In Memoriam: Ricardo Scofidio, AIA (1935–2025)

The recent passing of Ricardo Scofidio, AIA, marks a profound loss for the architectural community, particularly in New York City, where his visionary work has left an indelible mark. As a Founding Partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), Scofidio was instrumental in reshaping the city’s urban landscape with projects that fused architecture, art, and technology.

His contributions to The High Line and The Shed transformed how New Yorkers engage with public space, turning once-overlooked areas into vibrant cultural destinations. The High Line, a former rail line reimagined as an elevated park, is now an internationally recognized model for adaptive reuse. The Shed, with its dynamic, movable shell, epitomizes his commitment to flexible, forward-thinking design.

Scofidio was also deeply connected to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), where he was celebrated for pushing the boundaries of the field. DS+R’s work garnered numerous AIA New York Design Awards in addition to the AIA President’s Award, the AIA Medal of Honor, and the AIA Louis I. Kahn Award. His influence extended beyond physical structures—his provocative, interdisciplinary approach challenged the profession to think more critically about the intersection of architecture and culture.

As we reflect on Ricardo Scofidio’s legacy, we recognize not only his groundbreaking designs but also his enduring impact on the city’s identity. His work will continue to shape and inspire New York’s built environment for generations to come. Read more about Scofidio’s legendary impact in The New York Times, The Architect’s Newspaper, Dezeen, Architectural Record, among many other media outlets that covered his passing. Below we’ve gathered several tributes from members of our community.

From Steven Forman, AIA, Principal, Director of Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro:

A long time ago back in 1973, as I entered my second year of studies at the Cooper Union, Ric Scofidio was one of our professors who led the design studio that year. After a seemingly eternal charette to the end of year crits, and as we began to hang our work, the professors filed in. When it was my turn to present, I slowly turned towards the critics with complete and total terror. I was now facing the Dean, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Raimund Abraham, Bob Slutzky, Richard Henderson and Ric Scofidio. As I completed a tour of my drawings and models the group pounced, as they did with all of us, verbally shredding our work apart all in the name of making architects out of us. They all loudly argued back and forth about everything—important buildings, fantastic cinema, exceptional paintings, music, politics—everything except my scheme on the wall. Ric hadn’t said a word in all this time. Finally, Hejduk turned to Ric and asked what he had thought. Ric looked at my drawings, thought for a moment, then offered one sentence with laser precision, no more. Hejduk jumped out of his seat and exclaimed to the group, “That’s it. Ric is exactly right. That’s all that needs to be said about this scheme Forman.” I slumped into my seat as the crit ended.

Fast forward many years later, being a Principal, Director of Operations and running the studio at DS+R for some time now, is like being back at Cooper with Ric, and his clarity of thought. Together with Liz Diller, Charles Renfro, Ben Gilmartin, our talented Directors, Principals and staff, we still have much more work to do.

From Benjamin Gilmartin, AIA, Partner, Diller Scofidio + Renfro; 2025 President, AIA New York:

Ric was a mentor, model, and a compass for me. While inspired and intimidated by him when first invited to join the studio above the Village Voice at Cooper Square, he sat me down at the table, and shortly he and I were going back and forth over details for rear-fastening and supporting the massive, acoustically shaped, light-transmitting wood panels of Alice Tully Hall—in a manner producing no shadowing. This was a conversation conducted through sketches and then hand drafted drawings, even at the earliest moment of concept design. This process of realizing an idea from a detail was a seed from which to grow a project. It’s one of the first of many things Ric taught me. His cello, propped up in the corner of the studio, witnessed these early sessions, standing vigilantly as a muse.

Today, Ric’s office neighbors my own in our Chelsea studio. It is still inhabited by beautifully crafted instruments—from a vintage surveyor’s transit and leveling rod, a collection of oak tool boxes, a wooden cuckoo clock, miner’s hammer and headlamp, drafting board and tools. Seeing his model classic sports cars and the full-scale steering wheel on display in his office are a daily reminder that, while he was a profoundly calming presence in the studio, he was also an avid race car driver. Riding with him behind the wheel to visit the model maker’s shop upstate, along winding parkway roads, was an ultimate white-knuckle experience.

Ric always made time to think through a problem together and arrive at a solution, which was at moments unexpected, but always elegant and ultimately right.  He was brilliant, compassionate, provocative, generous, and kind. I am deeply saddened that he will not be returning to his desk again this morning or the next. I miss him dearly and his spirit will continue to guide our work each day.

From Jaffer Kolb, Co-founder, New Affiliates:

The night that DS+R’s MoMA expansion opened I found Ric in a quiet moment between congratulations. I had caught glimpses of him throughout the evening in different locations, always surrounded, mostly smiling. He looked over at me and waved once or twice but was always on the opposite side of the room.

