Architect as Artist: Ricardo Scofidio’s Enduring Legacy

To design a museum is to shape the way people experience art. Ricardo Scofidio understood this better than most. His buildings weren’t just containers for culture—they were provocations, ideas made physical, frameworks that challenged visitors to see both space and art differently.

With his firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the MacArthur “genius” grant-winning architect helped define a new era of museum design: sleek but not soulless, ambitious but human-scaled. His death at 89 marks the passing of a figure who didn’t just build museums—he reimagined what they could be.

A Museum That Refused to Sit Still

Scofidio’s first major mark on the American museum landscape came with the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA), a structure that doesn’t simply occupy space—it hovers over it. Completed in 2006, the building’s dramatic cantilevered form juts over the Boston Harbor, creating a tension between solidity and suspension.

Not everyone was convinced. The ICA’s sprawling fourth-floor galleries left other parts of the museum feeling like afterthoughts. Critics called the lobby “awkward.” And yet, the aesthetic—clean, minimalist, but never sterile—became a defining visual language for the firm. It was a museum that didn’t just house contemporary art; it embodied it.

From Critics to Makers

Long before they were designing MoMA expansions and London museums, Scofidio and his partner, Elizabeth Diller, were unsettling the boundaries between architecture, theory, and performance. Their early projects weren’t buildings at all, but conceptual interventions—installations that played with surveillance, perception, and the idea of space as something to be questioned rather than merely occupied.

One of their first forays into MoMA, in 1989, wasn’t a redesign but an experiment: para-site, a work in which cameras captured unexpected angles of the museum, revealing spaces visitors had never truly “seen.” It was an architectural thesis made tangible—proof that museums weren’t neutral backdrops but active players in how we consume culture.

This philosophy carried through in their later, more permanent works. The Broad Museum in Los Angeles—with its honeycombed steel exterior—earned as much mockery as praise. Some saw it as futuristic and bold; others called it incoherent. Still, it refused to be invisible.

Redrawing the Museum Blueprint

Perhaps the firm’s greatest triumph came with its 2019 expansion of MoMA—a $450 million project that seamlessly integrated new galleries without swallowing the museum’s identity. Unlike some of their earlier, more divisive work, this expansion felt effortless, as if MoMA had always been waiting for it. It expanded not just the museum’s footprint but its curatorial potential, allowing for a more fluid and ambitious presentation of modern and contemporary art.

Scofidio’s legacy is one of transformation. His museums don’t just hold art; they shape the experience of it. They demand attention. They provoke. They remind us that architecture—like art—is never static. It is restless, evolving, alive.

And thanks to Ricardo Scofidio, so are the spaces where we encounter it.