In the heart of the city.

A highly touted new building project has ended with a grand unveiling.

That's New York City.

This dinner is an award winning architect and co-founder of Dinner, Scofidio and Renfro, and her studio is behind some of the world's most iconic building projects, including the Highline in New York and the ongoing renovation of the Museum of Modern Art.

She's been speaking to our Hari Sreenivasan about her latest project known as The Shed.

It's a public art center and colossal work of engineering with a whole section that can be moved around on wheels Phyllis Diller, thanks for joining us.

First, let's talk about your most recent piece, The Shed in New York City.

What is it?

The shed is a brand new cultural institution that shows the visual and performing arts under one roof.

And it's all new commissioned programing.

This is on Hudson yards adjacent to the highline.

So how did you come up with this idea?

So the idea sprang from a request for proposals from the city, and it was in 2008.

It was when the economy was tanking.

And it was really improbable to imagine a new cultural facility in New York And so we thought, well, what does New York need that it actually doesn't have?

And the answer is some place that actually houses all the creative disciplines in one place, that's purpose built for flexibility.

And that's designed for a future that we can't imagine.

The building has some unusual features.

Yeah.

So tell us a little bit about those features.

So the main organization of the building is it's a it's a fixed structure with multiple levels, of which three are very tall floors for galleries and performing arts spaces.

So there's a theater and two galleries that are stacked.

And on top of the fixed building there is a telescoping outer shell that basically slides out onto an open space to the east.

And when it does so, it encloses and shelters a very, very large space that can be heated and cooled and could be an interior space.

In fact, doubling the original footprint so we're able to put on very large installations, very large theatrical productions, all sorts of events And when we don't need those events, we don't have to hide or call the space.

We simply roll it back.

Nested back on the on the fixed building.

And it's quite modest.

And it opens up a big public space right next to it that could also be used for cultural programing.

And what's structurally difficult about designing something like that?

Well, it's hard to move an £8 million building.

So we worked with a team of engineers and actually the structural principle is very, very simple.

It's based on Crane Crane technology that you see at shipping ports.

And it's an industrial system that basically runs on steel trucks with steel wheels.

And the motors are at the very top of the building.

And it's just a rack opinion system which has mechanical advantage so when it moves, the movement is silent.

It takes only 5 minutes to open and or close the building, and it runs on the horsepower of one previous engine.

You can move an £8 million building with a tiny Toyota Prius engine or the equivalent of.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's it's it's from an engineering standpoint, it's extremely smart, sustainable, quiet and operationally very, very easy to do.

It's also adjacent to the highline, which is for people who don't know the conversion of an elevated rail track into a walkway, into a park, into a public space.

And you're also behind that.

How how does that connect to the shed?

We made up an urban park out of it, and it's it's been really quite the rage.

So very, very popular in New York.

It's been there's been a viral effect all over the world.

There are lines all over the place.

And it's led to a tremendous amount of transformation in what we call the far west side Chelsea and Meatpacking District.

And this transformation ultimately also incorporated the railyards and which had previously not been built on.

So the opportunity to do the shed is directly linked to the success of the High Line and that whole transformation of the West Side.

Why do you think people connected to it?

I mean, especially with these spinoffs around the world, what is it about walking just this other elevation that connects with people?

I think there are multiple things.

One is that you're walking 25 feet off the ground and you can walk for a mile and a half without stopping for a light or a car to go by.

So you have this wonderful promenade you also see New York in a very different way.

Not the postcard views, not the very polished, beautiful things and typical sites.

You see a kind of subconscious of New York that was never really meant to be seen.

You see these chimney stacks, you see alleys, you see solid brick buildings, you see laundry draped from people's windows.

It's it's just a different side of New York that we don't typically see.

But I think that there's one thing that people maybe don't think about, but that really resonates with me about Bylon basically can only do two things.

You can you can walk and you can sit.

So basically, it's a place for doing nothing.

And in a city where everybody's productive all the time, whether they're working or working out burning calories or shopping or are on their devices, they're always doing something.

And and the headline gives you a kind of license to really do nothing and take that kind of parenthetical moment in the day and just be there and look at other people and just hang out in a way that's not necessarily all that.

When you look at your body of work, you don't design that many spaces for doing nothing.

You're also doing a lot of spaces that have a function in mind when you're crafting them.

Right.

So is there a through line?

If we look back through all of your work, is there connective tissue?

I think that there are several strands.

Maybe one is a preoccupation with vision and the culture of vision, which incorporates all sorts of things like spectatorship and exhibition ism and voyeurism and just a interest in optics and a kind of preoccupation and a kind of critique maybe with a preoccupation of vision as a master sense.

So that's one of the three lines.

Another one is a kind of desire to democratize space, right?

An interest in publicness and even on private property to always carve out space.

And as our cities are getting progressively privatized, architects really have to be on the warpath here to to protect space and make sure there is enough for the public.

You're also part of a couple of projects in Hudson Yards.

It's a multibillion dollar endeavor.

It's a concern has been that, you know, some of these types of projects are serving to make neighborhoods more elite.

How does that square with what you're just saying?

Is your interest in trying to make sure that there are public spaces preserved?

