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Ricardo Scofidio, an architect who revolutionized urban public space in his hometown of New York, with works such as the High Line and the transformed Lincoln Center campus, died last month, on March 6, in Manhattan, at the age of 89. According to a statement from his firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), he passed away peacefully, surrounded by family, including his partner in life and work, Elizabeth Diller.

“Ric had a profound impact on our architectural practice, establishing the studio with a mission to make space on his own terms,” the statement reads. “The firm’s partners and principals, many of whom have collaborated with him for decades, will extend his architectural legacy in the work we will continue to perform every day.”

The High Line phase 2. Photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy DS+R

Born in 1935, Scofidio, who studied architecture at the Cooper Union and Columbia University, took an unconventional path in the profession. In the 2016 book Twenty Over Eighty: Conversations on a Lifetime in Architecture and Design, Scofidio says he seriously considered leaving architecture. But after meeting Diller—his student when teaching at Cooper—he realized that he “didn’t have to practice architecture the way the profession practiced it” but could choose multidisciplinary projects that were “like jumping off a tall building without a parachute.”

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The Brasserie at the Seagram Building (1); Blur Building at the 2002 Swiss Expo. Photos © Michael Moran (1), Beat Widmer (2), courtesy DS+R

Para-site at the Museum of Modern Art, 1989. Photo courtesy DS+R

Beginning in 1981, the firm, then known as Diller + Scofidio, operated at the intersection of architecture, the performing arts, and the visual arts. During the first two decades, the partners realized a series of small, conceptual, but highly influential projects—installation pieces, multimedia theater work, exhibitions, interiors, and unbuilt structures—including, in 1991, the traveling installation Tourisms: suitCase Studies and the groundbreaking residence Slow House, for an art collector (despite also literally breaking ground, the project came to an abrupt halt mid-construction with the sudden collapse of the art market, leaving its cornucopia-shaped foundations in the earth). A startling high-concept redesign of Philip Johnson’s Brasserie in New York’s Seagram Building opened in 2000, as did Travelogues, at John F. Kennedy Airport, the following year. When Scofidio was well into his 60s, their temporary Blur Building, “an architecture of atmosphere,” designed for the 2002 Swiss National Exposition at Lake Neuchâtel, Yverdon-les-Bains, catapulted the couple into the spotlight.

Larger architectural commissions followed. Scofidio was partner in charge of both the High Line linear park, an ambitious, wildly successful, and oft-imitated adaptive reuse of a defunct railway on Manhattan’s West Side—designed in partnership with Field Operations and Piet Oudolf—and, in collaboration with FXCollaborative, a top-to-bottom overhaul of Lincoln Center’s 16-acre performing arts campus on the Upper West Side, which placed public space at center stage. “From the early days of concept design to the development of drawings, his focus, inventiveness, and detailing acumen inspired our collective work,” FXCollaborative partner emerita Sylvia Smith told RECORD. “He calmed the waters of an intense and complex project with wry humor and gentlemanly grace.”

The North Plaza at the Lincon Center for the Performing Arts. Photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy DS+R

Scofidio was also involved in the design of other DS+R projects in New York and beyond, including Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (2006), The Broad contemporary art museum in Los Angeles (2015), the Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University Medical Center (2016), The Shed, a High Line–adjacent arts center at Hudson Yards designed in collaboration with Rockwell Group (2019), a controversial expansion and renovation of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (2019), and the 32-acre Zaryadye Park in Moscow (2017).

“Ric was a true original, especially in detailing,” says Eric Höweler, Harvard professor and cofounding principal of Höweler + Yoon, who was a senior designer at DS+R from 2002 to 2005, during which time the studio grew from 12 to 45 people. “Everyone would try solution after solution, creating piles of trace sketches. Ric would come to the table with an idea so far out of left field that it would floor everyone. His was always the Gordian knot solution—so conceptual and elegant that it eluded everyone.”

As the firm grew—adding Charles Renfro as a partner in 2004 and Benjamin Gilmartin in 2015—it continued to devote attention to exhibitions, many becoming blockbusters, including Charles James: Beyond Fashion (2014) and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018), both for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the memorable Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design (2017) at the Jewish Museum in New York.

The Broad, Los Angeles. Photo © Iwan Baan, courtesy DS+R

“A graduate, a professor, and a friend of the Cooper Union, Ric returned again and again, long after his retirement from teaching, and his visual literacy continued to amaze students in the advancement of their work. A generous donor to the school at large, Ric’s sense of giving never ceased,” says Nader Tehrani, dean of the architecture school at Cooper Union from 2015 to 2022, who counts Scofidio as having been a trusted advisor throughout his tenure. “His gentle manner served as an apt veil for the contained intelligence and wit he would unleash every so often, reminding us that we do not need to overstep our presence to allow our voices to speak with power.”

Both Scofidio and Diller were named as MacArthur Fellows in 1999—the first architects to receive the honor—and, a decade later, as Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and as two of Time magazine’s Time 100: The Most Influential People in the World.

ICA, Boston. Photo © Chuck Choi, courtesy DS+R

“Ric’s calm and playful presence brought people together, his whip smart intuition made people listen, and his technical wizardry inspired people’s creativity,” says Renfro. “He was a father, sibling, and partner not just to Liz, Ben, and me but to the whole studio. He will be missed.”

“Ric was a true architect and a person of deep compassion, wit, and grace,” says Gilmartin. “I will miss him every day, even as his spirit of invention lives on in all of our work.”