February
15, 2002
Architect
Elizabeth Diller to Speak at Mount Holyoke February 28
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PHOTO: SALLY DAVIDSON
Elizabeth
Diller
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Crossing a footbridge
over the blue waters of a vast lake, you enter a Tinkertoy-like
structure surrounded and penetrated by fog. An indistinct murmuring
envelopes you. As protection from the damp, you don a "brain
coat" that has been programmed with your likes and dislikes;
it blushes red as you pass a stranger with a similar profile,
green as you slip by others. Taking your seat in the half-submerged
sushi restaurant, you notice fish swimming by at eye level between
double-paned walls. Upstairs in the bar, you place your order
from a menu of a dozen different types of water—and nothing
else.
Welcome to the world
of Elizabeth Diller. Her Blur Building— designed with partner
Ricardo Scofidio and currently under construction for the Swiss
National Exposition in Yverdon-les-Bains—is one of the many
interdisciplinary design projects that have earned Diller a reputation
as the driving force of the American architectural avant-garde.
Diller will discuss new works Thursday, February 28, at 7:30 pm
in Gamble Auditorium. The event is sponsored by the Harriet L.
and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership and supported by the
Katherine B. Fitzgerald Lectureship Fund. Diller's appearance
at the College is part of the yearlong series Building Meaning:
Architecture and Public Space in the Third Millennium.
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Elizabeth
Diller's Blur Building
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"Last semester
we looked at the role of architecture in society," says Christopher
Benfey, codirector of the Weissman Center. "This semester,
we're focusing squarely on architects as artists, as people who
offer vision, sometimes an alternative vision, of how to live
in the world." Benfey points out that, recently, Diller and
Scofidio were among four New York architects who collaborated
on the design of viewing platforms at the World Trade Center site.
"We have a very different relationship to buildings than
we did before September 11," says Benfey, "especially
large, public buildings. Immediately after the attacks on the
World Trade Center, Elizabeth Diller entered into the conversation
about the site. She and Scofidio urged from a very early date
that Ground Zero be a place for remembrance and not a commercial
site." Benfey has also observed that in the wake of the September
11 attacks, Diller has become one of the people the media looks
to "for a sense of how we should be thinking about buildings
now."
Last April, Boston's
Institute of Contemporary Art chose Diller + Scofidio to design
the new ICA, which will be the first art museum to be built in
Boston in nearly a century. Slated for completion in 2004, the
new 60,000-square-foot museum complex on South Boston's Fan Pier
will be Diller + Scofidio's first major new building project in
the United States.
Diller has been associate
professor of architecture at Princeton University since 1990 and
director of graduate studies at the university since 1993. In
1979, she and Scofidio formed Diller + Scofidio—an interdisciplinary
studio combining architecture, the visual arts, and the performing
arts. In 1999, Diller was the recipient of the first MacArthur
Foundation grant given in the field of architecture.
The Weissman Center
series continues April 24 when Daniel Libeskind, designer of the
Jewish Museum in Berlin, will present his work in dialogue with
James Young, professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of At Memory's Edge:
After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture
(2000). On the same date, W. Michael Blumenthal, director of the
Jewish Museum in Berlin and author of The Invisible Wall: Germans
and Jews: A Personal Exploration (1998), will discuss the
genesis of the Jewish Museum.
Looking forward to
the spring event, Karen Remmler, codirector of the Weissman Center,
notes that Libeskind, like Diller, is known for his interdisciplinary
approach to architecture and specifically for his "use of
space to express, or make concrete, the relationship between memory
and history." Libeskind's design of the Jewish Museum in
Berlin, notes Remmler, "allowed for unusable 'voids'—empty
spaces that represent the discontinuity of German-Jewish relations."
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