How architects behind New York’s High Line and their highly conceptual work changed a Hong Kong designer’s life
- Marisa Yiu, founding partner of Eskyiu, says a 2003 book on architecture firm Diller + Scofidio - now Diller Scofidio + Renfro, co-designers of the High Line - taught her to challenge herself
- Elizabeth Diller was also her professor when Yiu was a young architecture student, proving to be an ‘extraordinarily provocative and probing’ teacher
Liz Diller’s books and works question architecture’s cultural role in society and exhibition making. Her work is quite phenomenal. She’s always been about blurring genres and questioning her audience with a very experimental architecture, challenging how buildings engage culturally.
She is an inspiring force with her partner (Ricardo Scofidio) and their studio (now called Diller Scofidio + Renfro). They shape a lot of the work I do, both with my design studio and with Design Trust.
This particular book is based on her and her partner’s seminal exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. The book is also seminal: it tracks her career and also includes a lot of her writing. The show and publication were important to me both personally and professionally, as they were an architectural awakening to the endless possibilities for what the discipline and the pedagogy and practice of architecture could question, from objects to global politics. It showed how a design and architectural practice can challenge the expanded role of architecture and design.
Liz was also my professor when I was a young architecture student. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to study overseas, in the United States, on a scholarship to Princeton University. Then from 1998 to 2001, I was a graduate student at Princeton, and I was able to study with her.
