
suspension of disbelief a phrase formed by the English
poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and most notably used in the
plays of William Shakespeare or, more recently, Tom
Stoppard so that the audience accepts the play on its own
terms, temporarily giving over to the playwrights vision of the
world and the actors portrayal of it.
In Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the

actors know they are in a play and realize they have to act
out the play as part of their performance, meanwhile their
performance is dependent on the audience accepting their
pretense as characters in a play. The actors implore the
audience to momentarily suspend their disbelief. Both are
dependent on each other. Dramatic conventions are reliant on
particular rules being as they are so to emphasize a deviation
from the norm, and, in architectural terms, a building has
conventions that depend on preconceived notions: You know
that a stair means to ascend or descend, that a door denotes
a threshold for which you open or close, that a wall
demarcates programmatic space and so on.
Diller + Scofidio, model of The Slow House, 1989; courtesy of

DS+R
In a similar vein, DS+R highlight that a public conditioned to

accepted conventions receives experiences through a filter of
critical standards, of predetermined expectations and in terms
of reference, which is the natural result of the schooling of its
taste and faculty of perception as Esslin noted in
reference to theater. DS+R ask for a self-critical act from the
viewer. They may not discuss the absurdity of the human
condition, they merely present it in being. DS+R express a
sense of senselessness in the human condition and the
inadequacy of the irrational approach by the open
abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought. The
crossover between the Theatre of the Absurd and DS+R lies

in how the spectator receives the work. Each spectator
should find their own meaning and perpetually suspend
disbelief.
Supplementary to the argument posited is one of DS+Rs

earliest architecture projects (unrealized), Slow
House (1991), a private residence that, according to the
architects, is a physical entry to an optical departure, or
simply a door to a window. The project is dependent on the
idea of control both in the mediation of the view and also the
control in movement or direction of the user through space.
The transition from door to window provides a sequencing
from the authentic to the mediated.
Diller + Scofidio, view of visitor on ramp, The Blur Building,

Swiss Expo, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002; courtesy of DS+R
While Slow House is a controlled spatial design with a focus

on the resulting view, the Blur Building (Swiss Expo, 2002)
prevents the viewer from understanding the extents of the
building on display. Slow House dictates the view
and Blur dismantles the view. The stair, in DS+R, is an
amalgamation of these devices. On the one hand, it offers
controlled, level-to-level circulation, and on the other, it
thrusts the individual to the foreground of the envelope,
continuously activating its elevation thus preventing the
passerby from recognizing a static faade.
The Theatrical Stair

As a circulatory device, the stair is a purely functional piece of
architecture and enables a user to move up/down between
levels. Constrained by regulation, the stair is a difficult

building component to innovate. Its rise and run are
predetermined as is the number of steps before a landing,
handrail and balustrade requirements are set and the use of
tactile indicators and other safety measures are established.
Even the location of the stair in the layout of the building is
generally mapped by circulation distances and exit widths. To
begin to alter the stair to add meaning or communicate
through the stair is no ordinary feat.
To begin to alter the stair is no ordinary feat.

DS+R achieves this in a multitude of ways both physically
and experientially. Take, for example, the High Line Part
I (20092011) where there is an amphitheater-like space that
uses stair and landing that angles the view downward to the
street below. Not only is it a mathematical feat (incorporating
rise and run and an accessible ramp down to the base of the
window to the street), but it also creates a moment of
reflection and refuge from the High Line and the busy city
street below. An in-between space for the everyday citizen to
contemplate the ordinary in a new dimension.
The Sunken Overlook at 10th Avenue, The High Line; New

York, N.Y.; photo by Iwan Baan
Incidentally, this moment may have its origins in the Institute

of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston (2006), where DS+R
located a multimedia room cantilevered
https://architizer.com/blog/diller-scofidio-renfro-the-suspension-of-disbelief/ from the building to 12/19
create a room that looks down into the harbor. Somewhat

similar to Slow House, in both of these projects, the viewer is
directed to the view. By default of their location (either above
the street or the harbor-side), they inadvertently become an
activated and ever-changing faade on display.
Similarly the entry into Alice Tully Hall (2009), itself a theater
in New York, has an inverted stair on the street where the
public can sit and look into the lobby creating an
amphitheater surrounding the building for general public use.
Unifying across all of these projects is that the viewer begins
at the top of the landing and descends into a prescribed view
of everyday life below playing with a sense of vertigo,
instability and vulnerability through the suspension of the stair
positioned downwards.
Practice Rooms, School of American Ballet, Lincoln Center

