Liz Diller on New Projects & Women in Architecture

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Next, in the heart of the city, a highly touted new building project has ended with a grand unveiling. That’s New York City. Liz Diller is an award-winning architect and co-founder of Diller Scofidio and Renfro and her studio is behind some of the world’s most iconic building project, including The High Line in New York, and the ongoing renovation of The Museum of Modern Art. She’s been speaking to our Hari Sreenivasan about her latest project known as The Shed. It’s a public art center and colossal work of engineering with a whole section that can be moved around on wheels.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Elizabeth Diller, thanks for joining us. First, let’s talk about your most recent piece, The Shed, in New York City. What is it?

ELIZABETH DILLER, ARCHITECT: The Shed is a brand new cultural institution, that shows the visual and performing arts under one roof and it’s all new commission programming. It sits on Hudson Yards adjacent to The High Line.

SREENIVASAN: So did you come up with this idea?

DILLER: So the idea sprang from a request for proposals from the city and it was in 2008, it was when the economy was tanking and it was really improbable to imagine a new cultural facility in New York. And so we thought, “Well, what does New York need that it actually doesn’t have?” And the answer is some place that actually houses all of the creative disciplines in one place, that’s purpose built for flexibility, and that’s designed for the future that we can’t imagine. The building has some unusual features.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. So tell us a little bit about those features.

DILLER: So the main organization of the building is it’s a fixed structure with multiple levels of which three are very tall floors for galleries and performing arts spaces, that is a theater and two galleries that are stacked. And on top of the fix building there is a telescoping outer shell that basically slides out onto an open space to the east. And when it does so it encloses and shelters a very, very large space that can be heated and cooled, it can be an interior space. In fact, doubling the original footprint. So we’re able to put on very large installations, very large theatrical productions, all sorts of events. And when we don’t need those events, we don’t have to heat or cool the space, we simply roll it back, nested back on the fixed building and it’s quite modest and it opens up a big public space right next to it that could also be used for cultural programming.

SREENIVASAN: What’s structurally difficult about designing something like that?

DILLER: Well, it’s hard to move an 8 million pound building, so we worked with a team of engineers and actually the structural principle is very, very simple. It’s based on crane technology that you see at shipping ports, and it’s an industrial system that basically runs on steel tracks with steel wheels, and the motors are at the very top of the building and it’s just a rack and pinion system which has mechanical advantage. So when it moves, the movement is silent. It takes only five-minutes to open and/or close the building and it runs on a horsepower of one Prius engine.

SREENIVASAN: You can move an 8 million pound building with a tiny Toyota Prius engine or the equivalent of?

DILLER: Yes, exactly.

SREENIVASAN: Wow.

DILLER: From an engineering standpoint, it’s extremely smart, sustainable, quiet and operationally very, very easy to do.

SREENIVASAN: It’s also adjacent to The High Line, which is for people who don’t know the conversion of an elevated rail track, into a walkway, into a park, into a public space. Now, you’re also behind that. How does that connect to The Shed?

DILLER: We made up an urban park out of it and it’s been really quite the rage, so very, very popular in New York. There’s been a viral effect all over the world. There are high lines all over the place and it’s led to a tremendous amount of transformation in what we call the far Westside Chelsea and Meatpacking District. And this transformation ultimately also incorporated the rail yards, which had previously not been built on. So the opportunity to do The Shed is directly linked to the success of The High Line and that whole transformation of the Westside.

SREENIVASAN: Why do you think people are connected to it? I mean especially with these spin-offs around the world, what is it about walking just this other elevation that connects with people?

DILLER: I think there are multiple things, one is that you’re walking 25 feet off the ground and you can walk for a mile and a half without stopping for a light or a car to go by, so you have this wonderful promenade. You also see New York in a very different way, not the postcard views, not the very polished beautiful things and typical sights. You see a kind of subconscious of New York. It was never really meant to be seen. You see these chimney stacks. You see alleys. You see solid brick buildings. You see laundry drape from people’s windows.

It’s just a different side of New York that we don’t typically see. But I think that there’s one thing that people maybe don’t think about, but that really resonates with me about The High Line. Basically you can only do two things; you can walk and you can sit. So basically it’s a place for doing nothing, and in a city where everybody is productive all of the time, whether they’re working or working out, burning calories or shopping or on their devices, they’re always doing something. And The High Line gives you a kind of license to really do nothing and take that kind of parenthetical moment in the day and just be there and look at other people and just hang out.

SREENIVASAN: I mean in a way that’s not necessarily that when you look at your body of work, you don’t design that many spaces for doing nothing, you’re also doing a lot of spaces that have a function in mind when you’re crafting them. So is there a through line if we look back through all of your work? Is there a connective tissue?

DILLER: I think that there are several strands maybe. One is a preoccupation with vision and the culture of vision, which incorporates all sorts of things like spectatorship and exhibitionism and voyeurism and just interest in optics and a kind of preoccupation and a kind of critique maybe with a preoccupation of vision as a master sense. So that’s one of the through lines.

Another one is a kind of desire to democratize space, an interest in publicness, and even on private property to always carve out space. And as our cities are getting progressively privatized, architects really have to be on the warpath here to protect space and make sure there’s enough for the public.

SREENIVASAN: You’re also part of a couple of projects in Hudson Yards, it’s a multibillion-dollar endeavor. The concern has been some of these types of projects are serving to make neighborhoods more elite. How does that square with what you’re just saying is your interest in trying to make sure that there are public spaces preserved?

