Godspeed

Barreling across the Croton Dam at high speed in the dead of winter, in a vintage sports car with his adolescent son beside him, Ric Scofidio struck an ice patch, skidded out for a few harrowing yards, and regained control mere seconds before colliding with a solid stone retaining wall. “I asked him, ‘Was that on purpose?’” his now middle-aged son Ian recalled, speaking at Scofidio’s memorial service in mid-June. “Very quietly, he just said no.” As one-third of New York powerhouse firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the late architect—who, despite a lifelong addiction to hyperaggressive driving in overpowered vehicles, died in March of natural causes scarcely a month shy of his ninetieth birthday—was a fixture of the New York design scene for longer than most of its current members have been alive. His length of tenure, as well as his extraordinary personal magnetism, accounted for the gala-like turnout on a very warm summer night atop the High Line, the park that Scofidio designed with his partner-wife Elizabeth Diller, partner-friend Charles Renfro, and assorted other partners and friends who were among the 400 or so gathered guests. Appearing both in person and by video, speakers included former City Planning Commission Chairwoman (and key player in the Highline’s creation) Amanda Burden, architect Steven Holl, and Phyllis Lambert, the ninety-eight-year-old founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and a defining figure in North American building culture since the days of Mies van der Rohe. It was Lambert, in her very brief remarks, who offered perhaps the most succinct, most affecting tribute to the man whose love of everything beautiful and daring and fun changed the landscape of the city, and of the world, permanently. “May I ask,” said Lambert, “if you know an architect of greater warmth than Ric Scofidio?”