for the Performing Arts, New York, N.Y.; photo by Iwan Baan
Around the corner from Alice Tully Hall is the entry to

the Juilliard School (2009), a project that includes a staircase
wrapped into seating at its lobby. This, in turn, creates a place
for informal gathering, meeting and for viewing the street.
The School of American Ballet (2007) allows borrowed views
from intersecting studio spaces that also permit views in/out
through the liquid crystal glazing at the dance instructors
discretion.
Such physical studies of the stair all turn what would be a

functional element (a stair to take a user from point A to B)
into a place for social incubation: a multifaceted condition
where one can meet, watch and survey. Comparatively, the
Creative Arts Center at Brown University (2010) programs six
intersecting half-levels with its circulation core that permits
prescribed and limited views. Interestingly, in its conventional
use (point A to B) DS+R produce a disjunction between levels
with the stair operating always as continual.
Section Viewing North, School of American Ballet, Lincoln

Center for the Performing Arts, New York, N.Y.; courtesy of
DS+R
Practice Rooms, School of American Ballet, Lincoln Center

for the Performing Arts, New York, N.Y.; photo by Iwan Baan
Its very conventionality allows for the fluctuation in program

and the resultant prescribed view. It is a significant
conceptual twist on the stair as activator. In bisecting
programs, the stair, in these instances, calibrates views by
rejecting a view in totality.
the stair scythes between for purely

voyeuristic purposes.
Again in a continuation of domesticated language, similar
to withDrawing Room, DS+R state the landings [at Creative
Arts Center] of the main circulation stair are expanded and
conceived as vertically stacked living rooms for serendipitous
and planned encounters. Fascinatingly, DS+R implement the
use of a glass wall to expose the sectional splits in floor
plates as the stair scythes between, reminiscent of dividing
the stage or exposing the transmission of the activity beyond
for purely voyeuristic purposes.
In Flesh: Architectural Probes (2011) DS+R produced a book

that maps out strategies for contractual space in which
architecture can perform critically within encoded spaces of
privacy and publicity. The human body is an ever-presence in
their work in relation or opposition to the built environment.
Lobby with view of stairs and escalator, The Broad Museum,

Los Angeles, Calif.; photo by Iwan Baan
A darkened, shadowy crevice awaits.

At the Broad Museum (Los Angeles, 2013), DS+R produced
the veil and the vault in reference to the envelope and the
buildings entry point. With this intriguing double play on the
word vault otherwise known as a groin vault DS+R
induce a humanistic quality through this
https://architizer.com/blog/diller-scofidio-renfro-the-suspension-of-disbelief/ body-part reference. 15/19
It is unsurprising then to find the access to the main gallery

spaces are via a stair and an escalator through this vault. The
user is unaware of the space they are to enter, and instead a
darkened, shadowy crevice awaits.
Program and circulation are explicitly separated at the Culture

Shed (due for completion, 2019). It is the most overt
distinction between each in the oeuvre of DS+R. The
shrouded exhibition space is mediated, concealed from
immediate view; while along the property line, the street
passerby is able to view all of the users on authentic display
in its staircase along the elevation.
Diller + Scofidio, Eyebeam Museum of Art and

Technologyrendering, 2001; courtesy of DS+R
In the aforementioned stair examples, the importance of the

landing should not be understated. They create the stage for
the everyday viewer. Projects such as the
unrealized Eyebeam Institute (2004), Museum of Image and
Sound (Rio de Janeiro, 2016) and Columbia University
Medical & Graduate Education Building (2016) share a
similarity in form.
The main elevation in each is visually stimulated by a ramp

ribbon folding through the floor levels. A ramp may not fully
adhere to the principles of a stair, but it
https://architizer.com/blog/diller-scofidio-renfro-the-suspension-of-disbelief/ remains dependent 16/19
on regulations of height and landing and so maintains a stair-

like quality.
Exterior View, Medical and Graduate Education Building at

Columbia University; courtesy of DS+R in collaboration with
Gensler
In each of the ribbon projects, the individual is on full display,

they are the live video stream and the curtain wall is the
monitor. Individuals are no longer aware of the surveillance
camera because the camera is no longer there. They are in
fact the performance screen itself. The connection is, in each
instance, oversized landings enable gathering spaces,
theatrical stages for the viewing pleasure of the voyeur.
In Eyebeam, visitors and residents are combined; Museum of

