Flesh : architectural probes. / txt
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. The mutant body of architecture / Georges Teyssot.
- 253 p. ill. ;col. ; 28 cm. book
The mutant body of Architecture - Georges Teyssot -- Deviants -- Neurotics -- Neighbors -- Skinner -- Custodians -- Tourist -- Homebodies -- Insomniacs --
Like all the work of architects Liz Diller + Ric Scofidio, Flesh is a set of contradictions and complexities. It is both a monograph of their work, the first ever on their art, architecture, and installations but also not a traditional monograph. It is a both/and, neither/nor book-as-project noted at the time of its publication, in 1994, for its groundbreaking typography and not-too-subtle critique of architecture from within. Since its publication, Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfro) have gone on to become among the world's most famous architects, but the themes, concerns, and even forms that make them so celebrated today are all here in Flesh, along with its most radical proposition: that anything can be architecture. The work of New York-based architects Diller + Scofidio is consistently at the cutting edge of current thought, helping to radically redefine the role of the architect and architecture in contemporary society. Targeting the body as "a site of transient inscriptions, inseparable from program," they constructed Flesh, a book/project that, in their words, "maps out strategies for 'contractual space' in which architecture can perform critically within encoded spaces of privacy and publicity." The result is a dynamic publication that is not so much a book about their projects as it is a reworking of their projects -- interwoven with multiple strands of text and imagery, Flesh is a new "indexical structure" that allows the reader to determine diverse paths through the document. Diller + Scofidio is a collaborative team involved in cross-disciplinary work that incorporates architecture with the performing and the visual arts.
Architecture--Philosophy. Architecture and society.--History--United States--20th century. Installations Art--United States. Conceptual art--United States.