Yeah, I think that the city was very, very smart in organizing the open space and making sure that there was enough open space, public space open to the sky on Hudson Yards because it was privately developed and they were extra smart in identifying that parcel that would always belong to the city on which the shared stands.

So that is while it's physically within the four corners, of Hudson Yards, it's actually a New York City property and will always be.

That's the first thing.

Before any design takes place is just making sure that that's protected for public and cultural use.

I also wanted to ask you about the project you just finished up in Moscow.

What was the intent?

What was the outcome?

Oh, so sorry.

I did.

Park was a competition, an international competition that we won and this was the time of Edward Snowden.

And the relationship between the US and Russia was already it was it was quite complicated.

People told us to not compete, not even bother, because an American had no chance of winning this competition.

And we had our doubts about the government and whether we wanted to step foot in Russia and convinced ourselves that this is a project for the city of Moscow.

So it's a 35 acre park that sits right next to the Kremlin.

It's basically Moscow's equivalent to our Central Park, and it was the first time the site was liberated.

Before that, the Hotel Russia stood there and it was a Soviet era hotel with 3000 rooms, really crazy, huge footprint of a building and when they raised it, the first ideas was to develop it commercially, and then they decided that was not a good idea, that the park should be there.

So they were very inspired by the High Line, and I think that was the reason for our invitation to participate in the competition.

So now the park is open for about a year and a half.

And the brief says, don't make a space where people could collect.

And it was very, very clearly avoiding any kind of protest here.

And parks in Russia, and particularly in Moscow, are all very formal axial.

And there are certain kinds of plants that are allowable and usually very very formal gardens.

So our idea was to actually make a place for people to collect.

We called it wild urbanism, and we thought about it as a place where similar to the highline or the paving system and the vegetation are intertwined in different ways.

This project was so embraced by the Muscovites.

It was in the first month a million people came and it's one of the great attractions right now.

And I think we got away with murder here.

We made a place that was truly progressive in a government that may not have really understood entirely, but we had a great ally with the city architect.

You had an exhibit where there was a building on a lake and you essentially had this giant fog machine.

But the fog itself was what people were interacting with.

Tell me about that.

Yes, so so our studio in, I believe, 2002 for the Swiss Expo, we decided to make a structure that was inhabitable, that was out in the lake structure there.

That was a huge fog of a cloud of fog that you walked through.

There was a 500 foot long bridge that brought you there, and then you found yourself on something the size of a football field with no walls, just a couple of platforms with four columns that went down into the lake bed but you were immersed in in this mist and you really couldn't see more than three feet of ahead of you.

It was called the Blur Building.

Yeah, it became such a hit.

And in Switzerland, they required every student to go visit it.

And because it was amorphous and you couldn't quite see you could hear this kind of hissing of the sound of 35,000 fog nozzles.

And you were immersed in it and you could walk in any direction.

But it came to represent this sort of notion of Swiss Stout, which I thought was really, really phenomenal.

Being Switzerland, being in the middle of being a little of some, not knowing politically what you wanted to do.

You, not you.

What, what what country are you with?

What language do you speak?

And and it was just a super interesting way of penetrating a country.

You have been teaching at Princeton for decades.

And I wonder if in that time you've seen you've seen batches of students year after year.

Is there a gap between the number of women that enter the profession and the number of women who either stick with it because it seems a male dominated industry at the end result, regardless of who's coming in to your classroom?

Yeah, well, it is very MALE-DOMINATED.

And when you think about it from a cultural perspective, the association you would make with an architect is a white male heroic figure.

I mean, typically that's the very successful architects of the past have sort of fallen into a certain type today.

People work very, very differently.

There are many collaboratives.

I work in a collaboration with three men and one is gay.

One is black, who is my husband and one is white.

The unusual white guy, you know, in a team with a woman, three minorities, essentially.

And so people work very, very differently today.

In terms of women, I my classes are 50% female.

There's an absolute gender balance in academia, no different than many other fields.

And but there's something that happens, right, that gap.

So women come into the workplace.

There's a a disparity, I think, in salaries still.

And then as women progress, some have families and need to take time off.

Some officers are not that generous about giving women time off.

We have maternity and paternity leave, and we've always done it that way.

And we encourage women to slowly come back to the workplace.

But still, even in our studio, there's you know, there's not a balance.

It's not the way it is.

And in the academic context.

And I think we have to just think about it a lot and try to figure out what's really wrong here.

You know, a lot of people in architecture are men, and women have to dedicate tremendous hours to it.

It's a very, very hard profession.

It's not one that you can just leave at 5:00 and then forget about it until 9:00 the next morning.

Now, is there a is there a movement in the industry to address this do you think?

I think I think many, many firms are thinking about it when your firm might be one, because there is a woman at, as you said, three minorities in a way are running the firm.

But that's not necessarily the case with most successful architecture firms.

That's exactly right.

I think role models are very, very important Seeing that other women have succeeded and some women who really just sort of crack that glass ceiling and make it and and really transform that image of of that singular figure, that singular voice.

It's strange because you think that we've gotten over that by now.

But now, of course, Diller, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Great to be here.