Image and Sound offers a promenade as vertical boulevard;
and Columbia provides the study cascade where the
snaking form of the circulation engages the facade.
Vertical Boulevard, extension of beach promenade along

faade, The Museum of Image and Sound; courtesy of DS+R
The Extraordinary Everyday

Just as Henri Lefevbre suggested transformation of everyday
life could be found in the very processes of everyday life, it is
suggested DS+R use the stair to critique the everyday
condition of an individual-in-space at a point in time. The stair
is used beyond mere ordinary function to be made absurd or
extraordinary; it is projected forward for the viewer to take as
it is or take something from.
The stair, when thrust to the elevation as social activator,

becomes the performance screen or backdrop with the focus
on the individual and their movement, the faade exposes
and/or transmits. People are free to roam but are complicit in
their own surveillance. The viewer-turned-voyeur once
experienced vertigo and is now exposed as the object to be
viewed.
The stair is essentially a two-way street of

acceptance.
In the DS+R oeuvre, they first develop theatrical installations

as body-in-space, to stairs bisecting program and
disassociating views, to the stair as truly theatrical
architecture. DS+R are imploring the viewer to suspend
disbelief, to look beyond the stair as a conventional stair, and
instead to see a collection of individuals as an animated
faade as a picture of everyday life.
And for the individuals to use the stair not as a typical stair,
but as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead demands
the actors accept they are in a play for their audience to
accept the suspension of disbelief to improvise its use.
The stair is essentially a two-way street of acceptance.

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7/28/2017 Diller Scofidio + Renfro: The Suspension of Disbelief - Architizer

Diller Scofidio + Renfro: The Suspension

This article is the first in a new series, Reinterpretations, that

The American architecture practice DILLER SCOFIDO +

Section through the Eyebeam Museum of Art and

They contort the basic essence of a stairs

They contort the basic essence of a stairs upward/downward

Walter Gropius Total Theater, 1927; via Shams Design

The Preexisting as Backdrop

While it is unequivocal that DS+R was founded on the works

transition moment when the theatrical experimentations

French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, in The Critique of

Diller + Scofidio, Loophole, installation at Second Artillery

Many of DS+Rs early theater works or installations depend

Movement is chronicled or archived and

Diller Scofidio, Facsimile, 2002; courtesy of DS+R

Such a conflation of recorded imagery and live streaming

The deception of live footage and, in this instance, fictional

Diller + Scofidio, Overexposed, Getty Center, 1994;

Predating each of these examples is Withdrawing Room (San

As a series of spatial meditations, DS+R exposed a conflict

stair is the preexisting component that succeeds in all it

Diller + Scofidio, the withDrawing Room, installation at Capp

In a final but most prescient theater example, The Rotary

Diller + Scofidio, set design for A Delay in Glass, or The

The individual is physically located in space

The Suspension of Disbelief

A building has conventions that depend on

In Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the

Diller + Scofidio, model of The Slow House, 1989; courtesy of

In a similar vein, DS+R highlight that a public conditioned to

crossover between the Theatre of the Absurd and DS+R lies

Supplementary to the argument posited is one of DS+Rs

Diller + Scofidio, view of visitor on ramp, The Blur Building,

While Slow House is a controlled spatial design with a focus

The Theatrical Stair

levels. Constrained by regulation, the stair is a difficult

To begin to alter the stair is no ordinary feat.

The Sunken Overlook at 10th Avenue, The High Line; New

Incidentally, this moment may have its origins in the Institute

create a room that looks down into the harbor. Somewhat

Practice Rooms, School of American Ballet, Lincoln Center

Around the corner from Alice Tully Hall is the entry to

Such physical studies of the stair all turn what would be a

Section Viewing North, School of American Ballet, Lincoln

Practice Rooms, School of American Ballet, Lincoln Center

Its very conventionality allows for the fluctuation in program

the stair scythes between for purely

In Flesh: Architectural Probes (2011) DS+R produced a book

Lobby with view of stairs and escalator, The Broad Museum,

A darkened, shadowy crevice awaits.

It is unsurprising then to find the access to the main gallery

Program and circulation are explicitly separated at the Culture

Diller + Scofidio, Eyebeam Museum of Art and

In the aforementioned stair examples, the importance of the

The main elevation in each is visually stimulated by a ramp

on regulations of height and landing and so maintains a stair-

Exterior View, Medical and Graduate Education Building at

In each of the ribbon projects, the individual is on full display,

In Eyebeam, visitors and residents are combined; Museum of

Vertical Boulevard, extension of beach promenade along

The Extraordinary Everyday

The stair, when thrust to the elevation as social activator,