New York, from 1979.

The practice now called Diller Scofidio + Renfro grew out of a partnership between two architects who met at a New York art and architecture school. The New Yorker, in a profile by Justin Davidson dated 7 May 2007, says Ricardo Scofidio was a professor at Cooper Union and Elizabeth Diller was a student there when the two met in the autumn of 1976. In 1979, the year Diller graduated, the magazine says, the pair moved in together, started working side by side and, without quite meaning to, founded a studio. Wikipedia gives 1981 as the year the studio was founded.

The early name was a short equation. The New Yorker says the two decided to become known officially as a “creative sum”, Diller + Scofidio, and names The withDrawing Room of 1987 as an early installation they signed together. In that piece, the magazine says, a dining table and chairs hung near a gallery ceiling and a wall sliced a bed into two hinged halves. The plus sign between the two surnames put the partners side by side, with neither name set above the other.

For much of the 1980s and 1990s the studio worked mainly outside conventional building. The Observer, in an interview by Rowan Moore published on 30 December 2012, says the two made their name with installations, exhibitions and performances in galleries and found spaces, including one work that filled a room with open suitcases, one for each American state, on the theme of tourism. The New York Times, in an article by Herbert Muschamp dated 29 August 1999, describes Diller and Scofidio as two architects who lived and practised together in New York, known at that point mainly for temporary mixed-media installations, often commissioned by museums and public art funds. The same article says they had published their projects in books including Flesh and Back to the Front, so the printed page was already one of the places where the studio presented itself.

A restaurant, a third partner and a new name.

The step from installations to built work can be dated through a restaurant. The New York Times reported on 29 August 1999 that the pair were designing a new Brasserie in the basement of the Seagram Building on East 53rd Street, replacing a restaurant of the same name designed by Philip Johnson in 1959, and that it was due to open that October. The newspaper named Charles Renfro as project architect. The same article said the pair had completed an apartment block in Gifu, Japan, earlier that year and were working on projects in San Francisco, at Kennedy International Airport and in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.

The New Yorker says the Brasserie project prompted Renfro to join the studio, and dates the restaurant to 2000. The magazine says he joined in 2000 and became a partner three years later; Wikipedia says he joined in 1997 and was named partner in 2004. By May 2007 the magazine was using the name Diller Scofidio + Renfro, “as the firm is now called”. The new name kept the original pair of surnames, now without a sign between them, and moved the plus sign to the join with the third partner.

The same profile describes the studio’s working rooms. It says that in November 2006 the practice moved to a large space in the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, after years in a loft near Cooper Union that Scofidio described as more of a workshop than a typical office. It also says the three partners kept teaching posts: Scofidio at Cooper Union, Diller at Princeton and Renfro at Columbia. Wikipedia says Benjamin Gilmartin became the fourth partner in 2015; the name stayed at three surnames.

The Blur Building of 2002 belongs to the same period. The New Yorker and The Observer both describe it as a temporary structure on Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, with a walkway and nozzles that sprayed water vapour into the air to make an artificial cloud.

Names, books, models and photographs.

An architecture practice rarely sells a product off a shelf, so its identity lives in a handful of recurring surfaces. The first is the name itself. Many practices are named after their founders, and the way those names are joined says a good deal: a plus sign, an ampersand, a comma or a plain run of surnames each sets a different tone, and a change of partners often means a change of name. Initials and acronyms do similar work, compressing several people into a short mark that fits on a drawing title block.

The second surface is the published work. Monographs, exhibition catalogues and the practice’s own books carry its typography, layout and image style into libraries and bookshops, often for longer than any website. Models are a third surface: the material, scale and finish of a presentation model become part of how a studio is recognised. The fourth is photography of finished buildings, where the choice of photographer, framing and light repeats across press kits, websites and lectures. For a design guide, these surfaces show how a practice keeps a consistent voice while its buildings differ in place, programme and material.

A viaduct, a concert hall and a museum on Grand Avenue.

From the 2000s the practice’s work moved into large public projects in New York. The Observer said in December 2012 that the High Line, the mile-long park made on an old elevated railway in Manhattan, was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro together with landscape architect James Corner and garden designer Piet Oudolf. Diller told the paper that the team’s task had been not to spoil the viaduct, and that the main contribution was a paving system that tied the park’s parts together. Wikipedia dates the High Line work to 2009–2019.

The same Observer piece described the practice’s long project at Lincoln Center, including the renovation of Alice Tully Hall, a pavilion whose roof is also a sloping lawn and a bridge over one of the roads around the complex. Wikipedia’s project list dates the Lincoln Center redesign to 2007–2011 and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to 2007.

On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times reported on 21 September 2015 that The Broad, the contemporary art museum built by Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, had opened to the public the day before. Back in New York, Wikipedia dates The Shed and 15 Hudson Yards, both at Hudson Yards, to 2019, along with the expansion of the Museum of Modern Art, which it lists as a project with Gensler.

Across these projects the name on the drawings has changed once, when a third surname joined the original two. The practice’s published books, exhibitions and installations sit alongside its buildings as part of how it presents itself, a pattern that runs back to the late 1980s.

For a design guide, Diller Scofidio + Renfro shows how a plus sign can carry a partnership: at the start between two names, later between a founding pair and a third partner. Compare Gensler, the practice Wikipedia lists alongside it on the Museum of Modern Art expansion, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, another practice named after its partners. For this guide we use garden green, steel and concrete with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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