Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Elizabeth Diller\u2019s office is in a corner of a huge, open-plan loft in a former warehouse building in Chelsea.\u00a0I meet her on a Friday afternoon, when the office is Friday-quiet and the sun is sparkling on the Hudson.\u00a0The building, which occupies an entire city block, once had freight trains running into it.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s a nice reminder that Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the studio she co-founded with her husband Ricardo Scofidio in 1981 (Charles Renfro became partner in 2004), is best known for the High Line. The transformation of a disused freight rail line into what has become an astonishingly successful elevated linear park radically remade the landscape of Manhattan\u2019s west side a couple of blocks away.\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m apologetic about conducting the interview now.\u00a0Only a few weeks before, Scofidio died. Diller\u2019s colleagues had assured me that she was happy to be distracted by talking about her work.\u00a0 It is tinged with sadness, but this year brings the practice back into the global spotlight.\u00a0On May 31 the V&A East Storehouse will open on the edge of London\u2019s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.\u00a0Sited in part of the huge former Olympics Media Centre it is an ingenious reuse of an existing structure and represents a remarkable opening up of the museum\u2019s massive collection.\u00a0At the Venice Biennale meanwhile there is a bookshop and an installation that makes coffee out of canal water.\u00a0\u00a0We came out of the institutional critique but then we realised that it was people like us who were now running the institutionsAll these projects appear closer in intellectual ambition \u2014 rethinking institutions, technology and public space \u2014 to Diller and Scofidio\u2019s early work than they do to the big architecture their studio has become known for.\u00a0A classic example of the latter is the Shed, situated a few blocks away from their office \u2014 a transformable blockbuster which acts as the cultural component for the Hudson Yards development.\u00a0Nearby is Pier 57, turned into a massive tech-campus on the water for Google. Just beyond that is their 88-storey 15 Hudson Yards, one of the city\u2019s best recent skyscrapers.\u00a0The list continues across the globe, from Los Angeles, where they are working on a new phase of the Broad art museum, to Adelaide, where the Tarrkarri Centre for First Nations Cultures is emerging from Kaurna land.\u00a0There is also the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Qatar, the first contemporary purpose-built mosque for women in the world.\u00a0It is a remarkable building with a perforated concrete carpet of a roof floating over it; bright, light, fluid and open. Yet when Diller and Scofidio broke onto the scene they were known for challenging the orthodoxies of the big builders, the late modernists and the postmodernists.\u00a0They were doing something more nimble, working in galleries and on paper, in academia and in text.\u00a0\u201cThere was a kind of resistance,\u201d Diller tells me, \u201cthat came with the 1970s.\u201d\u00a0(She still sports the same radical chic almost-quiff and black-framed glasses she did half a century ago.)\u201cI lived down in the East Village and New York was quite depressed then, post-industrial but pre-anything.\u00a0It was the time when artists could find huge lofts.\u00a0The space allowed you to do experimental work, down and dirty and very liberating.\u201dIf she seems the archetypal New Yorker, Diller was actually born in Poland in 1958 and moved with her family to the US in 1960. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Architecture where she met Scofidio \u2014 who was one of her tutors. Their first work together, says Diller, was Traffic in 1981.\u00a0It was a\u00a024-hour installation of thousands of orange traffic cones in the traffic island of Columbus Circle, a striking piece of visual protest about the sheer waste of public space incurred by traffic engineering.Their first major architectural moment came two decades later and was hardly a building at all.\u00a0Blur Building, built for the Swiss National Exposition in 2002, was a skeletal structure set on Lake Neuch\u00e2tel which was enveloped in a cloud of vapour so that the pavilion vanished.\u00a0\u201cExpos were all about showing off technology,\u201d Diller says, \u201cso we made a decidedly lo-fi project, a critique.\u00a0It was controlled by an early AI system, learning from its own information.\u00a0We made a space where there was nothing to see.\u201dIt was inspired, Diller tells me, by the writings of French philosopher Hubert Damisch. But it was also fun, something children could enjoy as much as adults.\u00a0And it was pure experience.\u00a0The architects resisted the temptation to resurrect it somewhere else \u2014 it now exists as a memory.\u00a0\u00a0Their 1989 show at MoMA still haunts the architectural imagination. Para-Site was a sinister installation of cameras and strange mechanisms which surveilled the audience.\u00a0\u201cIt was critical,\u201d she says, \u201cabout the way people look at the museum and the way the museum looks at them.\u201d\u00a0Three decades later they would redesign MoMA itself.\u00a0Another piece, Soft Sell (1993), consisted of footage of a vivid red-lipsticked mouth projected on to an abandoned porn theatre in Manhattan.\u00a0\u201cWe were happy,\u201d Diller tells me. \u201cWe were the first architects ever to receive a MacArthur grant [in 1999] and that validated that what we were doing was architecture. It was critical, social, political.\u00a0We were teaching too and the idea of doing professional architecture never really entered my mind. \u201cWe came out of the institutional critique but then we realised that it was people like us who were now running the institutions.\u00a0We went from cutting up walls to building them.\u00a0The thing is, now we realise that we really want those institutions.\u00a0That is what civil society is.\u201dDiller shows me the practice\u2019s new book, its first monograph.\u00a0It has a curious format: two books bound together. One part is titled simply \u201cArchitecture\u201d, the other \u201cNot Architecture\u201d \u2014 split between the buildings and the writings, art and conceptual projects.\u00a0It\u2019s a labour of love, and the perfect encapsulation of the move from institutional critique to institution building.Now her practice is building like mad. It has no established single style, looking at each project as a new experience. \u201cIf societies and cities change,\u201d Diller asks me, rhetorically, \u201chow does architecture keep up? It\u2019s slow, heavy and expensive.\u00a0How do you produce architecture that doesn\u2019t default to the generic?\u201dShe points to the Lincoln Center, on which her practice has been working for decades, slowly upgrading the public and performance spaces, as a defining project. But also, more surprisingly, to 9\/11. \u201cNew York had gone through this trauma but there was something new in the air, a sense of citizenship. With the High Line we felt like architecture could do something for the city.\u201d But the High Line also became a conduit for hyper-gentrification, an accelerator for development on either side, which has ended up looking like a kind of architectural menagerie.\u00a0Diller rolls her eyes a little, well aware.\u00a0\u00a0In Venice the practice will be involved on three separate sites.\u00a0With the V&A it will explore the architecture of storage, in an installation that will focus on the storage life of a toothbrush as a way of exploring global supply chains, containerisation, warehousing and retail practice.\u00a0\u00a0The firm will also be designing a new temporary bookshop of the Biennale, a delicate, temporary tensile structure and another intervention, an intriguing-sounding installation which will filter and transform Venice canal water into espresso. \u201cI\u2019ll be drinking the first cup,\u201d she shoots before I can ask any more questions.\u00a0dsrny.comFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Elizabeth Diller\u2019s office is in a corner of a huge, open-plan loft in a former warehouse building in Chelsea.\u00a0I meet her on a Friday afternoon, when the office is Friday-quiet and the sun is sparkling on the Hudson.\u00a0The building, which occupies an entire city<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":290144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-290143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":290145,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290143\/revisions\/290145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}