Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a New York design studio that works across architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts.
Urban planning
Deciding how strangers will share a place.
- 39
- in design
- 9:24
- average
- 367 min
- in total
- 66
- across the network
All briefs
Andrea Branzi
Andrea Branzi is a curriculum, not a coffee table.
550 Madison Avenue
Philip Johnson · 1984
550 Madison Avenue is a postmodern skyscraper completed in 1982 by Philip Johnson and John Burgee. It uses pink Stony Creek granite cladding and features an eight-story arched entry and split pediment. It challenged modernist functionalism, complied with NYC zoning via an atrium, and reduced energy use versus glass towers. Though not the first postmodern building, its scale and location made it the movement’s most famous example. It was designated a NYC landmark in 2018.
Centre Pompidou-Metz
A regional museum that uses geometry, sightlines, and roof engineering — not branding — to assert cultural parity with Paris.
Charles Correa
Correa’s architecture refuses imported aesthetics — but builds no system for replicating its cultural logic.
Hassan Fathy
A failed resettlement project that rewrote the rules of low-cost housing by rejecting industrial materials—and proving that failure can be more instructive than success.
Jürgen Mayer
Architecture that treats the body, technology, and nature as inseparable — not as themes, but as structural conditions.
King Power Mahanakhon
A helix-shaped void that made a building famous—not for what it housed, but for how tall it stood, and how briefly.
Melnikov House
A self-commissioned experiment in round-house construction — not a manifesto, but a working prototype with no successors named.
Metabolism (architecture)
Metabolism wasn’t about buildings — it was about making obsolescence architectural policy.
Nakagin Capsule Tower
Metabolism’s only built manifesto — and its first and final failure.
Parc de la Villette
A park built to confuse you — then help you find your way inside the confusion.
Piet Oudolf
He designs for decay—and that’s why his gardens last.
Portland Building
Postmodernism’s first tall office building failed its users before it entered the history books.
Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building
A cathedral of silicon: this city hall declares power through contradiction, not coherence.
Vittorio Gregotti
Gregotti didn’t design buildings—he designed the conditions under which architecture could be both ideological and buildable.
Amale Andraos
Andraos did not design a building — she designed a practice that treats ecology, education, and urbanism as inseparable.
Arata Isozaki
Architecture as fiction, not form — Isozaki weaponised absurdism before he built a thing.
Atelier Bow-Wow
Architecture is not about form — it’s about the functional relationships between behaviour and its environment.
Barbican Centre
Chamberlin, Powell & Bon · 1982
The Barbican Centre is a Brutalist arts complex in London, designed by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. It features a concrete ziggurat form and complex multi-level layout. It was designated Grade II listed in September 2001 for its scale, cohesion, and ambition. It forms part of an integrated urban development including the Barbican Estate and Golden Lane Estate. Its design remains controversial and divisive.
Benedetta Tagliabue
Architectural authorship is not inherited — it is claimed in the gap between death and delivery.
Bernard Tschumi
Architecture is not a vessel for society — it is a scalpel for cutting it open.
Bruce Mau
Design is not about making things—it’s about making sense of what already exists.
Cedric Price
Unbuilt architecture that built the future — by refusing to fix form before function, or authority before participation.
Fabio Novembre
A designer who built a career on adjacency — not authorship, not ideology, but calibrated presence across commerce, culture and city.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Wright didn’t build houses—he built systems for living, constrained by philosophy, not physics.
Fumihiko Maki
Maki’s architecture is not about form — it’s about how space is felt, entered, and remembered.
Kees Christiaanse
Christiaanse treats urban form as a social contract—walkable, mixed, unstyled—but never proves it works beyond assertion.
Kenzō Tange
Tange didn’t rebuild Hiroshima—he reoriented it, using columns, concrete, and an axis as instruments of moral geometry.
Kunlé Adeyemi
Architecture as fieldwork—not fix—but reading, prototyping, and collapsing.
Lever House
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Lever House is a 21-storey New York City office building completed in 1952. It is a glass-clad slab, built for Unilever, that uses fixed glazing, concealed HVAC, and a custom window-cleaning system.
Lúcio Costa
A jury chose Costa’s sketch over detailed rivals — not for precision, but for scalability.
Norman Foster
Foster didn’t invent transparency — he engineered it into structure, climate response, and daily life.
Odile Decq
Architecture as a continuous act of translation—not between form and function, but between body, model, city, and canvas.
Olivetti
Adriano Olivetti · 1908
Adriano Olivetti’s work is a coherent, documented system of industrial organisation, spatial planning, and political theory — not a collection of iconic objects. Its strength lies in the linkage between departmental structure, worker housing, advertising partnerships, and published doctrine. Its limitation is that none of the celebrated products (Lettera 22, Programma 101, Valentine, Elea 9003) are attributed to him directly in the source material. The influence is structural, not stylistic.
Rem Koolhaas
Architectural theory that edits human activity cannot ignore the fact that people need to escape fire.
Rockefeller Center
Associated Architects
Rockefeller Center is not a building but a coordination protocol disguised as architecture.
Seagram Building
Mies van der Rohe & Philip Johnson · 1958
The Seagram Building is a methodologically rigorous application of International Style principles — sited, tested, and materialised with explicit constraints and innovations. Its influence is unverified. Its success lies in its documented departures: from structural facade integration, from NYC window conventions, and from untested corporate monumentality.
Tadao Ando
Ando’s architecture is not minimalism—it’s structural and sensory discipline under seismic constraint.