DILLER: Yes. I think that the city was very, very smart in organizing the open space and making sure that there was enough open space, public space open to the sky on Hudson Yards because it was privately developed. And they were extra smart in identifying that parcel that would always belong to the city on which The Shed stands. So that is while it’s physically within the four corner of Hudson Yards, it’s actually New York City property and will always be, that’s the first thing. Before any design takes place, it’s just making sure that that’s protected for public and cultural use.

SREENIVASAN: I also wanted to ask you about the project you just finished up in Moscow, what was the intent? What was the outcome?

DILLER: So Zaryadye Park was a competition, an international competition that we won and this was the time of Edward Snowden and the relationship between the U.S. and Russia was already – it’s quite complicated. People told us to not compete, not even bother because an American had no chance of winning this competition. And we had our doubts about the government and whether we wanted to step a foot in Russia and convinced ourselves that this is a project for the city of Moscow. So it’s a 35-acre park that sits right next to the Kremlin. It’s basically Moscow’s equivalent to our Central Park, and it was the first time the site was liberated.

Before that, the hotel Rossiya stood there and it was a Soviet-era hotel with 3,000 rooms, really crazy huge footprint of a building. And when they raised it, the first idea was to develop it commercially, and then they decided that was not a good idea, that a park should be there. So they were very inspired by The High Line and I think that was the reason for our invitation to participate in the competition. So now the park is open for about a year and a half, and the brief says don’t make a space where people could collect and it was very, very clearly avoiding any kind of protest.

SREENIVASAN: Protests.

DILLER: Yes. And parks in Russia, and particularly Moscow, were all very formal axial and there are certain kinds of plants that are allowable and usually very, very formal gardens. So our idea was to actually make a place for people to collect. We called it wild urbanism, and we thought about it as a place where — and similar to The High Line — where the paving system and the vegetation are intertwined in different ways. This project was so embraced by the Muscovites. It was in the first month, a million people came and it’s one of the great attractions right now. And I think we got away with murder here. We made a place that was truly progressive in a government that may not have really understood entirely, but we had a great ally with the city architect.

SREENIVASAN: You had an exhibit where there was a building on a lake and you essentially had this giant fog machine, but the fog itself was what people were interacting with. Tell me about that.

DILLER: Yes. So our studio in, I believe, 2002 for the Swiss expo, we decided to make a structure that was inhabitable, that was out in the lake structure there, that was a huge fog, a cloud of fog that you walked through. There’s 500 foot long bridge that brought you there and then you found yourself on something the size of a football field with no walls just a couple of platforms with four columns that went down into the lake bed.

But you were immersed in this mist and you really couldn’t see more than three feet ahead of you. It was called the blur building. It became such a hit and in Switzerland, they required every student to go visit it. And because it was amorphous and you couldn’t quite see, you could hear this kind of hissing of the sand 35,000 fog nozzles and you were immersed in it and you could walk in any direction, but it came to represent this certain notion of Swiss doubt which I thought was really, really phenomenal.

SREENIVASAN: Being in Switzerland, being in the middle of —

DILLER: Being in the middle of and not knowing politically what you wanted to do, EU or not EU, what country are you with, what language do you speak… and it was just a super interesting way of penetrating a country.

SREENIVASAN: You have been teaching at Princeton for decades, and I wonder if in that time you’ve seen batches of students year after year, is there a gap between the number of women that enter the profession and the number of women who either stick with it? Because it seems a male-dominated industry, at the end result, regardless of who’s coming in to your classroom.

DILLER: Yes. Well, it is very male-dominated and when you think about it from a cultural perspective, the association you would make with an architect is a white male heroic figure. I mean typically that’s the very successful architects of the past have sort of fallen into a certain type. Today, people work very, very differently. There are many collaboratives. I work in a collaboration with three men and one is gay, one is black, one is my husband, and one is white, the unusual white guy in a team with a woman. Three minorities essentially. And so people work very, very differently today.

In terms of women, my classes are 50% female. There’s an absolute gender balance in academia, no different than many other fields. But there’s something that happens, that gap. So women come into the workplace, there’s a disparity I think in salaries still and then as women progress, some have families and need to take time off, some officers are not that generous about giving women time off. We have maternity and paternity leave and we’ve always done it that way. And we encourage women to slowly come back to the workplace.

But still even in our studio, there’s not a balance, it’s not the way it is in the academic context. And I think we have to just think about it a lot and try to figure out what’s really long care. A lot of people in architecture are men and women, have to dedicate tremendous hours to it. It’s a very, very hard profession. It’s not one that you can just leave at five o’clock and then forget about it until nine o’clock the next morning.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. Is there a movement in the industry to address this, do you think?

DILLER: I think many firms are thinking about it.

SREENIVASAN: I mean your firm might be one because there is a woman at the leader – as you said three minorities in a way are running the firm, but that’s not necessarily the case with most successful architecture firms.

DILLER: That’s exactly right. I think role models are very, very important. Seeing that other women have succeeded and some women who really just sort of cracked that glass ceiling and make it and really transform that image of that singular figure, that singular voice. It’s strange because you think that we’ve gotten over that by now, but no, not quite.

SREENIVASAN: Liz Diller, thanks so much for joining us.

DILLER: Thank you. Great to be here.