Ricardo Scofidio, architect of New York’s High Line, dies age 89

Architect Ricardo Scofidio, whose work co-designing museums, art venues and public spaces — including New York City’s famed High Line — reshaped America’s cultural landscape, has died age 89. A statement posted to the website of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the influential architecture practice he founded alongside wife Elizabeth Diller, said Scofidio had a “profound impact” on its work, adding: “The firm’s partners and principals … will extend his architectural legacy in the work we will continue to perform every day.” The company did not specify a cause of death but said Scofidio died peacefully on Thursday “surrounded by family.” Born in 1935, Scofidio studied at Columbia University before practicing at a New York architecture firm and becoming a professor at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. It was there he met then-student Diller, almost 20 years his junior, and they founded their studio in 1981. (Architect Charles Renfro’s name was added after he became a partner more than two decades later.) The duo’s early work was more concerned with the theoretical underpinnings of architecture than the practice itself. Their output through the 1980s and 1990s is best measured in terms of installations, videos and performances, not completed buildings. Yet, the firm’s artistic beginnings laid a conceptual framework for its later forays into the built environment. After completing Slither Housing in 2000, an angular yet gently curved 105-unit apartment building in Japan’s Gifu prefecture, the husband-and-wife team increasingly turned its attentions to cultural architecture. Their Blur Building, a pavilion that appeared to float above Switzerland’s Lake Neuchatel, was considered one of the triumphs of the 2002 Expo, and they soon began building on a greater scale. The ambitious Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, opened in 2007, signaled Diller and Scofidio’s arrival as a major architectural force. The first museum to be built in the city in a century, its upper volume hangs dramatically above ground, freeing up space for a generous public waterfront. The pair repeated the gesture soon after with the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall (both at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York), effectively removing a corner of the latter’s angular structure to create more space for the busy Manhattan intersection below. It was, however, New York’s High Line that propelled Diller and Scofidio into mainstream consciousness: In 2009, the year its first phase opened to the public, the pair were named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Completed alongside landscape architect James Corner and garden designer Piet Oudolf, the project transformed an abandoned freight train line into a 1.5-mile-long linear park on Manhattan’s West Side. Despite its ambitious size, the elevated park’s design is often celebrated for the quiet moments enjoyed traveling its length — the diverse garden zones, the picnic spots, sunken benches overlooking a framed vista of the traffic below. Describing his approach in a 2012 documentary about the project, Scofidio said: “The first time I came up here, I discovered the plants were incredibly opportunistic. Where there was sun, you had one kind of grass that was growing; where there was shade, you had a different plant that was growing. When we started thinking about the design, we realized that we could be as opportunistic as the plants.” The project sparked both a global craze for elevated walkways and — thanks in part to the re-zoning its creation necessitated — a building boom in its corner of Manhattan. Diller Scofidio + Renfro proved to be one of the beneficiaries when it was commissioned to design The Shed, a monolithic cultural center at the nearby Hudson Yards development that opened, to mixed reviews, in 2019. The firm’s other major museum projects include the United States Olympic & Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs and The Broad in LA (both its original design and a major expansion project set to complete by 2028). Diller Scofidio + Renfro also completed a formidable $450 million revamp of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMa), which increased its gallery space by 30%. Scofidio’s legacy will remain intertwined with that of his Polish-born wife, who often served as the firm’s public face. (In 2018 she was once again named in the Time 100 list, this time without her husband.) Yet, he was known for his imaginative vision and technical problem-solving, quietly driving the firm’s creative vision from behind the scenes. “I’ve become what I consider to be the troubleshooter,” he told the New York Times in an interview in 2019. “When there are snags or hang-ups, I’ll work to find a solution.”