Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/566702
"When he was judging the competition, he fell in love with the project and he has defended it through thick and thin. The story, really, is that Eli is a fan of architecture." —Elizabeth Diller 164 CULTURED e have a great history here of typologies we call campus, including the U.S. Naval Academy and the CIA," says landscape architect Gary Hilderbrand. The campus model, while not new, is one that has proven effective with master plans for projects—for both academic and cultural institutions that Hilderbrand and Doug Reed, with their 45-person firm, Reed Hilderbrand, have implemented. According to the landscape architect and design professor, the origins of campus life are rooted in the Latin term "Campus Martius"—the translation being "field of mars." "The main ingredient of a campus organization is a coherent, continuous landscape structure," Hilderbrand says. Elizabeth Diller couldn't say she wasn't warned. The in-demand architect, who pulled off miracles in designing the High Line and drastically improving New York's Lincoln Center, was urged to be cautious about working with the strong-minded tycoon and philanthropist Eli Broad on his signature private museum. "People told me, 'Watch out. Eli is not kind to architects,'" recalls Diller, sitting in the West Chelsea offices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York. But Diller was intrigued by The Broad project and submitted a plan for the competition in 2010. The design won—something that has been happening a lot lately for her and her firm. The fruit of their collaboration—easily the year's biggest museum opening—debuts this month in Los Angeles. The Broad, DS+R's 120,000-square-foot museum, which endured a year of delays and ultimately cost $140 million, now holds some 2,000 contemporary works in what is perhaps the country's best private art collection—a trove of pieces by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Kara Walker and many more. And Diller found herself getting along well with her patron. "I found Eli to be very pragmatic, but also very protective of the architecture," she says. "When he was judging the competition, he fell in love with the project, and he has defended it through thick and thin. The story really is that Eli is a fan of architecture." The way Diller wasn't intimidated by Broad's reputation is indicative of her fearlessness, but even more so, the way that thorny challenges of any sort turn her on intellectually, a pattern that has become clearer in the last decade of her work. "The more people said watch out for Eli, the more I wanted to do the project," she says. "There was something about being attracted by danger." Diller, who is a thin and angular person with a sharp mind to match, calls her design for The Broad "dumb, in a nice way," but that may be only from her lofty perspective. "It just has the one idea that we pushed and pushed," she says. That idea was a two-part structure, the 'veil' and the 'vault.'" It grew out of "conflicting aspirations," says Diller, namely that The Broad had to be both a museum and a large storage facility. So 36 million pounds of concrete went into creating the three-story vault, which is intentionally heavy-looking. Visitors ascend up into the light, with peekaboos into The Broad offices and storage areas along the way, toward a top floor of gloriously skylit exhibition area under the veil, some 35,000 square feet of column-free space. "The veil nests over the vault," says Diller. The building gets its dynamic look from the honeycomb of skylights that perforate the veil. They're diagrids, and the shape ensures that no direct light enters the exhibition spaces, only the carefully filtered kind. The veil's look also explicitly contrasts with Frank Gehry's ebullient Disney Hall, directly next door. "It was the most daunting of sites," she says. "I think that in the end, we said there's no way to compete. Disney has a more opaque and shiny surface—ours is much more porous and absorbent." Diller and her husband, Ricardo Scofidio, the co-founder of their firm, have made a career of tackling conceptual challenges that go well beyond designing buildings—they have curated museum shows about the idea of the American lawn, of all things, and even the culture of wine. The Broad project was also given their signature big-picture questioning. "Museums want sound control, light control," says Diller. "It usually means opaque buildings that are solid interfaces. But the idea of tuning the city out is not particularly interesting to me." So, in addition to the porousness of the veil, its corners don't come all the way down to the street—they are "folded up," providing a more inviting presence from the street. Diller is perhaps most proud of the building's robust functionality. "We have a lot of muscle and not a lot of fat," she says. "In most museums you're lucky to have 30 or 40 percent exhibition space. The Broad is nearly 50 percent." Most of the firm's projects are in the cultural realm these days—a statement most architects would kill to make. "We feel like we can make our best contribution there," Diller says. DS+R is underway on two different buildings at Columbia University, the new business school and a medical education facility, not to mention the controversial MoMA expansion and 2019's Culture Shed. That group of institutions highlights the fact that by the time the current slate is finished, no prominent architects will have gotten so many significant structures built in New York City. That's the Holy Grail for many, partly because it's so difficult. Diller was born in Poland, but she grew up mostly in New York City, and so the concentration of work there pleases her greatly. She and Scofidio live in the Village, and they have a house upstate in the Hudson Valley, too. Amusingly, given the vast scale they work at, they are too busy for the simplest of tasks on the homefront: "We can't even renovate our own bathrooms." Diller attended Cooper Union, and fell into the profession sideways. "I never even wanted to do architecture," she recalls. "I wasn't interested. I took architectonics just for the hell of it." Once Diller joined forces with Scofidio, they favored the experimental and the conceptual. "The way the studio grew was on 'thinking projects,'" she says. "For us, success doesn't mean having bigger projects or a bigger studio. It's just keeping us amused." Successes came fairly quickly, but two projects in particular made a difference. "To me the paradigm shifting projects were Lincoln Center and High Line—these two opportunities to do something in our own city," Diller says. W