BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES

RELATIONAL SPACE IN WORKS OF DILLER + SCOFIDIO

Nalan Bahekapl1, Pnar Artkolu2
1

Faculty of Fine Arts, Yeditepe University, Turkey

Faculty of Fine Arts, Kadir Has University, Turkey
nbahcekapili@gmail.com, pinar.artikoglu@gmail.com
2

ABSTRACT
This paper explores design in the realm of social interaction within the context of space;
specifically, focuses on architect duo Diller + Scofidios works and aims to re-read them
using Bourriauds concept relational art. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability. The possibility of a relational art [an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of
human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and
private symbolic space], points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art. The present-day social context restricts the possibilities of inter-human relations all the more because it creates spaces planned to this end.
Diller + Scofidio are after fusing mediated and physical space, to experiment and play
with social boundaries. Space-makers Diller + Scofidio are after augmenting, cracking
and blurring the restricting boundaries of space. Doing this, they always make us think
outside of the box.
Keywords: Diller, Scofidio, Relational Aesthetics, Relational Space.

Nicolas Bourriauds theoretical discourse surrounding art practices and theory

had a definite effect in contemporary art world of 1990s. Bourriauds writings
that search for an aesthetics of the inter-human provoked art discussions in late
90s and in 2000s a lot. For Bourriaud, all works of art produce a model of sociability, which transposes reality or might be conveyed in it. So there is a question
we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: Does this work permit
me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines? Bourriaud suggests that a form is more or less democratic. He reminds that the forms
produced by the art of totalitarian regimes are peremptory and closed in on themselves [particularly through their stress on symmetry]. Otherwise put, they do not

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give the viewer a chance to complement them. The role of human relations and
the viewers contribution is extremely under focus here.
Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics is an aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or
prompt. And relational art is a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social
context, rather than an independent and private space.
Bourriaud do not want to imply the statement of an origin and a destination, so
his relational aesthetics do not represent a theory of art, but a theory of form.
Form is defined as an encounter, it is relational property. Inter-subjectivity does
not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, but it also becomes
the quintessence of artistic practice.
So Bourriauds relational aesthetics, in a way, judge artworks on the basis of the
inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt. We wanted to
take a step forward in the realm of space and architecture, and to apply Bourriauds questions for art works directly to architectural works; we wanted to
explore how does a space give the user [not only viewer here] a chance to contemplate itself, how can we judge a space and see if it permits the user to enter
into dialogue?
Works of architect duo Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio form a valuable
platform that could let us delve into areas which we can loosely call relational
space. Diller + Scofidio have been working within an in-between position
between art and architecture: their work has been even pointed as art/architecture.
Investigating Diller + Scofidio is a reliable passage for us to carry relational aesthetics of Bourriaud through the concept of relational space which will let transmissions between categories and so overwhelm closed circuits better. Besides
their professional choice of situating themselves in-between art and architecture,
another reason for us to work on Diller + Scofidio can be seen in their objectives
and intentions which survey similar areas that are examined in Bourriauds
approach to contemporary art. Were neither conceptual artists nor architects,
says Diller. To the art world, we say were architects. In architectural circles, we
claim to be artists. We face the disciplinary division every day and have to appeal
to one or the other. The work itself tries not to be clear about which camp its in,
but we truly dont recognise such distinctions in our own work..
Diller + Scofidio perform in different areas, they use built environment and the
visual arts, do site-specific installations, commercial and institutional architectural projects, housing and urban planning; they bond design, digital media, performance, architecture, cultural theory altogether. And what is mostly important

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for relational space is that they try to expose collective norms that operate imperceptibly to rule and inform every day relationships.
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, have founded Diller + Scofidio studio in
1979. Diller + Scofidio are a collaborative, interdisciplinary studio that fuses
architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts. The team is mainly involved
in thematically driven experimental work that takes different forms. Elizabeth
Diller is a professor of Architecture at Princeton University and Ricardo Scofidio
is a professor of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York. As academics and
practitioners, the husband-and-wife team explores how space functions in our
culture and how architecture affects social behavior as much as it defines physical space. They are well known for their renovation of the Brasserie restaurant in
Mies van der Rohes landmark Seagram building in New York, as well as being
the first architects awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation genius grant.
the Blur Building, built for Swiss EXPO 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near the town
of Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and in 2002 Diller + Scofidio were awarded
commissions for two major cultural institutions, the Eyebeam Museum of Art &
Technology in New York [to be completed 2007] and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston [to be completed 2006].
The Whitney Museum of American Art hosted, between March 1st and June 1st
2003, a significant retrospective on the work of Diller + Scofidio under the title
Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio. Aaron Betsky, cocurator of the show with K. Michael Hays, describe the work of Diller + Scofidio
as a form of display that removes from architecture the idea that it is always and
only about shelter, comfort, and functionality. Betsky calls them hybrid architects/artists who make visible the technologies of desire and reveal the surveillance of objects of desire. So that they reconstruct the rituals of buying and selling, of control and negotiation those make up a world that may be our daily reality, but that goes unnoticed.
We should remember here Scofidios words: The things that control peoples
lives are not the things that lie on the surface, says Scofidio. Its the invisible
things that influence us and make us perform in ways we dont think about. If you
stay on the surface, youre sure to miss conditions that affect your personal life,
your city, your environment and, yes, your architecture. Betsky points out that
they articulate the invisible into the all-too-apparent. In doing so, Diller +
Scofidio construct an alternative to our culture of display, in which the continual
presentation of consumable goods -including human beings- appears to be the
central task of the social and economic system. In short, they display display.
Especially two features of their work is essential here for our study: how they
make visible the technologies of desire, how they approach to every day relationship rituals and what they want to put instead, and to offer.

