Was it during the same year of the house that was not built? - You’re talking about the Slow House, right? It was a seminal project designed in the early 90s, a few years before I came to the studio. It was a piece of architecture product of the study of a digital culture and a kind of analysis on how image can replace reality and vice versa. The house is essentially the extrusion of a view. The whole piece is based on the particular way of framing views. This is a vacation home on the beach, with a beautiful view of the Long Island sound. The shape of the house deals with the arrival from Manhattan, the turn of the visual cone and finally refocusing on the Long Island sound. The owner was a collector and dealer of Japanese art. He lost his fortune in the art market and construction had to stop and the house was never finished. However, the project is different to The Brasserie, among other things because it is not public. It was a wonderful project that won an award in 1992, I think. It has the most innovative architectural work of the moment, based on media. The Brasserie was different, we did interior architecture and a media project and put them together.
How did you join the studio and how was the path the led you to become senior partner? - Since 1984 I had my own studio and came to New York in 1989. When I started I took the typical New York commissions, like home renovations, small shops and galleries, building rehabs. Liz and Rick had taken their studio to the point in which their work had assumed a more permanent nature. Often the art projects were transformed into temporary installations in buildings or alterations to buildings. In 1997 they were approached by Phyllis Lambert, great patron of architecture, founder of the CCA (Canadian Center for Architecture) and responsible for the hiring of Mies van der Rohe for the Seagram Building. The Seagrams approached Lambert when they wanted to renovate the The Brasserie restaurant, and it was she who proposed Diller + Scofidio to take the task. This marks a milestone in the practice of the studio: the work would no longer deal with art incidentally, but rather about art and architecture together. The Brasserie gave us the opportunity to make a permanent architectural piece. Interior architecture merged with a number of investigations on digital technology and the way the body works in space. D+S sought an architect to help them because they were well equipped to do the artistic and technological tasks, but not for interior architecture. When they asked my name came up.
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