Columbia GSAPP is deeply saddened by the passing of Ricardo Scofidio, an admired and beloved member of our community, who earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at Columbia in 1960 when GSAPP was still known as The Columbia School of Architecture.
Ricardo Scofidio was one of the most influential architects and architectural educators of the past five decades. His students at The Cooper Union, where he taught from 1965 to 2007, are a living testimony to his personal and intellectual generosity. It was there that he met his partner in life, Elizabeth Diller, with whom he co-founded the interdisciplinary design studio Diller + Scofidio in 1981. Together, through an incessant dialogue where practice and personal life became indistinguishable, they inaugurated a new form of research-based practice that challenged the boundaries between installations, performance, and buildings. During those years, their public interactions became the way to make their office work visible. Members of our community vividly recall lectures at GSAPP from the 1990s where Liz would speak while Ric (as he was known by his colleagues and friends) sketched on a whiteboard. At times, during their lectures, they would dramatically interrupt each other in a form of performative debate. To this partnership—which reconceptualized architecture as the medium where the fleshy, the technological, and the societal entangle—he also brought a refined design sensitivity. Their early conceptual work already benefited from his sophisticated care for materiality and detailing, which became a unique form of resistance against abstraction, in an effort to politically situate technology.
The international success of their Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (2002), was followed by the renaming of the firm as Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) in 2004, marking the addition of architect and GSAPP graduate Charles Renfro (‘94 MSAAD) to the office’s leadership. With Renfro, DS+R expanded its portfolio to include an impressive array of cultural, institutional, and urban spaces, featuring some of the most celebrated architectural projects in recent history, such as The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2006) and The Broad Museum in Los Angeles (2015). DS+R work has reshaped New York City more than any other architect’s work has done in recent decades, with the renovation and expansion of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (2003–2009), The High Line (2009), The Shed (2019), and the expansion of The Museum of Modern Art (2019). Ricardo’s and DS+R’s long-standing relationship with Columbia University crystallized in three exceptional buildings: The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center (2016), part of Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons; Henry R. Kravis Hall (2022); and David Geffen Hall (2022), the new homes of Columbia’s Business School.
GSAPP Dean Andrés Jaque reflects: “Ricardo Scofidio uniquely exemplifies Columbia GSAPP’s identity as a school where design is understood as a research practice, where the material and the discursive are inseparable. His quiet capacity to interrogate the complexities of the present and his gentle presence will continue to inspire us and occupy an important space in our hearts, our minds, and our work.”
Ricardo Scofidio’s legacy is one of provocation, inquiry, and radical thinking in architecture. His intelligence and generosity remain deeply embedded in Columbia GSAPP through the work and testimony of those among us who were close to him, our programs, and our culture, reminding future generations how to challenge and critically intervene in the world through architecture.
