Architecture: First Thinking, Then Building

Here's the best evidence I know of that the past 10 years have witnessed a revolution in architecture. Diller and Scofidio are getting work. For decades the husband-and-wife designer team of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio was known mostly--make that entirely--as architectural theorists, deadpan funny conceptual artists and intellectual bomb throwers. In all those roles, they made a name for themselves by questioning the most basic premises of architecture. It would be hard to imagine, for instance, a more thorough rethinking of what makes a building than a project they completed for the Swiss Expo 02. The Blur Building, as it was called, was a "structure" made entirely of water vapor, produced by a framework of 31,000 computer-controlled spray nozzles configured on a multilevel platform in the middle of Lake Neuchâtel, near the town of Yverdon-les-Bains, and linked to the shore by a walkway. Visitors could approach and enter this hovering fog bank while asking themselves high-minded questions like, What really is an enclosure? Where is the line between inside and outside? And, while we're at it, where am I?

Although the Blur Building was both a crowd pleaser and an ingenious intellectual conundrum--just how many elements can you subtract from a building and still have it feel like a place?--working with fog did nothing to contradict Diller and Scofidio's image as thinkers in no hurry to operate with more solid materials. So it's a sign of significant clients' openness to new ideas that the pair have somehow joined the ranks of sought-after, real-world architects, the kind who work with poured concrete and get major commissions. In the past few years their firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro--they brought in Charles Renfro as full partner two years ago--has been chosen to redesign large parts of the glamorous marbledom that is Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City and to convert an abandoned elevated railway line in lower Manhattan into a very unusual park. They had already completed a housing project in Gifu, Japan. And on Dec. 7 their first major building in the U.S., the new home of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), will open on a prominent waterfront site as the first segment of the city's grand scheme to redevelop Boston Harbor.

The ICA is dedicated to the newest works of art, so if there is any institution likely to seek out unconventional architects, it's that one. All the same, who expected that Diller and Scofidio, well known as skeptics about the whole idea of museums, would end up designing one? When New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art gave them a big retrospective three years ago, they underlined their ambivalence about becoming insiders by having a little robot programmed to roll around for the duration of the show drilling holes in the gallery walls.