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D+S have been acutely aware of the status of place and most especially of the
non-places that Marc Aug has described: the ubiquitousness and placelessness
of the utopic -the airport lounge, the suburban sprawl, and shopping malls- all
places that signify the norms of polite society and behavior that border on the
empty, vacuous space of contemporary life.
They are at first intervening gallery walls and to make visible the technologies of
desire they mirror and distort the world around them, nonplaces that became
norm and display applications that control. Doing so, they attempt to make the
conditions, the anonymous values and norms of the society visible, readable,
audible and touchable.
Here, we specially would like to re-read their two important projects, Eyebeam
Museum and The Blur Building.
Both of the projects are produced for design competitions. The first one is a winning project of the competition that New York-based Eyebeam Atelier [The notfor-profit organization] has invited architects to design a space modeled on open
source code capable of being rewritten, upgraded, reprogrammed, reconfigured
to accomplish previously unanticipated tasks. The competition questions the
future of art, the future of architecture and even the conventions of the museum
itself - an unabashedly precocious effort.
Dillers firm has proposed a double-skinned ribbon structure that loops back on
itself. The ribbon ondulates from side to side as it climbs from the street. One side
of the ribbon is art studio and the other exhibition space. A medium between the
two holds equipment easily accessed for upgrading whenever desired.
Eyebeam project of D+S creates many intermingling zones and functions and
thus never completes closed and defined architectural space units. Residents use
the east cores and visitors use the west, but each user has to pass through the others zone.
Interstitial zone houses the buildings wires and installation systems. Power and
data lines end up with a grid of jacks places on the whole surfaces in use. These
jack are like skin pores [as Keith Mitnik says], -a system of small holes that helps
the feeding of the spaces by the interstitial zone. Power and data flow is through
these pores. There are many transitions between service and usage areas. No
space is designed for a single, specific use; not one lacks the potential for transformation.
And the stressed concept of transition continues with the use of faade. Actually
there is no real faade of the Eyebeam; the borders are blurred. Building has no
mask. A section cut is the faade, it is transparent, so there is no real division
between interior and exterior, building is not closing in itself. It is completely

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open. It will be contributing the city by its daily life then. Not with a designed
form which comes from D+S only, but with a live inter-human relations and the
daily life of the building. Public and institutional activity is not hidden behind a
design instead they create the faade. Eyebeam is creating a relational space
where form is a real encounter.
It is unfinished, always work-in-process both visitors and workers are contributing not to its life only but to its form and function as well.
Visitors log in as they enter. Answers given to a brief questionnaire are programmed into an electronic ID tag, which responds to a smart network that tracks
each visitor, permits or denies access to floors, keeps bar or bookshop tabs, and
offers information on artists whose work may appeal to the visitor. Liquid crystals slathered between transparent conductive film and glass panes form smart
walls. Electric current regulates transparency, translucency and opacity. To prevent daylight from bleaching screen-displayed work, a phototropic louvre on the
faade controls internal light levels. Maneuvered by visitors or artists inside or
online, a spindly spider robot scales the face of the building or gravitates towards
the densest area of use inside to videotape activity.
Eyebeam is a building that blurs boundaries between physical and virtual, visitor
and artist.
By screen-display technology, visitors leave visible footprints on the lobby floor,
while online guests can seed and water an actual robotic rooftop garden. So the
place is not shaped only by its relations with actual visitors but also online visitors play a role. Artists and visitors can also manipulate the appearance of a
screen on the faade with their mobile phones or computers.
Diller + Scofidio want to make us aware of relational space by questioning the
act of space creating. Displaying, as a key element in todays space organization,
is also an essential theme in works of D+S. Stating that the function of both art
and architecture became framing and representing the objects to be desired, they
claim that the principal task of the architect is no longer the construction of the
central institutions of the state but rather it is the making of places for display.
Their work also asks the question of where and how the architect must define heror himself in this task. They answer this by turning display back into ritual art,
and by making art out of our daily rituals. In so doing, they find a new way to
attach value to the objects of architecture [or art] itself. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability. The possibility of a relational art [an art taking as its
theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather
than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space], points to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern
art.

