From Experiment to Building: The Architectural Translations of Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Abstract

Since its founding in the early 1980s, the New York practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro has developed a body of work that spans architecture, installation, performance, and visual media. While the firm describes itself as interdisciplinary, the term has remained largely descriptive. Existing scholarship has documented particular dimensions of the practice, such as the role of images, duration, and performance, without fully explaining how ideas developed in one medium are translated into architectural decisions in another. This thesis addresses that gap by asking how DS+R’s interdisciplinary practices have influenced their built projects, in both physical form and conceptual approach.

The study adopts a qualitative case study methodology, anchored in four buildings that span two decades: The Brasserie (2000), the Blur Building (2002), the Institute of Contemporary Art (2006), and The Shed (2019). Around each anchor, a network of related non-architectural works is positioned in relation to the building, and recurring modes of translation are then compared across cases. The analysis extends Robin Evans’s concept of translation from the drawing-to-building relationship to the movement of ideas between installation, performance, media, and architecture.

Four translation mechanisms are identified: apparatus transfer, conceptual scaling, media logic transposition, and programmatic translation. Across the four cases, these mechanisms progressively deepen their integration into architectural production, moving from discrete devices embedded within a building to the organizing logic of the building itself. The thesis argues that DS+R’s significance within contemporary architectural history lies not in the fact that they have worked across media, but in the completeness of the circuit they have established between interdisciplinary experimentation and realized architecture.