April 2025 Editor’s Letter
Putting together RECORD’s annual Interiors issue often feels like taking a break from “real” architecture. After all, restaurants, galleries, and office spaces are frequently short-lived and lack the full impact of buildings—those complex and sturdy compositions of steel and glass, concrete and brick, timber and stone.
But in some cases, they can leave quite the impression. A firm that had a significant pedagogical influence, in studio and other classes, for a student like myself pursuing architecture in the late ’90s, was one that, for decades, hadn’t really built anything at all, Diller + Scofidio. Of course, many of the groundbreaking projects that office produced since its founding in 1981 weren’t interiors per se, but thought-provoking installations, exhibitions, and theater sets. And then came the Brasserie. A restaurant interior that, when it opened in 2000—with its surveillance monitors, runway entry, and impossibly cantilevered bar—upended all expectation of what hospitality design could be, or do.
The sad news of Ricardo Scofidio’s death on March 6 came at a time when he and partner Elizabeth Diller were probably on any number of architects’ minds. Two days before, the winner of the 2025 Pritzker Prize had been announced—China’s Liu Jiakun. The inevitable guessing game leading up to that announcement had me, at least, thinking, is this Liz and Ric’s year? After all, an American has not won the prestigious award in 20 years—not since Thom Mayne was named a Pritzker laureate in 2005. The proximity of both bulletins indeed had a certain poignancy.
Ric Scofidio was an architect who, as we all well know, did go on to build buildings and, more, transform urban public space with projects like the High Line. In 2019, at the opening of The Shed—an example of how his firm’s built works could be as provocative as the early art pieces—I recall a laid-back Scofidio, away from the journalists and cameras, perched against one of the giant wheels that help roll out the structure’s telescoping shell. A few of us joined him there just as it was about to be deployed. For our amusement, he put a penny on the rail beneath the wheel, which, after it was run over, was flattened almost paper thin. We pay tribute to the man, playful and formidable, and his work and spotlight Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s just-released monograph, so fittingly called Architecture, Not Architecture.
