Ricardo Scofidio, the american architect and co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), passed away on March 6, 2025, at the age of 89. His influential career spanned decades, shaping the architectural landscape through bold experimentation and an interdisciplinary approach that fused art, technology, and design.
High Line, NY, Photo © Iwan Baan
DS+R announced his passing with a statement:
“DS+R founder Ricardo Scofidio has passed away peacefully on March 6, 2025, at the age of 89. He was surrounded by his 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 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. A memorial service to celebrate Ric’s life is being planned and will be announced in the coming weeks.”
The Shed in New York. Photo by Iwan Baan
Born in New York City in 1935, Scofidio co-founded the firm with his wife Elizabeth Dillerin 1979.
He led the design of the High Line - Section 1 – the adaptive reuse of an obsolete, industrial rail infrastructure into a 1.5 mile-long public park, Blur Building – a pavilion made of fog on Lake Neuchâtel for the 2002 Swiss Expo, and contributed to the redesign of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, and The Broad Art Museum in Los Angeles. Ricardo spearheads many of the studio’s independent works, including Soft Sell, a video installation in an abandoned porn theater in Times Square; Tourisms: suitCase Studies, an investigation of American tourist attractions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; and Musings on a Glass Box for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. He is Professor Emeritus at The Cooper Union School of Architecture.
Scofidio’s work was widely recognized for challenging conventional boundaries between architecture and art. In 1999, he and Diller became the first architects to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, an acknowledgment of their radical and avant-garde approach to design.
The Broad in LA, photo Iwan Baan, courtesy of The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro
About Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R)
Founded in 1981, Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) is a design studio whose practice spans the fields of architecture, urban design, installation art, multi-media performance, digital media, and print. With a focus on cultural and civic projects, DS+R’s work addresses the changing role of institutions and the future of cities.
The studio is based in New York and is comprised of over 100 architects, designers, artists and researchers, led by four partners—Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin. DS+R's cross genre work has been distinguished with TIME’s "100 Most Influential People" list and the first grant awarded in the field of architecture from the MacArthur Foundation, which identified Diller and Scofidio as, “architects who have created an alternative form of architectural practice that unites design, performance, and electronic media with cultural and architectural theory and criticism. Their work explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.”
DS+R completed two of the largest architecture and planning initiatives in New York City’s recent history: the adaptive reuse of an obsolete, industrial rail infrastructure into the High Line - Section 2, a 1.5 mile-long public park, and the transformation of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ half-century-old campus. The studio has also completed the 35-acre Zaryadye Park adjacent to St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square in Moscow. They are currently working on large urban public spaces in Madrid and Milan.
The studio has also worked with global cultural institutions to expand access to the arts. The Broad is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles offering free admission, whose visitorship reflects a comparatively younger and more diverse contemporary arts audience, while the V&A Storehouse, under construction in London, will bring much of the collection out of storage and into public view for the first time. DS+R also completed two projects that have reshaped New York’s cultural landscape: the surgical renovation and expansion of MoMA, which brings the museum’s vast collection closer to the public, and The Shed, a start-up multi-arts institution originally conceived by DS+R.
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