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The Blur Building of D+S have many similar features that make it open to concepts of relational space. It is actually a pavilion made of water vapor for Swiss
Expo 2002 located in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. It is a project that blurs the
studios artist-architect design role. In 1998, Diller + Scofidio joined a team of
architects competing for a role in the 6-month-long Swiss National Expo 2002.
The team won, and the duo set about designing a temporary structure for the lake
site. They wanted to use an indigenous material, and what could be more indigenous to a lakeside resort than water? Over 30,000 computer-regulated nozzles
maintain a microclimate around a tensile structure that hovers, cloudlike, above
Lake Neuchtel. It is temporary building and not a building at all at the same
time. Making of nothing is how they call it.
Interactivity is again a main source for inter-subjectivity. Visitors wear braincoats
programmed with responses given to questions during an onshore check-in. As
they wander through the cloud, their coats respond to one other, blushing to indicate their wearers affinity, glowing green to indicate antipathy. This creates a
randomized flow of traffic over the platform as visitors choose either to engage
with others or to avoid interaction.
As the visitors change the form by their braincoats their relations are effected by
the design too because of red and green indicators which intervene their separated walking.
A video walk-through of Blur begins onshore and proceeds over an increasingly
foggy ramp. Within seconds the screen has gone snow-blind white, indicating
complete immersion in the building. The notion of a pavilion is reversed. Rather
than make a muscular, heroic architecture that does what it does acrobatically,
says Diller, we tried to make architecture of nothing.
Making of nothing, as the subtitle of their book on the Blur Building reads, or
making an architecture of nothing both show the unmaking of architecture,
unpacking a pavilion, undoing the idea of an Expo place which is closed in itself.
Its a building that denies the eye perspective, depth, surfaces, context and mass.
It turns architecture into atmosphere. It challenges senses other than sight. So
there is a certain focus on experience rather than finished paths. Visitors feel like
they are in a cloud, a fog. And as visitors walk through the cloud, their dampened
vision heightens the remaining senses. They feel the lower temperature; they
smell and taste the lake water as it atomises. Blur gives importance to experience,
senses, and activity. The body politics inherent are opening new areas for a relational approach.
As you enter the 300- by 200-foot cloud, the passage divides: One half leads to a
restaurant partially submerged in the lake, while the other rises through pockets
sculpted by forced air and spaces constructed by artificial light. In a central media

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pod, networked video projectors create a 360-degree image fed by live buoycams on the lake and live streaming video from the Web. The intention, say Diller
+ Scofidio, is to reinterpret the immersive environment of 18th century panoramas with 21st century technology.
The glass-walled, open-roofed sushi restaurant sits just below the haze, half-submerged; fish swim between the double-paned walls, creating an inside-out aquarium. We are again in spaces where interior and exterior are changing their roles
easily and borders are blurred.
Contemporary art creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with
those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that
differs from the communication zones that are imposed upon us. The present-day
social context restricts the possibilities of inter-human relations all the more
because it creates spaces planned to this end. With Bourriauds words, it is
described as cleaning the city streets of all manners of relational dross and fizzling neighborhood relationships. With a similar kind of concern Diller +
Scofidio are after fusing mediated and physical space, to experiment and play
with social boundaries. The user is participant and producer rather than merely
consumer of space and time. Creating an alternative form of architecture practice
that unites design, performance, and electronic media with cultural and architectural theory and criticism, space-makers Diller + Scofidio, are after augmenting,
cracking and blurring the restricting boundaries of space. Doing this, they always
make us think outside of the box.
REFERENCES
BOURRIAUD, N. (1998), Relational Aesthetics, Presses duRel, Paris
BOURRIAUD, N. (2001), Postproduction, Lukas & Sternberg, Paris
DILLER, E., SCOFIDIO, R. (1995), Flesh: Architectural Probes: The Mutant Body of Architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, U.S.
DILLER, E., SCOFIDIO, R. (2002), Blur: The Making of Nothing, Abrams Press, U.S.
DILLER, E. et al, (2004), Diller + Scofidio: Eyebeam Atelier of New Media & Technology,
University of Michigan Press, U.S.
JACKSON, N.B. (2000), Thinking about Architecture, Princeton Weekly Bulletin, (vol. 89, no.
21), (March).
SIMPSON, B. (2001), Public Relations - Nicolas Bourriaud Interview, ArtForum International Magazine, (April), N.Y.
http://www.loudpapermag.com/article.php?id=122; Loudpaper Magazine
http://www.domusweb.it; Domus Magazine
http://www.boiler.odessa.net/english/raz1/n1r1s02.htm; Boiler Art Magazine

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http://www.sfai.edu/database/whats_hot_detail.asp?id_event=761; San Francisco Art Institute

http://www.stretcher.org/archives/i1_a/2003_02_25_i1_archive.php; Stretcher Magazine
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive; Wired Magazine
http://www.whitney.org/programs/educators/; Whitney Museum of American Art
http://www.icaboston.org/Home/Information/TheNewICA/DillerScofidioProfile; The Institute
of Contemporary Art Boston

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