Liz Diller: ‘I truly believe you should do work that you’re totally unqualified to do’

Liz Diller, 70, is the co-founder of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architecture firm best known for renovating the High Line in New York. She was born in Poland in 1954 and moved to the US with her parents aged two. She studied architecture at Cooper Union, where her future husband and business partner, Ricardo Scofidio, was teaching (Scofidio died in March, aged 89). DS+R’s other projects include the Shed at Hudson Yards, the Broad in Los Angeles and the expansion of MoMA. Now, after their proposed Centre for Music was scrapped in 2021, they’ve completed their first project in London – the V&A East Storehouse at the Olympic Park, where more than half a million objects and books in storage will be open to public view.

The new V&A site is an unusual cross between a museum and a storage facility. What drew you to it?

The V&A wanted to figure out how to make their collection [in storage] available to the public. We had already done it in some small way at the Broad, which was originally a storage facility with a gallery inside. We turned that around and changed the proportions so it became more of a museum. So it’s all in the spirit of having more of the collection on view. Allowing the public to see things close up and breathing the same air as the artefacts was very important to us.

How did you go about it?

The Here East building was built for the Olympics and it was empty. We added two more levels. The principle of it is, basically, stuffing the entire volume with artefacts in storage and boring out the middle – almost extracting it as if it were a mineral – and then entering from the street up through the floor and coming into this gigantic, three-dimensional cabinet of curiosities. That first sense of awe was really important.

How will it be different from the usual museum experience?

The work is pre-curated. No meaning is imposed on it. The curator isn’t talking. So it’s not a one-way thing. You’re curious. You want to see what’s under the skirt of something. I think it will appeal to a younger generation who don’t want to be told everything and would prefer to have things a bit more open to interpretation.

By all accounts you were a reluctant architect at the outset. Why?

Well, it started with my European parents, who wanted me to channel my artistic desires – I wanted to be a film-maker and a photographer and a media artist – into a profession. And so architecture was that profession; if I didn’t choose architecture, then it should be dentistry [laughs]. I took architecture at Cooper Union as an elective, to ground myself, and I started becoming more and more interested in the way architecture was taught – unlike in the art school, there was a sense of accountability. If you have an idea, you have to explain it, you have to convince people and produce material that is somehow legible. So I transferred and graduated with an architecture degree, though I didn’t tell my parents till graduation day.

Even after you started your practice with Ric Scofidio in 1981, you focused more on artistic and academic projects than actually building things.

It was a slow process. We started to do work in public spaces. That led to more invitations to do bigger things in museums and galleries, which led to doing a little architectural thing here and there. We thought of ourselves as artists in the architecture world. We wanted to always be the outsiders. We just basically followed our curiosity.

Are you taken aback that you’ve ended up doing really massive projects, including a New York skyscraper [15 Hudson Yards]?

Yeah. Big urban projects like Lincoln Center, for example, was a huge maturing process for the studio. That started very small, with an installation in an old porn theatre at 42nd Street, and kept snowballing. So it was funny how we got there – I think it was a case of mistaken identity, almost. But we learned on the job, and now I truly believe you should do work that you’re totally unqualified to do, because you do your best work. When we did the Mile-Long Opera [along the High Line in 2018], we were totally unqualified to do an opera, but it was one of the best things we’ve ever done. And everything we do is like that: we jump out of aeroplanes without parachutes.

When you took on the High Line, did you have any inkling what a phenomenon it would become?

No, not a clue. We were doing something that was for the neighbourhood, because the neighbourhood didn’t have green space. We thought maybe 400,000 people yearly would come; in 2019 it was more than 8 million. It’s one of the most popular tourist attractions in New York. But not only that: it went viral and every city wanted to do something similar on obsolete infrastructure. You know, it had its issues, because some of the artists and lower-income residents were driven out because the value of the property around the High Line kept going up and up. So it gentrified too quickly. But it had this positive effect of, in a time of limited resources, being able to think of infrastructure as a recyclable thing that could be adapted.

Your publicity material describes you as a “punk rock architect”, and I wondered…

I don’t know where that came from!

Given your interest in cinema, are there any films that you think do a good job of representing architecture on screen? Obviously, we’ve just had The Brutalist…

I didn’t like it at all! I would say that getting architecture right is very, very hard for Hollywood, so it’s not for that reason. I just didn’t like the script. But I would say Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and some of Peter Greenaway’s early films are the things that stimulate me. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about architecture, it’s really about how film and space can come together in interesting and unusual ways.

V&A East Storehouse opens on 31 May

• This article was amended on 26 May 2025. An earlier version incorrectly gave Liz Diller's year of birth as 1958. She was in fact born in 1954