Towards the end of the evening, I happened to walk by as he was seated alone, next to the stairs leading down to the store. He was looking across the room and at the crowds. I asked him how it felt, because I couldn’t imagine. I had helped briefly on the competition entry from the studio years before, but there was a wide gulf between those early brainstorming sessions and the realized building that surrounded us.

His response was surprisingly wistful. He talked about the early days of the collaboration, of the types of work they did and thought they would do and imagined for the future. But here we are, and it’s done, and now what, he asked. He kept repeating “I just never thought…” and I may be misremembering but I recall him adding “in my wildest dreams,” but also maybe that part went unspoken.

By the time I joined the studio, DS+R was indisputably established. They had touched, shaped, and produced so many museums and so many institutions—competing for and winning the MoMA expansion seemed natural or preordained. But in that moment, it was like talking to a Ric from the past who was slightly startled at what his office achieved; a time-traveller who couldn’t quite believe his future. Over the years working for and with the studio, I was lucky to get to know and see some sides of him: generous, funny, exasperated, confident, growly, detail-obsessed. But I hadn’t seen this particular kind of wistful.

We talked for a while, longer than I thought I’d have his attention for at the opening. The more I try and recollect the memory the less certainty I have about its details, but I think about that conversation often. And I still remember the combination of happiness and surprise, pride and nostalgia in his answer. Ric had a certain depth to him always, which cut through even the polite small talk of an opening and drew you in, and an attitude towards his work—a wonder, a patience, a curiosity—that I try to emulate in my own practice.

 

From David Rockwell, FAIA, Founder and President, Rockwell Group:

It was in the fall of 2001, only a month or so after 9/11, that I truly began to know Ric Scofidio, the hugely talented architect, educator, and founding member of the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who passed away on March 6th. At a dinner at the Odeon, not far from the World Trade Center site, a group of leading architects began exchanging ideas about plans and streets and towers and monuments. I remember Ric, a quiet man who waited patiently to share his ideas, expressing dismay that our colleagues were eager to rebuild so quickly. Two points stood out, as I recall, that spoke deeply about his approach to design and to people.

It was premature—and wrong, he said—to speculate on what should be there when we hadn’t even had a chance to process the loss. Further, and perhaps more importantly for an artist and designer focused on space as an experiential force, he wondered how to help people see what had happened in an authentic, unmediated way, free from the incessant and hyperbolic media noise of 9/11.

Two years later, Ric said something about his childhood in a profile in The New York Times Magazine. “I was continually told as a child to be invisible.” The comment touched on his experience as a multi-racial child in New York City. But it also revealed something important about a man heralded by colleagues for his attention to ideas: Ric spent his life making the invisible visible, shaping propositions into projects. He also understood that it’s often the unbuilt elements that give architecture its true character and life—the way the light changes on a wall, or how you encounter others in a view across an atrium or passing on a stair.

It was within days of that conversation about the World Trade Center that Ric, Liz Diller, his wife and business partner, and I joined fellow architect Kevin Kennon to develop the idea for the Viewing Platform, a 30-foot-wide, 300-foot-long ramp that led to a 16-foot platform over Church Street at Fulton Street.

The Viewing Platform was a raw structure composed of wood beams and planks and metal scaffolding, primitive when contrasted with the museums, theaters, cultural spaces and buildings that Ric, Liz and their partners Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin are now celebrated for around the world. But simplicity, I came to believe for Ric, was equally a design element, something captured elegantly in the origami he created for friends and family. Simplicity can be about what is not there, a decision that allows others to bring themselves into a space, a willingness to co-create with the user. The Viewing Platform did that by not doing any more than necessary: it didn’t suggest any narratives in a space where they were patently unnecessary.

The High Line, perhaps Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s greatest masterpiece, is a more complex project, more than just a park or a walkway. It’s a simultaneously serious and playful experience, one that celebrates the city it bisects by harnessing the past to help us reimagine the city we want to live in today. Yet the wonderfully simple genius of the High Line, with its vibrant landscape design by James Corner and Piet Oudolf, is not just that it allows you to walk through the city in a new way. It’s that in one of the world’s busiest urban environments, it forces you to slow down, to reflect on what’s around you, and in so doing, see the thing (in this case, the city) anew.

A similar idea is at work in The Shed, the cultural center in Hudson Yards we worked on together. If you could create a theater that was scalable, people could have a new and different experience with every visit.  Ric would obsess over how we could expand and contract the structure, not with partitions, but with wheels, creating a caterpillar like building that could roll into something bigger or smaller, reminiscent of the trains in the area that moved on massive wheels and tracks.

When the Viewing Platform opened in late December 2001, I joined Ric, Liz and Kevin to watch how the public used it—the slow walk up, the silence as people approached the top. They came to see what had happened, of course, the surrounding area still a horrific landscape of crushed metal and debris. But they also came for personal transformation, a pilgrimage that allowed them to reflect on something that wasn’t there—the lives lost, the families broken, the dreams shattered, the communal response, the sense of belonging that tragedy often creates.

They came, as Ric knew months earlier, to see the invisible.

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